NorthEast Radio Watch 7/14/2025: Townsquare Cuts Continue
In this week’s issue… Budget cuts hit Townsquare markets - WBEN rearranges schedule - WPDH's Taylor steps down - K-Love prepares for PA additions - "Swan" preens in VT
NorthEast Radio Watch 6/14/2021: WFME Plans Return to 1560
In this week’s issue… NYC AM finds new home – Alhart steps back – A move on the Vineyard – Stafford out in Toronto – New HD in Canada
By SCOTT FYBUSH
Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada
*It’s already been four months since Family Stations flipped the switch to take WFME (1560) in NEW YORK silent following the $51 million sale of its longtime transmitter site in Maspeth, Queens (shown below last year).
At the time, the word we heard from sources in the New York engineering community was that Family had two plans for returning its programming to the airwaves in market #1: the purchase of another license in town, and eventually a rebuilt 1560 at a different location.
With a third of the one-year silent period already having ticked away, there’s been no sign of the rumored station purchase – which may explain why last week, Family filed a request for special temporary authority (STA) to put a limited 1560 signal back on the air at reduced power from a surprising location: a longwire antenna strung from the tower on First Mountain in West Orange, New Jersey that was Family’s New York-market base of operations from the 1960s until 2013, when Family sold what was then WFME (94.7) to Cumulus. (It’s now Audacy’s WNSH, and has a CP to move from West Orange to the East Rutherford tower site of iHeart’s WOR 710.)
Family never actually sold that 200-foot tower on Mount Pleasant Avenue, which is also used by WFMU (91.1) and as an auxiliary site by several other New York FMs. While it’s hardly an ideal spot for an AM station, located in an area with awful ground conductivity, it’s apparently the best option available at the moment to get 1560 back on the air – and so WFME is now proposing to use no more than 12.5 kW day and night into a slanted wire extending from a midpoint on the tower to an ATU on the roof of the transmitter building.
It won’t be a great signal, putting only 1 mV/m over the far reaches of New York City, but it will at least keep the 1560 license alive and keep Family’s programming available to determined listeners in the metro area. Is this Family’s end game? Surely not – and we’ll be following the next steps as Family figures out how to better restore full service, whether it’s on the 1560 license or somewhere else on the dial.
SPRING IS HERE…
And if you don’t have your Tower Site Calendar, now’s the time!
If you’ve been waiting for the price to come down, it’s now 30 percent off!
This year’s cover is a beauty — the 100,000-watt transmitter of the Voice Of America in Marathon, right in the heart of the Florida Keys. Both the towers and the landscape are gorgeous.
And did you see? Tower Site of the Week is back, featuring this VOA site as it faces an uncertain future.
Other months feature some of our favorite images from years past, including some Canadian stations and several stations celebrating their centennials (buy the calendar to find out which ones!).
We still have a few of our own calendars left – as well as a handful of Radio Historian Calendars – and we are still shipping regularly.
The proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here – and if that matters to you, now’s the time to show that support with an order of the Tower Site Calendar. (And we have the Broadcast Historian’s Calendar for 2025, too. Why not order both?)
Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your order now for the new calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too!
Related Posts
NorthEast Radio Watch 7/7/2025: Boston Mourns LB
In this week’s issue… Remembering Boston's Lyndon Byers - CRTC approves Rogers, Evanov spins - Towers come down in PA, and might go up in NY - More FM moves in Ontario
NorthEast Radio Watch 6/23-30/2025: Another Great Day in Alpine
In this week’s issue… Honoring radio's greatest inventor - Maine morning vet retiring - Buffalo names new HOF inductees - PA's Loftus retires
Top of the Tower Podcast #65: Back and Forth With PA’s Jason Togyer
In this week's episode - Top of the Tower is back with a new spring/summer season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio! This week, it's another joint episode, a two-way chat with my good friend Jason...
