• My Account
  • Your Profile
  • Member Archives
Friday, May 23, 2025
Cart / $0.00

No products in the cart.

Fybush.com
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links
No Result
View All Result
Fybush.com
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links

No products in the cart.

No Result
View All Result
Fybush.com
No Result
View All Result

Site of the Week 11/14/14: Southern Minnesota (Big Trip 2013, part 4)

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
November 14, 2014
in Big Trip 2013, Free Content, Minnesota, Tower Site of the Week
0

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

When we’re fully engaged in a “Big Trip” like the one we’re in the midst of chronicling from the summer of 2013, there’s not a lot of time for anything that’s not radio or TV. We get up in the morning, aircheck morning-drive radio, hit the road bright and early, use up as much daylight as we can traveling and touring, and if we’re lucky we get to squeeze in a few decent dinners or maybe a ballgame at night.

The SPAM Museum!
The SPAM Museum!

Not an actual radio station
Not an actual radio station

But if you’ve never gone through Austin, Minnesota before – and if it’s a dreary, rainy day with some time to spare before the next station tour is scheduled – sometimes you’ve just got to make a stop at the SPAM Museum. No, we did not know ahead of time that this tongue-in-cheek tourist attraction includes its own mock “radio station,” but once “K-SPAM” presented itself (a few exhibits ahead of the recreation of Monty Python’s fabled “SPAM” sketch), we had to share it with you here on Site of the Week. And seriously, it’s a fun (and free) little museum that takes itself precisely as seriously as it should…complete with free samples as you walk around.

Old sign at 970
Old sign at 970

KQAQ 970
KQAQ 970

Away from Hormel’s legendary luncheon meat, there is indeed some radio to be seen in Austin. The city extends south of I-90, but if you instead head north of 90 on the east side of town, the farm country yields up the four towers of KQAQ (970), out at the corner of 245th Street and 555th Avenue. This was a late addition to the dial when it signed on in 1960, running 5000 watts by day and 500 watts at night from a very directional pattern generated by these four widely-spaced sticks. Over the years, it became KGHR (immortalized in an old sign at the former studio site here), then KNFX under Clear Channel, then returned to its original calls when it returned to local ownership a few years ago with a cool oldies format.

KAUS 1480
KAUS 1480

KAUS studio
KAUS studio

Head back through downtown Austin and south on Highway 105 and you come to the older of the two AMs in town. KAUS (1480) signed on in 1948 from this site on the south side of town, and it’s been here ever since. Regional owner Three Eagles held the keys when we stopped in for an impromptu tour in 2013, but it’s since sold to Dean Goodman’s Digity group. (We’ll see more of Three Eagles later in this Big Trip.)

KAUS AM
KAUS AM

KAUS-FM
KAUS-FM

On the AM side, “The Voice of Mower County” does a lot of local talk, sports and news over its 1000-watt signal; sister station KAUS-FM (99.9) does “US Country” over a big 100,000-watt signal from a tower west of here between Austin and Albert Lea.

(That’s sports guy Clint Narramore in the production room shot below, and it took us both a few moments to realize that we had a NERW-land connection – he used to work in New York’s Southern Tier at WEBO in Owego!)

KAUS production room
KAUS production room

KAUS transmitter room
KAUS transmitter room

The stations occupy a brick transmitter/studio building that’s probably a little bigger than a small AM/FM combo really needs these days, but there’s a reason for that: back in the early 1950s, the building was expanded when KAUS added a TV sister station, KMMT (Channel 6) in the summer of 1953. Channel 6 became KAUS-TV in the 1960s, and it moved out in 1974 to its own building just off the north side of the I-90 bypass. Subsequent owners changed the calls to KAAL (“Austin/Albert Lea”), and with a tower in the farm east of Austin and south of Rochester, KAAL is now the ABC affiliate for that entire sprawling Rochester/Austin/Mason City market we mentioned in last week’s installment.

KAAL's Austin studio
KAAL’s Austin studio

KAAL master control
KAAL master control

Under current owner Hubbard, KAAL’s center of gravity has started to shift: while some newscasts still come from this facility in Austin, a satellite newsroom in Rochester was already producing several evening shows when we visited in 2013. This year, KAAL announced plans to build a new studio and newsroom in Rochester that will originate all of its newscasts starting in 2015.

KAAL newsroom
KAAL newsroom

KAAL's news set
KAAL’s news set

This building in Austin will continue to house sales offices, master control and a few newspeople covering Austin and vicinity (news coverage of the Iowa side of the market seems to belong mainly to Mason City’s KIMT, unless it’s a big story), and we’ll have to get back to this area at some point to see what a Rochester-based KAAL looks like.

KAAL control room
KAAL control room

KSMQ's building
KSMQ’s building

After KAAL makes its move, there will still be one TV station based entirely in Austin: public broadcaster KSMQ-TV. Unlike public radio, for which pretty much all of Minnesota depends on the centralized service of Minnesota Public Radio, public TV around the state is highly localized. including some delightfully small operations. While channel 15 here in Austin started out back in 1971 as a school-run station, KAVT, it’s been in community hands for a couple of decades now, with studio facilities tucked into the back of a building at Riverland Community College just off the I-90 bypass on the west side of town.

KSMQ's offices
KSMQ’s offices

KSMQ edit suites
KSMQ edit suites

That’s pretty much the entire station offices in that view above, from up in the storage loft at the back of the station. With much of its market getting primary PBS service from either St. Paul-based Twin Cities Public TV (KTCA) or Iowa Public TV’s Mason City transmitter (KYIN, on the same tower near the state line as KIMT), KSMQ does a lot of local production, assisted by the state’s “Legacy” funding. There’s a room full of edit bays off to one side of the facility, next to the control room and studio.

KSMQ control room
KSMQ control room

KSMQ's studio
KSMQ’s studio

And what’s that tucked in the back of the rack room? It’s the transmitter rack for KMSK (91.3), the Austin relay of Mankato State University’s KMSU (89.7). KSMQ lost its STL tower, a 440-footer over at the edge of the campus, in a storm the winter before we arrived; it took only a day to rig up a replacement STL path to get the signal out to the KXLT tower in the Ostrander tower farm to the east, where KSMQ’s transmitter is located. (KSMQ has lots of ties with KXLT’s sister station KTTC: the KTTC Austin news bureau occupies a room off to the side of the KSMQ office area, among other things.)

KSMK 91.3
KMSK 91.3

KMSK 91.3
KMSK 91.3

KATE/KCPI
KATE/KCPI

From here, you could just about roll a bowling ball 175 miles west along the straight, flat I-90 corridor to the South Dakota state line, but we made some stops in the small towns that dot the landscape along the way.

It’s only 20 miles or so to Albert Lea, where I-35 crosses I-90 amidst a landscape pocked with small lakes, and here we find the current studio for Austin’s KQAQ (970), shared with its sister station KQPR (96.1 Albert Lea) in a storefront in the city’s rather vacant-looking downtown. We didn’t make it to KQPR’s tower, south of I-90 east of Albert Lea not far from the KAUS-FM site, but we did go a little south of downtown Albert Lea to see the other tower in town, shared by Three Eagles’ KATE (1450) and its sister FM KCPI (94.9).

KSMQ's rack room
KSMQ’s rack room

The KQPR/KQAQ studio
The KQPR/KQAQ studio

The KATE/KCPI studios eluded us somehow, so it’s off to the next radio town, another 35 miles or so down I-35. The roads into Blue Earth (where the dirt was actually just as brown as anywhere else) were under construction this summer day, so it took some maneuvering to find our way around to the studio/transmitter site of KBEW (1560), which is also the studio of KBEW-FM (98.1). KBEW signed on in 1963 (as chronicled in an exceptionally detailed and accurate Wikipedia article, the exception to the rule these days), spawned the original KBEW-FM (100.9) in 1965, then signed the station off again 11 years later when the station’s then-owner, Clifford Hedberg, bought what had been KEYC-FM (99.1) in Mankato from the then-owners of KEYC-TV. The Mankato FM went silent, and it wasn’t until the early 1990s that a new KBEW owner put a new KBEW-FM on the air from a site out to the west of Blue Earth.

Blue Earth is also the home of religious KJLY (104.5), part of a network of stations dotting northern Iowa and southern Minnesota; its current transmitter site is up north near Mankato, but its studio and former transmitter site still sit right alongside I-90 as we head west out of Blue Earth.

KBEW 1560/98.1
KBEW 1560/98.1

KJLY aux
KJLY aux

KSUM 1370/KFMC 105.9
KSUM 1370/KFMC 105.9
KFMC 105.9
KFMC 106.5
KSUM/KFMC
KSUM/KFMC

It’s less than 20 miles from here to Fairmont, a pretty town nestled alongside a chain of lakes, where Woodward Broadcasting stakes its claim on the region’s radio dial with an AM-FM pair.

KSUM (1370) and KFMC (106.5) share a site on West Lair Road on the far side of Hall Lake from downtown Fairmont.

“Ag Country 1370” dates its history back to 1948; today it runs 1000 watts day and night, using two of these three towers by day and all three at night; “Classic Rock 106.5” has been around since the 1980s, and today it’s a 100,000-watt C1 signal that’s easily heard up north in Mankato.

The next radio town heading westward is Jackson, another 30 miles along the way, but the studio/transmitter building of KKOJ (1190) and the transmitter of its sister station KRAQ (105.7) are a little out of the way and daylight is starting to run out, so we press on 30 miles more to Worthington. By now we’re just 50 miles from the state line and Sioux Falls radio is nearly local, but Worthington still has its own local radio scene.

One end of KWOA's wire
One end of KWOA’s wire

The KWOA/KUSQ building
The KWOA/KUSQ building
KQAD 800
KQAD 800 (and the KLQL 101.1 studio)

Normally, these Worthington stations – news-talk KWOA (730) and country KUSQ (95.1) – can be heard over in Sioux Falls, too, but things were far from normal when we pulled up at the studio/transmitter site on the west side of town to see not much tower at all.

Ir turns out an ice storm in April 2013 had taken down most of the tower here, leaving KWOA operating from a longwire strung between two phone poles and KUSQ running low power from a single bay mounted on the remaining stub of the tower.

Two more FMs have studios, but not transmitters, here: rocker KITN (93.5 Worthington) and top-40 “Party” KZTP (104.3 Sibley IA).

And we finish our southern Minnesota jaunt in the last radio stop along I-90 before it hits the border: Luverne, just a few miles shy of South Dakota, is home to KQAD (800) and KLQL (101.1). Both stations signed on in 1971 using this studio and transmitter site on County Highway 9 east of town. KQAD’s 500-watt, two-tower signal (dropping to 80 watts at night) still transmits from here, but the former KQAD-FM 100.9 moved sites to a taller tower north of town when it moved to 101.1 in the 1980s.

From here, it’s on to Sioux Falls – but we’ll save that fun for next week’s installment.

Thanks to KAUS’s Ed Brady and Clint Narramore, KAAL’s Wendell Nelson and KSMQ’s Matthew Bluhm for the tours!

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! 

 


And don’t miss a big batch of southern Minnesota IDs next Wednesday, over at our sister site, TopHour.com!

Next week: Big Trip 2013 part 5 – Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Share this:

  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • More
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
Tags: KATEKAUSKAUS-FMKBEWKBEW-FMKCPIKFMCKJLYKLQLKMSKKQADKQAQKSMQKUSQKWOA
Previous Post

NERW Extra: Shakeup in Boston Talk Radio

Next Post

Current: “Evolution and revolution” coming as ATSC readies new broadcast standard

Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

Editor/Publisher, NorthEast Radio Watch and Tower Site of the Week

Related Posts

Top of the Tower Podcast #063 – Radio and Podcasting, with Arielle Nissenblatt
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #063 – Radio and Podcasting, with Arielle Nissenblatt

In this week's episode - It was a longer hiatus than we intended, but Top of the Tower is back with a new spring season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio. This week, we move north...

by Scott Fybush
May 23, 2025
NorthEast Radio Watch 5/19/2025: WRGB’s Bishop Retires
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/19/2025: WRGB’s Bishop Retires

In this week’s issue… WRGB's Bishop to retire - CT "tower" coming down - Remembering Robin Marshall

by Scott Fybush
May 19, 2025
Top of the Tower Podcast #062: Keeping Students in Broadcasting
Free Content

Top of the Tower Podcast #062: Keeping Students in Broadcasting

In this week's episode - It was a longer hiatus than we intended, but Top of the Tower is back with a new spring season of conversations with some of the most interesting people in radio. This week, we continue bringing...

by Scott Fybush
May 14, 2025
NERW 12/15/2014: CRTC Drains Niagara Simulcast
Free Content

NorthEast Radio Watch 5/12/2025: New Owners For Two AMs

In this week’s issue… Catsimatidis, Shula add signals - Radiodays rocks Toronto - Ex-Bell, Evanov stations rebrand By SCOTT FYBUSH Jump to: ME - NH - VT - MA - RI - CT - NY - NJ - PA -...

by Scott Fybush
May 13, 2025
Next Post

Current: “Evolution and revolution” coming as ATSC readies new broadcast standard

Log In

Join Now | Lost Password?

Get Fybush.com Updates

Get Fybush.com updates emailed directly to your inbox!

© 2025 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Archives
  • Subscribe
  • My Account
  • Store
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • About/Contact
    • Scott Fybush
    • Copyright Information
    • Privacy Policy
  • Fybush Media
  • Links

© 2025 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.