COVERAGE AREAS (The BIGGER Picture)

[DJ_Perry]

There isn't much benefit in covering lonely stretches of highway and huge swaths of unpopulated desert if you can't be picked up on a clock radio where your target audience lives.

Exactly. 97.5 may cover a big piece of Arizona (like all the sticks over towards Camp Verde), but that doesn't do much for the valley....which is where their ratings need to come from (not Prescott where they come in better). And just because cars get them, only means they can be picked up on peoples commutes, as opposed to the rest of the day.

 

[johndavis]

And just because cars get them, only means they can be picked up on peoples commutes, as opposed to the rest of the day.

I work for a station with a great morning show. They've had about a 14 year run in the market; we hired them away from the competition when we signed on to go up against them. We're on a rimshot; the competition is a full market signal. The rimshot puts about half of its signal over the Gulf of Mexico; that's about as useful as covering Prescott or I-8 between Gila Bend and Yuma. We were stuck around a 2 share in every daypart.

We added a better signal that gets into people's homes and offices better. We hit the top 10 the next month and have never looked back, consistently beating the competition in every daypart. (okay, sometimes they beat us at night. woo.)

If you have a killer morning show and people can wake up to you in the morning, you can hook them in the rest of the day. If your first chance at reaching them is after they've gotten into the car and the show they were listening to when they left the house went to commercial, you're at a considerable disadvantage.

You need good programming and a good signal. It all works together.

 

[ironbear]

In some cases, the reason is those stations are on translators in Northern AZ because the people who own the translators want to listen to the station they're rebroadcasting. You are allowed to insert :30 of underwriting every hour to cover your expenses. Ironbear was involved in a few of these, including KDKB's translator in the 80's and KZON's in the 90's. The spot was sent on the subcarrier from a cart deck and the translator switched from main to SCA and back on a subaudible tone.

As for why stations don't promote them, that's up to the station. KUPD used to promote its translators in Tucson and Flagstaff back in the 80's quite a bit. I remember being asked by the translator owner to talk ours up more at KZON but our management wasn't too interested. We were too busy trying to sell Phoenix and there wasn't any money for us to make outside of the city. We looked at the extra coverage as a bonus, not as a sales tool.

Thanks, John. It was a pleasure working with you all at KZON...what a great station it was!

The translator spot insertion system was originally developed by me for my earlier KDKB operation in Prescott, Flagstaff and Verde Valley, and was a simple automation system of sorts. A clone of it was sold for a time by IGM, the old program automation company.

By 1999, I'd had some health issues, and sold the translators to various buyers. That and a legal dispute with a buyer led to my withdrawing from K246AA's engineering, which while mostly on the air, has certainly suffered technically from poor technical support.

The FCC limits translator advertising to that single, 30 second avail per hour, which tends to make operations supported like this more like hobbies than anything.

Translators operating at 10W ERP can get out very well indeed, so I question claims of overpower on South Mountain. Radio-locator's red signal map contour is the FCC 60dBu. The others (50dBu and 40dBu) are well outside that interference protected zone, and seem fairly spotty in practice due to terrain.