A lot of the signal problems you describe are terrain related. Traverse City is buffeted by ranges of hills, as are most "coastal" cities. They can only be well served from the top of a nearby terrain ridge/range, across a Bay, or from in the city proper. WHGR-FM/WJGS/WUPS does well at high elevati...

if you can believe what's left of the newest public Nielsens, WUPS is doing great in TC. Are we reading the same numbers? 1.5 share shows that they are NOT doing great. In fact, this very censored report shows that over 80% of actual radio listening is not listed - which means it's not subscribed. ...

Many Nielsen markets are too big for their signals. Northern Michigan is an egregious example. On my most recent trip home to Motherland Michigan, I was chagrined that as I traveled from Houghton Lake to Traverse City. WUPS was mostly unlistenable on my Honda radio around TC despite their monster to...

When nobody else pays for the ratings, you get to have the top positions all to yourself. I have a sinking feeling that TC/Peto/Caddy Nielsens will soon go the way of these other markets they've recently dropped from their regular surveys: Battle Creek, Michigan, Bend, Oregon, Billings, Montana, Gra...

I got one of these PPP grants for my little hybrid operation. We have just installed a new antenna array which set us back several thousand dollars for tower monkeys. Combine that with tower rent and it adds up. Ours is under 10 kilobucks. Even though we have no paid staff, the PPP helped keep us on...

As I understand this week's gov position on the PPP, the money can be used for any necessary business expense in addition to payroll. Crazy things like power, rent, taxes, executive full release massages, whatever you can write off as a biz expense. Let's face it, a lot of broadcasters got a Marine ...

I LOVE that name. Dick Schick, DDS. Cooler than Doogie Howser, MD. There are precious few women in broadcast engineering. It's hard to convince Dad to fix dinner and take care of the kids when he gets home from work, just because some silly transmitter has taken the dirt nap. Soon as I got my First ...

I was impressed to see tonight that Heritage Broadcasting of Cadillac (TV 9&10) got a bunch of federal Paycheck Protection Program money. According to Open The Books website https://www.openthebooks.com/maps/?Map=90013&MapType=Pin Heritage Broadcasting Company Of Michigan 4/13/2020 $1-2 million 4960...

CK, your list of engineering greats gone away was all names I recognize. Thanks to Carl Smith, I was able to learn to be a enjyneer at home. Fired through that home study course in about 3 months, drove to Detroit and passed the FCC First Phone exam by knowing how to figure out the answers. Unlike t...

Hey TC Talks, thanks for the link to Dave Schaberg's obit. A lot of memories were stirred, and several names were people I used to know back in the day. Wow. As for 2 mile high translators in Colorado, I can only imagine the range across, say Kansas, as opposed to clanging up against the next Rocky ...

Being a couple thousand miles away keeps me out of the loop, I didn't know until the recent post from CK-722 that Dave Schaberg no longer walks among us. Dave was a year ahead of me in high school in Lansing. He owned a DJ service, even as a student. And he wouldn't hire me to be one of his announce...

Holy Cow I just remembered that Radio used to be fun... Yeah, I miss that part. Oh, wait, I still have a little fun and make chump change doing radio with low power. My twin 250 Watt flamethrowers are fill in translators for a Shelton/Olympia, WA Class A FM. I supply the translators and the enginee...

Coordinated on channel signals have varying degrees of success depending on terrain, directional antennas and frequency lock. Los Angeles is divided by various mountain ridges which are effective FM blocks for Class A FM signals which tend to be at lower elevations than the regional superpowered gia...

OK, dead makes it tougher. But stealing from the dead is a time honored tradition. I was in LA around that time, I think. I was engineering at the 92.1 in Thousand Oaks and the AM. That owner was bleeding cash and had to sell. I think that's when the new guys decided to try to gather the three 92.1 ...

I had a client in Southern California who owned 92.1 in Riverside, Thousand Oaks and Catalina Island. He tried the same thing, but never got it approved.

Seems to me that with the new lack of a local studio rule, that the economics of this maneuver might well work out these days.