Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Charlie
I've noticed that many small towns have good AM stations to listen to, but they are usually very low power. There's one near my cabin broadcasting from Woodville, TX (population 2000) that I enjoy. My cabin is roughly 15 miles south of Woodville, so I can just barely pick it up. They play a good mix of older country songs.
I've encountered many AM stations during my travels on board ship. My favorite is from New Jersey... WMTR 1250. They play the best oldies from the 50's and 60's. It's like stepping back in time.
|
The small stations in small towns are good, IMO, as long as they are playing music, but all too often these stations are sold and switched to talk or other formats after so many years, especially in this day and age of takeovers by conglomerates. I can give you two examples. One is the local station located some three miles from my hometown. This one is a 500-watt station that used to play all oldies, using a format modeled after CKLW in Detroit in the '60s-'70s. Two years ago, the local station near my hometown dropped that format like a hot potato and replaced it with syndicated talk. The local station five miles or so from where I live now used to be top-40, but about three or four years ago or so it dropped that format and began retransmitting the programming from a classical music station some 50 miles west of here, when the classical station was sold and switched to a frequency right next to a powerful country station in the next town, 35 miles east of here. So, Charlie, I'd enjoy that oldies station in Jersey while it's playing oldies, as the next time your ship passes through the town where the station is located the format may be entirely different. A former program director at the local station near my hometown told me about 25 years ago that the radio business is anything but stable; in fact, he said that a person working in radio today will be lucky if he or she is at the same station six months from now. This was the situation 25 years ago. Given that many small AM stations are switching from live DJs to talk or satellite music programming almost at the drop of a hat these days (a small station some 35 miles from here went to satellite from live programming last year), however, I don't doubt what that program director told me one bit. Also, some small-town stations are going off the air altogether when they find themselves unable to compete with stations in larger cities. A 1kW station about 20 miles south of me went silent about three years ago for just that reason, after having had three formats (the last one being satellite sports talk from the Sporting News Radio Network) since it first signed on in 1969; it was located in Geauga County, Ohio, a rural area some 30-40 miles from Cleveland, and found itself completely unable to compete with the larger stations in the city, especially since the station that went silent was in the impossible situation of being unable to get authorization for either full-time operation at lower night power or to switch frequencies to another (it tried to get authorization to move to 870 kHz from its original 1560) that would allow for full-time operation at either lower night power or full daytime power. The FCC said no, perhaps because of 870's proximity to a local 50kW Cleveland station on 850. The Geauga County station finally threw in the towel the day after Memorial Day three years ago and has not been heard from since.