106.5 Toledo

[WOHO]

Heathcliff, the City administrator had mentioned that's where their $2 million dollar road (racetrack) is going to be: a road to go from "Downtown Oregon" Dustin Road, alongside Dunn Chevy across the tower lands, alongside the former Broadcast House, to a little better POS bridge over the ditch and dump traffic out so they can slide across Pickle Road on into the East YMCA facility. A fair amount of trees are coming out, only vertical structures are 2 or 3 wooden power poles. I think there's a few Sun Oil pipelines going thru there, and that should be interesting to see how well those are mapped out since they haven't dug any holes on the property since 1954 (other than a concrete base for their UHF remote tower.

[Colonel Flagg]

I made a pilgrimage to the Pickle Road site last weekend, everything is gone but the tower bases and fencing. Innate makes a good point, the far SE 1470 tower (the one with the shit for ground) is(was) close enough to the edge of the property that elevated grounds would have been an improvement, they could have dropped a cargo container on the SE corner of the property by the ditch for the transmitter and STL and still sold 85% of their land to the City of Oregon and still kept just the one SE tower by pulling a "1310 special"?

I looked into salvaging the 1470 license. Non directional with 1 tower limited the facility to daytime only, as is the case with most Non-D facilities on 1470. It looked doubtful that even 500 watts was a possibility. 250 looked more likely with the information we were provided, using a theoretical site on Route 20, owned by a friend of mine, near WJYM. The night pattern on 1470 pointed directly at Lake Erie (away from co-channel WMBD Peoria) Even with 250 watts it was still too close to Peoria.

[Colonel Flagg]

I made a pilgrimage to the Pickle Road site last weekend, everything is gone but the tower bases and fencing. Innate makes a good point, the far SE 1470 tower (the one with the shit for ground) is(was) close enough to the edge of the property that elevated grounds would have been an improvement, they could have dropped a cargo container on the SE corner of the property by the ditch for the transmitter and STL and still sold 85% of their land to the City of Oregon and still kept just the one SE tower by pulling a "1310 special"?

I might have asked before but what are the city of Oregon's plans for the land? Thanks for going out there, I was wondering if anything was left. So no more transmitter, shack or anything, wow.

The Pickle Rd studios were actually very nice when I worked for Lew Dickey Sr back in the 80's. The place had just been remodeled. Main control room was very classy. Nearly soundproof. The building was mid-century modern, with a rich wood paneling throughout. Lew's office had a private entrance, and a shaded patio, overlooking the towers, next to his reserved parking place. Fast forward to Cumulus ownership... It's my belief that nobody knew how to maintain the MCM "butterfly" style roof on the building. An employee claimed they became ill due to mold in the building. That prompted the move to Arlington, and all stations being crammed into that facility.

[burytheneedle]

I worked in that building in late '90s early 2000s, would have loved to have been there during it's hayday. Anyone have any pictures of what it used to look like? Also, what kind of shape is the old WSPD building on Oregon road in?

[WOHO]

Scott Fybush has some photos online, but it was in evacuate time then I believe. In 1979 it had a giant aerial photo on the wall of "Oregon" and the tower site, nice paneling, and a really neat curved receptionist desk!.
The AM studio was big and fantastic, 3 giant carousels of tape carts in the main studio where you could watch the tubes on the backup transmitter glow thru the "North" window. Thru the "South" window you could watch the automation for Z-105. Thru that (west) glass sliding door was the production room, straight thru the production room window was a super dinky newsroom studio with tiny Gates console next to the UPI and AP wire tractor-feed printers in the hall. You could only get to the main studio and newsroom and engineer's room down the hallway with the audio processing gear, EBS, main and backup xmitters and giant Gates phasor unit. Also, 'remote controls' out to the 105.5 transmitter to monitor power, beacon operation, audio.

As far as WSPD, I was not permitted to take any photos during my tour of the transmitter building a few years back per company policy, but it is well-maintained with main and backup transmitters. Much to my surprise, there wasn't a fully operational studio like you would have expected in an old EBS fallout shelter station from the 1950's. I was surprised there was no old turntable with tube mixer and a mike so you could go "live on the air" and announce "the bombers were coming in from Russia" and to enjoy this LP for the next 20 minutes until Ground Zero?
Actually, "WKRP" had more ability to go "Live" at the transmitter than here if the studio crapped-out like it did during the great blackout of August 2004. If it was me, I would build a backup studio with the parts laying around from an old abandoned FM studio, but there are other technical backups in place at WSPD that I'm not privy to. And I hope I didn't say anything out of order- if so, Engineer Gary Fullhart, please delete this post. And, I have to take into account, the days of a duopoly with two engineers with time on their hands are over as you try to keep seven transmitters rolling, not counting the FM-HD feeds and online presence too with not enough engineers to go around. I have seen a photo of a transmitter building exactly like WSPD's in Radio World about 10 years ago, so it must have been something you could order-up back in the day?

[Gary Fullhart]

WOHO - No worries. We have since built a backup studio at the site (late 2018 when I had a couple interns). It's never been used, but we can easily go live from there. I has provisions for a host, three guests and can even take calls. It also has some minimal provisions to feed some of our FMs, should the studio building be unavailable.

[Deleted User 15502]

106.5 still of the air, from what I hear, 104.7 in ABQ NM is still off but changed there call letters from KABQ to KKTH. No wonder on 106.5's New calls will be or where the WTOD calls will be parked.

[Deleted User 15502]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KKTH

Looks like 104.7 is back on with a Spanish Christian music format. Makes sense.

[WOHO]

KKTH is 100KW and is scratchy in ABQ? How short is the tower with that kind of power?

[Deleted User 15502]

I know nothing about ABQ or New Mexico, so I'm not sure.