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AM Frequency of the week: 740

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cyberdad

cyberdad

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Crystal Lake. IL... 40 miles NW of downtown Chicago. 65 miles SE of Milwaukee. 10 miles N of Gilberts.....

Days: Usually blank. But I have heard CFZM (Toronto) a couple of times on daytime skywave.

Nights. Normally CFZM with a good signal. Sometimes KRMG (Tulsa) sneaks in underneath. Also have heard WRPQ (Baraboo), WI on 250 watts day power. Same goes for WVLN (Olney, IL) These latter two are licensed for 6 and 7 watts nighttime respectively, so, yeah, I'm guessing day power.

Other locations: Last week, KMZN (ex-KBOE) in Oskaloosa, IA came up in another thread, This little powerhouse on 740 packs a mighty 229 watts. But given the fabulous eastern Iowa ground conductivity, it manages to basically cover the entire southeast quarter of the state daytime. Including a fair-good signal at my college location in Mount Pleasant. When it's at 10 watts night power, it's still listenable in Iowa City, 40 miles east of Oskaloosa.. Assuming you don't mind CFZM intruding once in a while.

Moving right along....at our beach location near Pensacola, I've been able to snag KTRH on good days. Nights, 740 is usually a mix of KTRH and KRMG.

On my western business trips, KCBS was pretty much a nighttime regular up and down the west coast. When KBRT was transmitting from Santa Catalina Island, it used to get clobbered in LA and Orange counties by KCBS. Since they've moved their transmitter to the mainland and COL to Coasta Mesa, I suspect the 190 watts bughttime that KBRT is running is still no match for KCBS.
 
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Near north Chicago suburbs days usually nothing. At night it’s CZFM with a good signal. I’ve heard Tulsa a few times. Out west I hear KCBS up and down the coast at night.
 
Tyler, TX:

KTRH Houston "News Radio 740 KTRH, depend on it." is the usual occupant of 740 as the sun rises. Throughout the day KTRH weakens, but remains audible. I have caught KCMC Texarkana "The Fan" rising above the weakened KTRH, but it only happens here and there. Nothing consistent, really just depends on conditions.

At night, KTRH is a goner. So is KCMC. To boot, Tyler is directly in line with KRMG's SE null. So, I end up with what I believe to be XECAO from the Yucatan Peninsula. My Spanish is not good enough to keep up with their rapid fire delivery. I have heard "Radio Formula" spoken repeatedly. It's a talk format, and the conversations are moving at a brisk pace. Unless someone knows of another "Formula" elsewhere in Mexico, that's the only station I can consider a probability. I have yet to catch any kind of an hourly identification, nor have I heard it air the National Anthem. So, I have yet to officially log it. It's there almost nightly, right next to XEX.
 
East Tennessee: Days-weak to non-existent WCXZ, Harrogate TN, owned by the private Lincoln Memorial University.
Night: CFZM dominates, with KRMG periodically fading up. That can change during auroral conditions, making KRMG dominant.
Retro/other: Dayton/Western Ohio. Daytime is WNOP, Newport KY, which has an excellent signal for 2500 watts. WNOP was a legendary jazz (not the smooth kind) station but has been Sacred Heart Radio for some time now. The signal reaches well into Central Indiana. I have received CFZM on daytime skip or early sunset skip 50 miles north of Dayton, as early as 2:30pm. On the Lake Erie shoreline I've gotten the last breath of CFZM's day signal in Sandusky. Of course it was CBL as a CBC station.
 
From the southwest suburbs of Chicago ...

Daytime is absent anything, even downstate WLVN except in the rarest of conditons.

Nights, it's the CBL/CHWO/CFZM 50 kW powerhouse from Toronto, diplexed with CBC-owned CJBC 860 (the transmitter is still run by CBC). Next heard was KTRH Houston, and before picking up KRMG Tulsa, which usually gets into a fight with CFZM around 2 a.m. or so. Also logged WLVN at 4 a.m. one 2020 morning on day power.
 
Wilmington Delaware

Days - Strong signal from WJFP (formerly WVCH) 9 miles to my NE with conservative talk. In its' former life it was the Christian Voice of the Delaware Valley for many decades.

Nights - WJFP cuts their power to 6 watts but sometimes I can still hear them underneath CFZM especially when there is high solar activity preventing signals from the N propagating S.
 
Hartland, VT:
Nothing days. CFZM Toronto nights.

Meriden, CT:
WNYH Huntington, NY, days. CFZM nights. WNYH had just switched from Korean music to old tapes of Brother Stair around the time I left Connecticut. I assume that's what it's still running.
 
AM 740 WMSP - Montgomery, Al

From the Alabama Broadcast media page entry for WMSP:

This station started in 1953 as the second Brennan station in Alabama after WVOK in Birmingham. 740 from the 50's through the 70's was WBAM (alaBAMa), The Big Bam. Studio and transmitter were on the Troy-Montgomery Highway. Unusual for a daytimer, it was a top 40 station. Had a 5/8 wave tower and enjoyed phenomenal coverage, albeit with a slight null towards WSB in Atlanta. Had a strong listener base in small towns (much like co-owned WVOK in Birmingham) nearly 100 miles away. In fact, the two stations together covered 90% of the state! Both stations, while top 40, didn't have the typical formatics of 60's top 40 stations: no high energy jocks, fewer jingles and promos and a bland news presentation. Wikipedia notes that WBAM was also well known for putting on concerts in Montgomery, including one with up-and-comer Elvis Presley, who was presented with Roy Acuff!
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. Due to FM competition, it went country in 1973. In the early 80's the station was sold to WLWI-FM and they simulcast for a while. It also changed its name to WLWI for that short time. In the late 80's, the station went to nostalgia, then to plain oldies; now sports talk rules the airwaves. Originally a 50,000 watt daytimer, the station would play "Dixie" at signoff each night. In 1995 the station dropped to 10,000 watts and added nighttime service, around the time they were still playing oldies.
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At home in Oakland - All-news KCBS, day and night, the place to go at 3:30 in the morning when, it seems, the little earthquakes along the Hayward Fault seem to happen. Can't really say much more than that.

Personal history - Last week, I mentioned starting my radio career at a station at 730 on the dial. This week, I can mention the end of my radio career, which was at KTRH in Houston. I was hired shortly after KTRH went all-news, by a terrific news director from the Pacific Northwest who, both before and after he was at KTRH, had a long career as John Erickson. In Houston he went by his legal name. Creative, a good mentor, with lots of emotional intelligence. Unfortunately, the station's GM lacked those three attributes. He fired the ND and replaced him with a hatchet man - one of whose hatchets got me. That was the third radio job I was fired from. At that point, I was thoroughly fed up with radio and with radio news in particular. It felt like there was no place for me in the profession. That's when I went back to graduate school and kicked off three decades in IT where, especially in cybersecurity, I had a great deal of success.
 
rosecitymedia said:
Tyler, TX:

KTRH Houston "News Radio 740 KTRH, depend on it." is the usual occupant of 740 as the sun rises. Throughout the day KTRH weakens, but remains audible. I have caught KCMC Texarkana "The Fan" rising above the weakened KTRH, but it only happens here and there. Nothing consistent, really just depends on conditions.

At night, KTRH is a goner.
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The KTRH daytime pattern has a little bump toward deep-East Texas. The nighttime pattern is different and aims just about all the signal toward the Gulf of Mexico.
 
cyberdad said:
Other locations: Last week, KMZN (ex-KBOE) in Oskaloosa, IA came up in another thread, This little powerhouse on 740 packs a mighty 229 watts. But given the fabulous eastern Iowa ground conductivity, it manages to basically cover the entire southeast quarter of the state daytime. Including a fair-good signal at my college location in Mount Pleasant. When it's at 10 watts night power, it's still listenable in Iowa City, 40 miles east of Oskaloosa.. Assuming you don't mind CFZM intruding once in a while.
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It still puts a good signal into downtown Des Moines, too.

If you have a newspapers.com subscription, check out the December 11, 1983 issue of the Des Moines Register, which has a feature on KBOE and its wide-ranging signal. The article particularly noted the station's larger-than-usual ground system.
 
Re: KBOE/KMZN
Mark Roberts said:
It still puts a good signal into downtown Des Moines, too.

If you have a newspapers.com subscription, check out the December 11, 1983 issue of the Des Moines Register, which has a feature on KBOE and its wide-ranging signal. The article particularly noted the station's larger-than-usual ground sysOE) KMZN
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iI used to have a newspapapers.com subscription, but I was disappointed with their lineup, so I cancelled. That was quite a while ago. Maybe I should revisit that. I've been a fan of the Des Moines Register for a long, long time.
 
cyberdad said:
Re: KBOE/KMZN

iI used to have a newspapapers.com subscription, but I was disappointed with their lineup, so I cancelled. That was quite a while ago. Maybe I should revisit that. I've been a fan of the Des Moines Register for a long, long time.
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They've got a pretty complete line-up of the Register and the Tribune, as well as the Waterloo and Cedar Rapids papers, plus the Kansas City papers and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It's especially fun to go through the radio logs of the Register and Tribune, which bring back a lot of memories.
 
It also has the Quad City Times and the Moline and Rock Island papers, the Omaha World Herald and Lincoln Journal Star, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and predecessor papers, and the Chicago Tribune. Rival GeneologyBank.com has the Chicago Daily News and the Sun-Times and predecessor papers through 1950. Newspapers.com also has the NY Daily News, LA Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit News, Indianapolis Star, News and Times and a ton of Florida papers, including the Pensacola News Journal. 23,989 titles in all. I use both in my work almost every day.
 
From Mesa AZ:
Days: Local KIDR Phoenix, who runs 1000 watts from SW Phoenix with Spanish language programming.
Nights: Combination of KIDR (at 292 watts) and KCBS San Francisco.
 
I've long thought of 740 as one of the more interesting frequencies out there, and I could write a lot about my experiences on the channel over the years. I'll do my best to keep it brief ...
Home (Pickerington, Ohio): A very weak WNOP by day, and usually a strong CFZM at night. CFZM is audible daytime northeast of Cleveland, and at my in-laws' home in the far northeast corner of the state, they have a strong daytime signal but are in the cancellation zone at night.
When I lived in suburban Houston about 15 years ago, I was almost straight in front of KTRH's pattern. That signal bulldozes downtown Houston and anywhere out toward the Gulf both day and night. I remember reading several years ago that their main lobe puts something like 150K ERP over downtown Houston at night. Even so, there were times that some Spanish-language interference could be heard far under KTRH as close in as the Galleria area. It was impossible to understand, but somehow strong enough to sneak in and be faintly heard under that powerful KTRH signal. Maybe it is XECAO that rosecitymedia mentioned.
As Cyberdad notes, KTRH is a regular visitor into the Florida panhandle at night. I doubt KTRH makes it all that far past Panama City, but it's there and audible after dark.
I've heard it in Dallas at night, but very weakly. By the time you hit Ennis and Corsicana during the day, KTRH is very listenable.
And moving home from Houston in 2009, I tried for KTRH in Memphis, but all I got was KRMG. I'm a bit too far north to catch KRMG nowadays.
 
schmave said:
When I lived in suburban Houston about 15 years ago, I was almost straight in front of KTRH's pattern. That signal bulldozes downtown Houston and anywhere out toward the Gulf both day and night. I remember reading several years ago that their main lobe puts something like 150K ERP over downtown Houston at night.
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When I was at KTRH (36 years ago), we often got letters from missionaries in Central America, all of whom clearly felt that it was a link to back home. The 10 pm news block was especially appreciated. I doubt the sales staff, working at the time across Lovett Boulevard in a house that KTRH bought in order to make space for an expanded newsroom at 510, sold much time there, though!
 
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