December 12-19, 2002
The AM Towers of Dayton, Ohio
 Last week, we visited
WCTM, a wonderfully quirky little
one-man operation in Eaton, Ohio, about 25 miles west of Dayton.
It wouldn't be fair to deprive you of a look at the rest of
the AM dial in the Dayton market, would it? Thought not...
We'll start about 40 miles north of Dayton on I-75, and about
four years ago. Fall 1998 found us heading from Fort Wayne to
Dayton and Cincinnati for a couple of quick days of tower hunting,
with a handful of stops on the way. First up was WMVR in Sidney,
a pleasant town halfway between Lima and Dayton, playing a live
and local hot AC format on 105.5 FM and, from all three of those
towers at left, 1080 AM.
It's a good thing we got there and took this picture when
we did; last year, WMVR (the calls stand for "Miami Valley
Radio," by the way) turned off the AM transmitter for good
as part of a deal that will allow WOAP (1080 Owosso MI), 180
or so miles away, to move south to the Lansing market. The FM
is still going strong from the tower closest to the building;
we're told the other two towers came down when the AM went dark
for good.
Our next stop, 20 minutes or so later, was in Piqua (say it
"Pih-KWAH"), home to another AM/FM combo of some note.
WPTW (1570) boasted "AM Stereo" on the sign out front,
and meant it, though our noontime stop found the station doing
death notices instead of music. It's a traditional small-town
full service station, and it's still at it four years later (although
in mono these days, I hear.)
As for the "WCLR" on the other side of the studio
door, that's 95.7 FM, the former WPTW-FM. By 1998, it had found
its way into the Cox cluster of media that dominates Dayton,
including WHIO (1290), WHKO (99.1), WHIO-TV (Channel 7), the
Dayton Daily News and the nearby Springfield News-Sun. It
was playing oldies then, simulcast with WZLR (95.3) in Xenia,
southeast of Dayton; later it would switch to an 80s format as
WDPT, "The Point." (Xenia also flipped, becoming WDTP,
but this year returned to the WZLR calls with classic rock.)
 The WPTW tower was
out back, behind the studio, but the sun was at a terrible angle
for picture-taking...so on we went to Dayton that day.
Dayton is an easy city for tower hunters, with most of the
important facilities clustered in tight proximity. All the city's
TV stations (we'll see them in a later installment) are within
a couple of miles of each other southwest of downtown, while
most of the FMs (except Cox's WHKO) were on a collection of towers
just southeast of downtown. Since that 1998 visit, Clear Channel
has consolidated four of its FMs in the market at a single master
FM site, the old WTUE (104.7) tower on a ridge just east of I-75
and just south of downtown.
Also on that ridge is a tower that was home to WMMX (107.7),
which has since moved to the master site, but which remains home
to 107.7's former sister station, WDAO (1210), an urban-formatted
daytimer. I didn't get close enough for a good picture then,
and in any event the AM antenna is nothing but a set of wires
strung partway up the FM tower.
 Dayton's other three
AM stations are all close neighbors in the suburb of Kettering,
southeast of the city. Two of them even share the same street:
David Road, which runs for about a mile east of Ohio 48. Heading
east along David Road, the first stop is at number 717, shown
above, which is home to both the studio and transmitter of WING
(1410), which was once the major top-40 AM station here.
WING was doing CNN news in 1998 and is now mostly satellite
sports; it's now owned by Radio One, which also operates top
40 station WGTZ (92.9 Eaton - the original WCTM, if you were
paying attention last week!) and urban WDHT (102.9 Springfield.)
About a mile east of WING are the three towers of Cox's WHIO
(1290), the oldest and probably the best AM signal out of Dayton
(with WONE close behind); about half a mile southwest of WING
are the four-in-a-square of WONE, Dayton's standards station
on 980.
 WONE's full-service
heritage is reflected at Clear Channel's studio complex downtown,
at 101 Pine Street in the historic Oregon neighborhood of Dayton.
In addition to the neon letters on the facade of this 150-year-old
building, check out that funky old WONE sign hanging off the
side, a relic of an earlier studio location!
(We had a chance to tour this building recently; Clear Channel's
engineers have done a nifty job of fitting eight stations into
three floors of the facility - and yes, WONE's studio is right
next to the WONE sign. Dayton-savvy readers will note that this
picture is clearly from the 1998 visit; "The Beat,"
WBTT 94.5 Englewood, seen on the facade and on the remote truck
at right, has since become a "Kiss" station under new
calls WDKF.)
That's it for Dayton proper - but we'll give you the grand
tour, filling out our 1998 photos with some more recent (as in
last month) images of the stations in several small towns east
of Dayton.
 Springfield is a
sizable community about half an hour east of Dayton on I-70 (and
US 40, the old National Road), and in addition to Radio One's
WDHT (102.9) mentioned above also boasts two AM stations with
some unusually close ties.
The tower at left is WIZE (1340), the graveyarder that was
once the radio voice of Springfield and kept playing the
hits well into the 80s. Today, WIZE is part of Clear Channel,
simulcasting WONE and filling in some gaps in WONE's signal to
the east (where it protects 980 facilities in places like Washington,
D.C. and Troy, N.Y.)
But there's still life in the building at the base of the
tower, high on a hill north of downtown Springfield: it's home
to the studios of talker WULM (formerly WBLY), which was once
involved in an LMA with WIZE before Clear Channel took over.
 WULM operates on
1600 from a separate site west of US 68 (also home to the WDHT
antenna, and just a mile or so from the studio and tower of religious
WEEC 100.7.)
Head south from Springfield on US 68 (or east from Dayton
on US 35) and you pass through the Dayton suburb of Fairborn
before arriving in the city of Xenia, Ohio. And if you head into
Xenia on the US 35 business route, one of the first things you'll
see is the three-tower site of WGNZ (1110), the religious station
licensed to Fairborn. When we photographed WGNZ this November,
the preachers and station IDs sounded just a bit odd, with almost
a warble to them; we later learned that the station has been
having STL problems and the audio we heard was coming from WGNZ's
Webcast, which was doubling as a studio-transmitter link!
The more interesting spot on the Xenia radio dial, though,
is AM 1500, the daytime home to WBZI. Tune in to WBZI and you'll
hear country music - but not of the Shania Twain/Brooks and Dunn
variety.
 No, sir: WBZI plays
country music - and Western, too - made by people named
Hank and Merle and Johnny and such, and you can thank owner (and
bluegrass star) "Moon" Mullins, sitting at the board
doing afternoon drive, and his son Joe (rear left) for keeping
it that way, live and local all day long. And yes, that thing
behind Moon is a record player and it's playing an actual LP
record!
Business is good at WBZI, we're told, with plenty of positive
response to the classic country format that's been running for
a few years now. (So good, in fact, that the Mullinses opened
up a retail store next door to the station to provide an outlet
for the kind of music they play, which is hard to find at the
big chain stores in Dayton!)
And now you've seen pretty much everything of interest on
the AM dial in and around Dayton. Head south of here by just
a few miles and you're in the northern fringes of the Cincinnati
market; in fact, it's only half an hour or so on the road to
get from the Dayton AMs to the legendary WLW
site in Mason, and it's no wonder that WLW always does very
well in the Dayton market - but we'll get down to the Queen City
another time.
In the meantime, we'll mark the birthday of one of the radio
industry's most important inventors next week in a Tower Site
special - and if you still need more steel, we're pleased to
announce that the Tower Site Archive
index has been fully updated, so you can find the sites you've
missed over the last few years.
 Want to see more neat sticks all year
round? Nashville's WSM (at left) is one of the more than
a dozen Tower Site images featured in the 2003 Tower Site Calendar,
coming this fall from Tower Site of the Week and fybush.com.
If you liked last year's edition, you'll love this one: higher-quality
images (in addition to WSM, this year's edition includes Providence's
WHJJ; Mount Mansfield, Vermont; Buffalo's WBEN; KOMA in Oklahoma
City; WTIC, Hartford; Brookmans Park, England; WPAT, Paterson;
Four Times Square, New York; WIBC in Indianapolis; WWVA in Wheeling,
W.V.; WGN Chicago and more), more dates in radio history, a convenient
hole for hanging - and we'll even make sure all the dates fall
on the right days!
This year's edition is back from the printer, and shipping
is underway. Orders placed by December 15 should arrive in time
for Christmas! And this year, you can order with your Visa,
MasterCard, Discover or American Express by using the handy link
below!
Better yet, here's an incentive to make your 2003 NERW/Site
of the Week subscription pledge a little early: support NERW/fybush.com
at the $60 level or higher, and you'll get this lovely calendar
for free! How can you go wrong? (Click here
to visit our Support page, where you can make your NERW contribution
with a major credit card...)
You can also order by mail; just send a check for $16
per calendar (NYS residents add 8% sales tax), shipping included,
to Scott Fybush, 92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester
NY 14618.
Thanks for your support!
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