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Site of the Week 5/4/18: Two Stops in Hartford

Scott Fybush by Scott Fybush
May 4, 2018
in Connecticut, Free Content, Tower Site of the Week
0

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

“Radio moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and take some pictures once in a while, you could miss it.”

Full Power in Glastonbury
Full Power in Glastonbury
Full Power lobby
Full Power lobby

OK, maybe that’s not exactly what Ferris Bueller said, but it’s true – at the speed radio is changing these days, we often find ourselves in danger of missing the opportunity to chronicle broadcast facilities before they move, and our first stop this week is a perfect example.

On the ground floor of an office building just off Route 2 in the eastern Hartford suburb of Glastonbury, Connecticut, this is the Hartford half of John Fuller’s Full Power Radio, or at least it was when we visited in October 2017.

Full Power bullpen
Full Power bullpen
WMRQ 104.1
WMRQ 104.1

As radio facilities go, this was a bit of an unusual one: it housed WMRQ (104.1 Waterbury), the modern rocker Fuller had purchased as a spinoff from Clear Channel, as well as “Bomba,” the statewide Spanish-language station that runs on WMRQ’s HD2 and a plethora of translators that reach from Bridgeport north to Hartford and east to Rhode Island.

Beyond the lobby (where the station swag included, unusually, a bowl full of “Radio 104.1”-branded condoms!), most of this space was a big open bullpen area, with a few enclosed offices and a conference room on one side and the studios for WMRQ and Bomba at the far end, next to an engineering rack room. (Check out that giant circular window from the WMRQ studio out to the building entrance…you don’t see a window like that in many radio facilities, do you?)

Bomba studio
Bomba studio
Bomba studio
Bomba studio

We can talk about this Glastonbury facility in the past tense because something very big went down just after our visit: Full Power picked up two more Hartford-market stations, buying WDRC-FM (102.9) and three of the four “Talk of Connecticut” AMs (WDRC 1360 Hartford, WMMW 1470 Meriden, WSNG 610 Torrington) from Connoisseur, which also sold Fuller the WDRC studios and AM transmitter site up on Blue Hills Avenue in Bloomfield, north of Hartford. (We saw it in an earlier ownership incarnation back in 2007.)

And so WMRQ and Bomba have moved on…and we need to get back to Hartford to see how they’ve been integrated into the WDRC facility one day soon.

iHeart Hartford lobby
iHeart Hartford lobby
WKSS 95.7
WKSS 95.7

From Glastonbury, it’s a straight shot up Route 2 and across the bridge into downtown Hartford, where our visits over the years had somehow never taken us inside what’s now one of the city’s oldest radio facilities. iHeart Radio’s four FMs and one AM occupy most of the ground floor in the big office building at 10 Columbus Blvd. on the south side of downtown, the result of steady growth over the three decades since the first of these stations moved in.

That first station was WKSS (95.7), which was only a few years into its transition from beautiful music to top-40 when it relocated from a Victorian mansion on Wethersfield Ave. here to Columbus Boulevard in the late 1980s.

WWYZ 92.5
WWYZ 92.5
iHeart racks
iHeart racks

With consolidation in the 1990s, WKSS ended up as part of SFX, which brought in the former Merv Griffin stations – WPOP (1410) and WMRQ – as well as classic rock WHCN (105.9) and eventually also WWYZ (92.5 Waterbury), bringing their studios from three other locations around town to an expanded space here. SFX became part of Capstar in 1997, which begat AMFM, which begat Clear Channel, which begat today’s iHeart. (WMRQ, as noted above, eventually ended up with Fuller, but its space in the cluster was later filled by ESPN Radio outlet WUCS 97.9 Windsor Locks, a move-in from the Springfield, Mass. cluster to the north.)

A bit of history
A bit of history
WUCS/WHCN studios
WUCS/WHCN studios

So how does everyone fit in here? Let’s take a tour, starting with the two mirror-image studios visible behind the lobby glass. That’s WKSS on the left, country WWYZ on the right, each with supporting production rooms and programming offices down halls on either side.

Walk down the hall to the left and we pass the glassed-in rack room, where chief engineer Rick Walsh pauses to pull out a bit of history from the engineering offices behind the racks – that’s the old WPOP sign from the former AM transmitter/studio facility in Newington, which we still need to visit on a future trip.

WUCS 97.9
WUCS 97.9
WHCN 105.9
WHCN 105.9

The hallway turns again past the rack room, where we find another mirror-image studio pair. I think these were originally for WMRQ and WHCN; now one studio is used for WUCS and WPOP (which is mostly satellite-fed talk), while WHCN (now “The River”) occupies the other side, again with production studios and programming offices arrayed down the halls on either side of the studios. (The main air studios were revamped a few years ago with new SAS consoles and networking.)

Around the back side of this studio cluster, a former conference room was recently rebuilt as a really nice-looking talk studio, primarily for the benefit of WUCS’ afternoon Rob Dibble talk show. There’s a desk with spiffy lighting, a video wall and a comfy pair of leather chairs for more intimate interviews, all looking out toward the downtown skyline.

WUCS talk studio
WUCS talk studio
Performance studio lobby
Performance studio lobby
Control room
Control room

As this cluster grew, it took another big chunk of office space on the other side of the first floor, which is mostly used these days for sales and management offices – at least until you’ve walked all the way to the end of that space, where another former high-ceilinged conference room has been completely transformed into a live performance space, heavily branded with Dunkin Donuts logos.

These performance rooms have become a common feature at big radio clusters around the country, but this one is especially nicely done. Its curved entryway is plastered with photos of performers playing here, and that same curve forms the back wall of the round stage, which faces a seating area that includes some futuristic orange curvy seats that match the color of the big window into the elevated control room.

Performance studio
Performance studio
Performance stage
Performance stage

The video screens flanking the stage can rotate, and of course can display any of these stations’ logos – and to the left of the stage, a roll-up door provides access to a smaller conference area that in turn looks out toward Columbus Boulevard.

Thanks to John Fuller and Rick Walsh 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 Hartford IDs next Wednesday, over at our sister site, TopHour.com!

Next week: Univision New York

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Tags: WHCNWKSSWMRQWPOPWUCSWWYZWXCT
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Scott Fybush

Scott Fybush

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

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