Ed Joseph wrote: ↑Tue Jan 08, 2019 11:56 pm
Wow... 640 Kingsley. I was thinking it was lower on the dial, but, to be honest, this was back in like 1978 or maybe 80. I remember some commotion about Kingsley in the early 90's??? I don't recall all that much about it. Did 640 ever actually go on the air up there? Kingsley... did it have anything to do with WJZZ 1210 after KNX bit the dust? LOL "Long Distance Radio" with it's impressive ten mile groundwave reception??? Something about towers on a toxic dumpsite or something? Wasn't that Henderson's baby back in the day? Sorry, but stuff up north happens so fast and frequent since I was working up there, I can't even start to make sense of it. The market of chaos!
I *do* recall Don showing me some old FCC papers from the 1kW days. What they actually said, well, that was 1985. I saw a lot of old paperwork at several stations back then. Wish I could have scraped up those, and all the original WTAC paperwork, but someone beat me to the building and cleared it completely out before I got there. I was the last person to set foot in the Center road building. They actually knocked the rear wall out while I was still in the building. It fell as I was leaving the driveway with a small, empty rack and the desk from production.
Don did tell me that the whole North tower thing was actually a boondoggle of sorts and really wasn't needed, but for to have an FM on it later. He said their cardioid pattern could practically run off the short towers with only minor adjustments to the phasor. As Don expressed it, "close enough for Flint, anyway".
I had to run WTRX on 500W omni for a few hours once when the middle tower took a lightning strike. I was standing outside in the driveway about to go home when it happened, and it knocked me right down! I literally wet myself a bit! That was when my already too long day got a *whole* lot longer. On top of that, I also was given weekend overnight duties permanently that night after Ernie Haddaway did a call-in quit. I did over 26 hours on the clock there that day... Came in at 4:30 AM Friday morning and finally left for home at 6:10 AM Saturday morning.
Wow, someone remembers our 640 CP in Kingsley. McCluskey or Schaberg had nothing to do with 640 there. My partner and I had grand plans in those days. We filed for several FM's around the country and AM's in Las Vegas (50kW), Sterling Heights (5kW), Kingsley (10kW). The first two were built and sold.
The story of Kingsley is simple. Harold Munn and I worked on all of our projects. I had the idea and he loved squeezing something new into a new place. It was a challenge for him I guess. 640 fit with 10kW day and 1kW night with three 300+ foot towers on the east side of Kingsley, just north of M-113. Today there is one tower on that site. It was a lot of work to get the CP, but we did it.
Now more back story about WTCM. During this time they had made the switch from 1400 to 580. It was discovered that the M-3 maps were really wrong! They had a pattern and power of 2,500 watts. After it was built and proofed they discovered they would need to double the transmitter power to actually cover that licensed pattern, which they soon did. So now they were 5kW and later years kept increasing their power up to today's power level. This scared us that we would need a much bigger transmitter in Kingsley to actually cover the pattern we had been approved for 10kW.
The other part of the WTCM story was when we listened to them, very few commercials! With no money flowing in on WTCM, why would we want build a new station in Kingsley? They had a H*** FM to support their AM!
About this time, Pervis Spann who then owned 640 in Zeeland wanted to make moves. He really wanted to move 640 Zeeland to Chicago. (Imagine that?) To get this job done, he would need to buy out our 640 CP in Kingsley and another 640 CP in Tomahawk WI. He made a deal to pay us $5,000 dollars to turn in the CP. Similar deal with Tomahawk. As I remember, we were paid $2,500, but never another nickel. Tomahawk never saw a penny! Pervis wasn't the most honest man to deal with. We were busy with our other CP's in the other cities and I never paid much attention to what he did after we returned our 640 Kingsley CP.
Years later when Munn/Reese was working with Bell Broadcasting in Detroit. They were looking to upgrade their Detroit station to 1200 with a lot of power. They needed to move 1210 in Saginaw to make it work. As I remember they bought 1210 and since Munn/Reese knew Kingsley qualified to have it's first station, they moved it to a site SW of Kingsley. I've been told that it was a former dump site of some kind. They built it as a 50kW non-D daytimer. Coverage has always been pitiful, but I think they skipped on the construction and as we know, the M-3 map is wrong in that area, so the station has never covered it's licensed coverage map.
Around that time, WXOX 1250 in Bay City was sitting dark. Again I think, Munn/Reese thought of moving it to the old 1210 site to up grade it and you know the history from there.
Another comment above was about a low frequency AM in Northern Michigan. McCluskey did apply for an AM in Stanwood, just south of Big Rapids. As I remember, it was around 540 or so. It was never granted a CP for some reason.
Remember back in those days, we didn't have internet. We found out things on the phone, magazines or books. it was easy to miss something going on a short distance away and took a lot longer to hear about.
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