J Alex! So wonderful to see that you're still alive and kicking. I can't remember the last time I saw a post from you. Thank you for stopping in to say hello.
It's not surprising to see so many dark AMs that aren't on the FCC's silent list. They claim to care about radio but do nothing to enforce the rules. With the coming relaxation of the FM translator relay rules, I imagine more stations will be lowering power levels to the bare minimum just to keep things "legal" when feeding a translator. And those without translators will continue to struggle.
1470 kind of surprises me to be off so soon after they were supposed to have flipped to a news/talk format. If you saw their website you wouldn't know anything is amiss, but their Facebook page appears to have become abandoned shortly after their March 1st flip date. They wound up postponing the flip due to severe weather in the area (!) but after that I lost touch with them. There are a few posts from visitors going back to early March asking if the station would be back on the air, so they've been off for a month now, more or less.
Update: They filed a silent STA in January due to economic conditions, so I presume any time off the air again would be covered under that. It was for 180 days.
With 1170 in Montgomery I'd be curious to know if the translator is still on, because that would be illegal over the long term. (I'm 99.9% sure it's on the air.) They had a problem a few years back due to storm damage, and later they dropped to a simpler two tower setup to keep costs down.
Update: These guys are operating under an STA as well, for 4 watts. They said the daytime Continental transmitter was destroyed by lightning in December 2016 and they recently filed an extension to the original STA. So I wonder if it was on, just impossible to receive?
1410 in Prattville is the only one of the stations you (didn't) hear that is actually on the FCC silent list. It's been off for what seems like eons.
1320 has had a history of being off and on (mostly off) but it doesn't really matter now that Summit is feeding their translators via an HD-3 channel. Unless they finagle a way to wedge another translator into Birmingham, I expect 1320 to stay off.
950 is probably just balancing things out, to make up for all the time they were ON the air with a deleted license, ha ha. I'm sure their FM translator is chugging away because no one cares.
J Alex, have you been following the saga of 1220 and 1480 in Mobile? 1220 lost their tower site in Fairhope and was supposed to be diplexed on the 1480 tower but it never did a good job of reaching across the bay, so they finally swapped formats and put the standards on 1480. I can actually listen to it in Foley now! Unfortunately, as is all too common on AM radio, they are only playing one channel of audio so a lot of times you only hear half a song.
