And the local 97.1 in Houston had SEVEN different formats before settling on Country Legends, which I wouldn't call a "stupid" format.
Additional thoughts - I wasn't calling the format "stupid" - I was calling the allocation stupid because it covered up a station I could previously listen to. Similar to the situation in Dallas when a 93.7 came on the air, covering up KLBJ. KLBJ, by the way, was very receivable on my car radio from my location in Plano under most conditions. It was, of course, subject to severe dropouts, but its format is so good I put up with the dropouts.
Which gets me to my second point - are you absolutely sure your own equipment hasn't been damaged by our frequent lightning storms? A strike even a mile away can take out a sensitive front end transistor if you are hooked up to an antenna. You might not even be aware damage has occurred because the unit is still functional and all locals and rim shots still come through. You might go for days, weeks, or even months just thinking propagation conditions are too poor for DX, when in reality your tuner's sensitivity has gone down an order of magnitude. I have had this happen to me on several occasions - when I lived in Florida in particular. I had a particularly nasty lightning storm a year ago August which took out the front ends of most of my tuners, even those indoors that were only hooked to dipoles. It has been very annoying to dig into the front ends of multiple tuners to change out transistors, but absolutely necessary. I even lost the RF transistor in a portable radio, and it destroyed my car radio.
About the only way to detect that the damage has happened is to have a test station - the weakest fringe station in the area that is not affected by atmospherics, at least not in the afternoon. I find Bob FM 103.5 to be an excellent test - on a normal car radio (with a whip antenna) on the NW side of town it should be receivable under all atmospheric conditions. If it is not - the input transistor is highly suspect. I tend to use KLTY and KLUV as a test for my home tuners, hooked to my antenna they should be receivable under all atmospheric conditions. If not, the tuner is damaged and the front end needs repair. This applies to just about all of my home tuners and receivers from the relatively modest three gang Kenwood KR-5010 to the Sony tuner so highly touted on DX boards.
I started removing the antenna from the tuner input except when I am using it while I lived in Florida with even worse lightning conditions - I have a supply of quick disconnect coax connectors and just yank the antenna connection off the antenna input when I am not using it. Except for last August, that has been enough to protect my tuners for a couple of decades.
