Why Old CTV?

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Adam

I listened to them the last time I drove through Ohio, they played some good stuff that you rarely hear on the radio. But I can't pull it in up here, even with the vhf antenna on the roof. There is absolutely nothing on FM to listen to up here. On AM I'll listen to some of the talk, but I haven't found any good music.

You won't hear WKHR over the air where you are in Michigan. Your best bet is to listen to them on their Internet stream. When I said WKHR probably has a "60-70 miles or more" OTA coverage area, I may have overestimated it; I wouldn't be a bit surprised if I did. The station does have enough range, however, to reach most of northeastern Ohio. You will likely hear it for quite a distance once you get them on your car radio the next time you drive through here.

The AM/FM radio situation in the Detroit area is the same as it is in every other major city in the US. As I said in my post, syndicated talk and sports have pretty much taken over the AM radio dial just about everywhere, and if that's not enough, FM talk has taken root in several cities as well. In your area, for example, WXYT 1270/WXYT-FM 97.1 are all sports; here where I live, near Cleveland, a hard-rock FM station recently dumped the format for talk; and the list goes on. I've never quite forgiven the company that bought out the former "Music of Your Life" AM station in Cleveland several years ago. The station finally managed to get permission from the FCC to increase their daytime power from 10kW to 50kW--then, about three weeks or so later, they changed hands, the new owners dropped the music format, changed the station's callsign and promptly affiliated the station with the ESPN radio network; the station is now WKNR ESPN Sportstalk 850.

Sheeeeesh.......

Several former top-40 stations in the Detroit area are now airing syndicated talk, among them WJR 760 and CKLW 800. I have fond memories of listening to CKLW "The Big Eight" as a teenager in suburban Cleveland in the seventies (the station had then, and still has today, excellent coverage all along the south shore of Lake Erie), and WJR 760 used to have excellent local talk programming, using the slogan "The Great Voice of the Great Lakes."

Ah, memories. Many of the music stations are still on the air today in their cities, in many cases with the same calls, but have moved from AM to FM and, in a lot of cases, have fired some or all of their on-air staff in favor of automated programming or talk. An AM station in the next town south of me did that a few years ago, replacing its local programming with automated satellite feeds, and a small local station just east of where I grew up did the same thing, roughly at the same time.

Needless to say, both stations lost me as a listener as soon as they switched formats. However, the station near my hometown goes to 42 watts at night and, from dusk to dawn, doesn't reach the small town where I live today, so it really doesn't bother me that I do not hear them anymore. The station's 500-watt daytime signal barely reaches here (I emailed the station's chief engineer awhile ago regarding this matter and got back a reply stating that the station's nighttime signal is not meant to be heard in my area, which is not considered suburban Cleveland) and is all but inaudible, except on some of my really good Zenith radios with AM RF stages and/or high-performance IF stages; my Zenith C845 and K731 both pick up the station well during the day, but as I said, the nighttime signal is totally inaudible on any of my radios. I guess if I put up an outdoor wire antenna I could get the station's 0.042kW signal all day and night, but I live in an apartment building and cannot erect such antennas. The station is all-talk now anyway, so I don't miss it.

BTW, do you remember when WKNR was in Dearborn, Michigan? I downloaded a bunch of old radio jingles from Youtube a few months ago, and one of them is for top-40 rock WKNR "Keener 13" in Dearborn. ("WKNR Dearborn is.......together" is part of the jingle; another jingle had the callsign and the phrase [in part] "Keener Thirteen....it's fun!.) I don't remember when the station changed formats or calls, or for that matter what their present format and callsign are.

[andy]

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