Radio’s Journal of Record since 1984 — now online & updated daily at www.TheRadioJournal.com
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Scott Fybush - Editor
[email protected]
As Louisiana braces for more water, Joplin recovers from a
devastating tornado – with radio’s help.
It’s been a devastating spring down south, and broadcasters in Louisiana still aren’t out of the woods. As the Mississippi
River continues to flow at record levels, New Orleans-market WFNO, Norco, LA (830) is keeping a wary eye on the
situation around its towers, which sit in a swamp between the river and Lake Pontchartrain, west of the New Orleans
airport. WFNO has remained on the air, fighting off threats to cut off power to the site due to flooding. The station’s
three towers are elevated on 18-foot piers, and so far they’ve stayed high and dry, but access to the site has been
limited and the station’s hoping for the best as water levels are predicted to stay at record levels for weeks to come.
AP
+ In Missouri, radio warns, and avoids tragedy. The pictures from Joplin
have been chilling — mile upon mile of devastation, with schools, homes
and hospitals destroyed. But for the radio stations in Joplin, the storm
could have taken an even worse path: the line of tornadoes went off to
the city’s east side, and most of Joplin’s radio and TV studios and towers
are on the slightly higher ground on the city’s west side. Zimmer Radio’s
cluster, the largest in town, managed to get out a warning about 20 minutes
before the storms began striking Sunday night. News-talk KZRG (1310)
lost power to its transmitter site for part of Sunday, but its FM translator on
102.9 stayed on while Zimmer simulcast its programming on the other five
signals in the cluster. With phone service and power out to much of the
devastated city, Zimmer’s stations remained in simulcast mode after the
storm passed through, providing many residents with their only reliable
source of emergency information. Five employees at the Zimmer cluster
lost their homes, but nobody there was hurt. One Joplin station is on the
devastated east side: KXMS (88.7) at Missouri Southern State College
barely escaped the path of the storms, losing power on Sunday night but
returning to the air Monday, otherwise unscathed.
After a high-profile AM-to-FM move, Alpha moves an FM to AM in
Portland, Oregon. In March, Alpha Broadcasting began simulcasting
news-talk KXL, Portland, OR (750) on the former KUFO-FM (101.1), a big class C facility. And with the talk format
now firmly ensconced at KXL-FM, Alpha is repurposing the AM 750 facility. At 5:00 (PDT) tonight, Alpha will move its
sports-talk format (including Portland Trailblazers games) from KXTG, Portland (95.5) over to the AM signal, which has
full-market coverage with 50-kw days/20-kw nights. Moving “The Game” to AM will allow Alpha to launch a new format
on the 95.5 FM signal, also a full-market class C with 97-kw/1266’.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011 Page 2 of 3
News of the Week
Washington State’s Andy Skotdal gets his new towers up.
There’s nobody out there who’s been a more determined fighter
for AM radio than Andy Skotdal, who’s spent millions of dollars in
legal fees and years of his time to overcome no end of obstacles
– including vandals who toppled his towers with a bulldozer – to
build a new transmitter site for his KRKO, Everett, WA (1380) and
his new construction permit, KKXA, Snohomish, WA (1520). After
defeating the latest round of NIMBY opposition, Skotdal finally
won permission to erect the two new towers needed for KKXA’s
diplexed operation at the KRKO site, and the new self-supporting
towers went into place there last week. The new 1520 signal is
currently permitted for 20-kw days/50-kw nights, but Skotdal says
he hopes to have it at 50-kw fulltime by the time he gets it on the
air this summer as, he says, “likely to be the last new (AM) radio
signal ever to go on the air in the Puget Sound basin.”
Photo caption: Brian Gruhn of NorthStar Broadcast Contractors
reaches for the new KKXA tower while Kim Johnson and
Harvey Stacey wait to bolt the flanges.
World doesn’t end…but Family Radio site is vandalized. Despite the high-profile prophesy of network founder
Harold Camping that the end of the world would get underway Saturday with a worldwide Judgment Day, the day
passed with little fanfare on Family Radio’s dozens of radio stations around the country, all of which were still operating
the next day. Camping’s “Open Forum” producer Matt Tuter tells the Los Angeles Times that $25,000 worth of copper
and air-conditioning units were stolen from the transmitter site of one of Family Radio’s Sacramento-market signals,
KEBR, Rocklin, CA (1210) over the weekend. Tuter blamed the thefts on “an angry listener,” though as engineers
well know, copper thefts at unmanned transmitter sites are all too common even without any apocalyptic predictions
accompanying them.
Fine time at the FCC. The Enforcement Bureau has been busy this month, writing up hundreds of thousands of
dollars in fines against pirate broadcasters, and plenty of fines against licensed operators as well. Here’s just some of
the latest action…
+One owner, $49,000 in St. Louis-market fines. Entertainment Media Trust’s four stations in and around St. Louis
drew the Enforcement Bureau’s attention, and the outcome proved to be expensive. FCC inspectors found one of the
stations, KZQZ, St. Louis (1430, wasn’t switching from daytime to nighttime pattern or power. The station also hadn’t
conducted its required equipment performance measurements, and its public files were incomplete, for a total fine of
$23,000 - plus another $2,000 for several missing issues/ program lists in the public file of sister station KQQZ, De
Soto, MO (1190). And then the inspectors also found missing public files at two more Entertainment Media stations,
WQQW, Highland, IL (1510) and WQQX, East St. Louis, IL (1490). Those problems would normally have netted
$10,000 in fines for each station, but the FCC upped the amount to $12,000 each ($24,000 total), citing its concern
that “Entertainment Media Trust may have a systematic compliance issue” based on the problems at KZQZ and KQQZ.
+No fence, no EAS, no public file, big fines. When FCC agents visited WIRJ, Humboldt, TN (740), they found
plenty of problems: no fence around a hot AM tower, no EAS equipment, and no sign of a public file. What’s worse, an
investigation found that the tower had been unfenced for at least a year and the public file had been non-existent for
Wednesday, May 25, 2011 Page 3 of 3
News of the Week
at least twice as long. Adding up all the standard fines for those problems ($7,000 for the missing fence, $8,000 for
EAS and $10,000 for the public file) yields a $25,000 fine for owner John Warmath, as well as an FCC mandate for a
signed statement that the station has been brought into compliance. To the north, Patrick Sickafus faces a $7,000 fine
for broken fences and gates at two of the three towers of his WWSM, Annville-Cleona, PA (1510) following an FCC
inspection there in May 2010.
+ No local studio nets a $21,000 fine in Texas. Last July, FCC agents went looking for the studio KVOZ, Del Mar
Hills, TX (890) after observing that the station failed to power down from its 10-kw daytime power to its 1-kw nighttime
directional facility. But they couldn’t find a main studio in Del Mar Hills, and a call to licensee Consolidated Radio’s
home office in McAllen, Texas brought out a contract engineer who told the FCC that KVOZ was having transmitter
problems and had been running 3-kw day and night for several months. A partial public file turned up at a private
home in Laredo, the nearest large city to Del Mar Hills. By the time the FCC was done adding up fines, the total came
to $21,000: $10,000 for the incomplete public file, $7,000 for the lack of a proper main studio and $4,000 for running
overpower at night and underpower by day. The FCC’s Notice of Apparent Liability also directs Consolidated to certify
that it has a proper main studio, public file and power-down schedule in place by June 15.
+ Plead your case, get a reduction in fines. The FCC is very specific about its conditions for reducing a fine: a station
has to submit detailed financial records to even have a chance at getting its penalty knocked down. World Media
Broadcast’s WCLM, Highland Springs, VA (1450) racked up $21,500 in proposed forfeitures after an FCC inspection
found no working EAS unit or public file at the station’s studio in Richmond. World Media asked the FCC for a break,
saying it had a clean record of compliance and had fixed the problem. The Commission never reduces a fine based on
compliance after an inspection, and while it usually will reduce a fine slightly for a station with a clean record, it found
WCLM’s violations too grave to be qualify as a “history of overall compliance.” But World Media also submitted several
years’ worth of gross revenue data, and the FCC found those numbers compelling, reducing WCLM’s fine to $5,500.
AM totals keep declining. The latest count of broadcast station totals from the FCC shows a net gain of just 13
broadcast licenses in the first quarter of 2011, from 30,630 to 30,643. But one category of stations keeps dropping:
there are now 4,778 AM stations licensed, down by four from the last count at the end of December 2010. Licensed
LPFMs held steady at 859, while commercial FMs (6,533) and translators (6,141) grew slightly. The big growth was
at the noncommercial end of the radio dial: more than 100 new licenses and CPs were added since the start of 2011,
bringing the total to 3,417.
CANADA THIS WEEK —
Two Montreal AMs may come back from the dead. It’s been more than a year since Corus shut down two of its
50,000-watt Montreal AM stations, CINF (690) and CINW (940), returning the stations’ licenses to the CRTC just
before selling the rest of its Quebec station group to Cogeco. That sale included the remaining assets of CINF and
CINW, most notably the stations’ transmitter site in Kahnawake, south of Montreal - and now Cogeco wants to bring
those AM facilities back to life. Quebec’s provincial transport ministry (MTQ) is supplying $9 million in funding over
three years to help pay for a pair of all-traffic stations, in French on 690 and in English on 940, to be operated by
Cogeco in conjunction with the rest of its station group. Cogeco’s application to revive 690 and 940 will come before
the CRTC at a hearing in July.
Corus seeks Vancouver site change. The prime spot for FM and TV in western Canada’s biggest city is Mount
Seymour, which rises just north of Vancouver, BC. But there are multiple broadcast sites scattered up the mountain’s
flanks, and they’re not all created equal. Corus tells the CRTC that it’s having a hard time keeping CFOX (99.3) and
CFMI (101.1) on the air from the high-elevation site on the mountain owned by Rogers. A fire at the site forced the
stations down the mountain to their auxiliary site in 2010, and Corus says more problems with the master antenna
at the Rogers site forced CFMI to move back to the auxiliary site in March. Now Corus wants to relocate CFOX and
CFMI to the auxiliary site on a permanent basis. It’s much lower on the mountain (368.4 meters above average terrain,
compared to 686 meters at the Rogers site), but Corus says an increase in power from 35.2-kw to 51-kw (average ERP,
directional) would make up for most of the height decrease, maintaining the stations’ coverage of metro Vancouver.
Copyright 2011. M Street Corporation. All rights reserved. No portion of the Radio Journal may be copied, faxed, retransmitted or reproduced in any form without written
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or online at www.TheRadioJournal.com. Annual rate: $169. Scott Fybush, Editor. To advertise, call Gene McKay, General Manager, 800-640-8852 or Beth Dell’Isola, 770-831-4585.