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Audacy Philadelphia
- Thread starter uhaul396
- Start date
Land? Possibly. I believe they own the KYW-AM tower site. Not sure about the WPHT tower site. All the FMs are on the Tower farm in Roxborough, which I don't believe they own any of the land there?
As for the stations themselves? Probably not. Philly is their "home market" so they'd want to keep it looking pretty. WPHT at some point when it's not making them enough money might be sold off to a godcaster. KYW compliments the areas that 103.9 doesn't reach well, so I don't see them dumping that anytime soon.
As for the stations themselves? Probably not. Philly is their "home market" so they'd want to keep it looking pretty. WPHT at some point when it's not making them enough money might be sold off to a godcaster. KYW compliments the areas that 103.9 doesn't reach well, so I don't see them dumping that anytime soon.
I lived on Culp Street between 2000 and 2004 as a kid. I use to rode my bike on all the hills back in the farm and admire the towers! WMMR is the rebel, not using the antenna farm. Now, they have the access road blocked off at Culp St and Wigard Ave.
They're not really a "Rebel" I forget the real technical explanation of how 93.3 is a harmonic or something of 103.9, so they can't be at the tower farm.
Also don't forget, 97.5 and 106.1 share the tower on Mermaid Lane in Wyndmoor, Montco.
When there’s no timetable attached to the question it becomes really easy to assume yes—some day, at some time, if some hypothetical deal is beneficial, then sure. Hypothetically such a wide open possibility exists on paper.
I'm impressed Julius was able to ask a question about WPHT without mentioning 1210 or WPHT.
Works out good actually. WMMR has better coverage into south Jersey and the beaches, and reaches almost as far north. Their signal holds its own despite not being as high.
I'm pretty sure they own both. The WPHT site goes back a long way. It's one of the oldest stations in Philadelphia. That station was also one of the earliest CBS stations. Bill Paley was a Philadelphia boy. When he started CBS in 1926, he began with 16 radio stations. WCAU was part of that original group. At the time it was owned by Leon Levy, Paley's brother in law. CBS bought it in 1957. I'm not sure exactly when that antenna site was built, but the transmitter building appears to date to the 1930s. KYW is a bit more complicated.
Audacy is not selling any of its stations anywhere. WBEB and WOGL make a lot of money for Audacy. If they were going to sell stations they would have already had done it already
Where’d the crystal ball come from? When you need to raise cash, and there’s a willing buyer, lots of things can happen. Is it likely in the near term? Probably not, though EMF might have a surprise or two in them. As to “already,” that depends on the rather consequential matter of there being a buyer.
Right now, I have no intention to sell my home. But if someone came along with enough cash in their dump truck…hey, something might suddenly be up for discussion,
Right now, I have no intention to sell my home. But if someone came along with enough cash in their dump truck…hey, something might suddenly be up for discussion,
The 10.6 IF.. thats what 93.3 and 103.9 are
The current 1210 site in Moorestown was built in 1940, one of the many moves that clear channel stations made as FCC rules began to allow them to put their transmitters closer to the center of their markets.
Before that, WCAU was out in Newtown Square, where its Blaw-Knox diamond tower was one of the first of its kind back in 1931.
I'm not sure what makes KYW more complicated. Its site in Whitemarsh Township was built in 1934 when it moved from Chicago (the current towers are from 1949), and it's remained under the same ownership as the station - Westinghouse to NBC back to Westinghouse. When Westinghouse bought and became CBS, the site came along for the ride, and it was sold to Entercom along with the stations.
i lived in moorestown in elementary school, long before the internet became common place and before i was into radio, but i was aware of WPHT..... didnt know the tower was in town back when i lived there
The part where it moved from Chicago.
And, for a while the calls were in Cleveland, a smaller market transfer as the owners squabbled.
If you have profitable markets why would you give that up
It's a fascinating story, especially because the way Westinghouse PR wrote it up was that they literally "moved KYW to Cleveland," which wasn't really the case. The 1060 license in Philadelphia is the same license from the first KYW through WRCV (the NBC years, 1956-65) back to KYW, and the 1100 license in Cleveland is the same license from WTAM through KYW through WKYC to WWWE to today's WTAM. But Westinghouse really did move at least some KYW staff from Philly to Cleveland, which doesn't usually happen in a station swap.
In any event, the 1060 transmitter site in Whitemarsh Twp changed hands every time the license did, so it was owned by Westinghouse from 1934 until 1956, by NBC from 1956-65, by Westinghouse/CBS from 1965 until 2017 and by Entercom/Audacy since then. It's a fairly large piece of land in a desirable area, but the nature of the 1060 DA means it would be hard to move it anywhere else and maintain the current signal. You can't diplex it on the closest DA, the Salem 560/990 site just down the road, because 990 and 1060 are too close in frequency.
For those unfamiliar with diplexing, it's when two separate stations employ the same towers or group of towers.
Without getting into directional systems. if a pair of single tower stations diplexes, each signal has to be tuned to the same tower. That means that the antenna tuning unit (ATU) has to reject fully the other station in each case. And it has to be "tuned" to the actual station in each case. Antenna tuning makes the tower match the characteristics of the output of the transmitter and its connection to the tower (coax or open wire). If the tuning is too sharp, the sidebands of each station are rolled off and the station fidelity is reduced. On the other hand, if the tuning for each stations is broadbanded, each can potentially interfere with the other.
Here is an ATU and combiner for stations on 570 and 805 I built in 1966 in Ecuador:
Each box inside the box had the tuning for each station and the rejection network for the other station's signal.
If the stations are directional, you have made the design exponentially more difficult and there are only a handful of engineers in the world I'd trust to do that today. And even then, most of the work is computer-assisted.
And, yeah, that is me at age 20 trying not to electrocute myself on the contraption we built. Fortunat4ely, I had a brilliant engineer helping me put this on the air.
I'm sure the question facing Audacy in these cases is how much of that land is needed for the tower, and can some of the land get sold without hurting the effectiveness of the tower. In some cases, such as Cumulus and WMAL, they sold the entire property and did the diplex situation. But in the case of iHeart and WLW, they are repurposing the land around the tower for a shopping mall and other usage, and the tower remains where it is. So we see there are many ways to handle tower land.