It's a new market on Toppy!

It's a Tower Site of the Week installment!

It's...um...well, it's there in the desert, anyway.

(My apologies to the Ridgecrest/Indian Wells Valley Chamber of Commerce for not being able to come up with anything much more exciting to say about their town...)

Well, after surviving a HDD crash with my laptop pancaking on the floor and getting my data recovered after a thinner wallet, I am back.

This time we continue with more AM stations from the Seattle area. Most of the clips are refreshes, but we have a handful of call changes and a neat station that is new to Toppy - KKXA 1520

Bill

It's a long way from everywhere...but I lived there, long ago, and I finally made it back in 2010 to get some IDs, which you can hear here...and see pictures (lots of them!) over at Tower Site of the Week.

Here's hoping that 2012 is off to a great start for everyone. It's been a strange winter here in the greater Nashville area where I live, with mild temperatures (fine by me) and today a rare January storm system that came through producing tornadoes (not so good). Luckily, since I work from home, I was able to reassure my girlfriend's yellow lab Clyde, who was nonplussed with the blaring from the warning siren and the barometric pressure change that he very clearly was able to recognize.

Luckily all is well here, though it was a bit troubling to be under a tornado warning and then see my neighborhood pulled up on the weather map on TV as an area where a tornado strike might be imminent. We dodged a bullet on that, but some others weren't so lucky. The only positive: no injuries or fatalities.

But you didn't visit this site to read about the weather. So, with a big thanks to Chris Cuomo, here are some legal IDs from the Tuscaloosa, AL and Selma, AL markets.

We're back! It's been a somewhat longer-than-planned New Year's break, in part because one of our editors is recovering from a serious hard-drive crash (best of luck, Bill!) - and because I was traveling just before New Year's.

Tonight's update takes us up and down the highway between Rochester and Fort Wayne, with new sounds from Erie PA (Family Life's WCGM 102.7 and Dan Geary's new oldies format at WWOW 1360), Columbus OH (Catholic radio on WVSG 820 and oldies on WODC 93.3), Indianapolis ("My 107.9" WNTR) and Fort Wayne itself ("ClickHop Radio" on WHPP 106.3 and religion on WFCV-FM 100.1). We'd have had another new 100.1 ID, too, but newly-flipped FM talker WMAN-FM in Mansfield, Ohio didn't have the legal ID machine working right on New Year's Eve day as we drove through.

And there's a bonus cut: our first ID of 2012, a New Hampshire Public Radio eight-station ID from last night's primary coverage.

New tonight here on Toppy are some of the IDs I recorded during a visit to Staunton, Illinois earlier this month, a town where some members of my girlfriend's family live. Staunton is close enough to be able to get most (but not all) of the St. Louis radio stations, at least on the FM dial.

Picking up HD2/HD3 stations from distance can be a hit-or-miss proposition. But, thanks to having made multiple visits to Staunton, I've been able to record and extract the IDs from most of the available HD2/HD3 stations -- at least the ones that bother to do a legal ID.

With that in mind, there are a couple of HD2/HD3 stations from the St. Louis market making their debut on here tonight. Listen, enjoy, and have a great Christmas everyone.

This is the second installment of Bill's Big Trip 2011. This week we start with some AM stations in the Seattle market. For the first time they include some HD IDs simulcasting with the AMers as well as KJR 950 parallel to KNBQ 102.9 and KOMO 1000 simulcasting with KOMO-FM 97.7.

Hope you enjoy them, and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah.

Till Next time!

Bill

This is an update of the recent changes on 99.1 and 107.9 in the Washington-Baltimore-Annapolis area. Thanks to Lance's heads-up, I managed to record another change earlier today 12 December. This time we have WNEW-FM 99.1 Bowie stunting with Christmas music and announcements of the upcoming format change to all-news and 107.9 WLZL Annapolis not in simulcast with 99.1. Finally, Family Radio on 860 is still using the WBGR calls.

I also cleared out my Annapolis archives - 97.5 WRYR-LP Sherwood, 107.9 WFSI Annapolis from October 2011, and 1430 WNAV Annapolis with an translator ID W260BM Annapolis.

Bill

Well, I am back home now and had a really productive trip. I managed to record a total of 176 clips from 168 stations in just over 8 days. As I mentioned before, I had help from two CC Witness AM/FM MP3 recorders with their timed recording capability. In Seattle and Spokane, I spent less than an hour at both locations setting the timers up so I could record stations from one end of the dial to the other unattended. I also had two other devices which I could do ad hoc recordings. I took advantage of jet lag which made it difficult for me to sleep from about 4 AM and took inventory of what I had recorded the day before. That way, about the only stations I missed were stations which were so weak that I could not make a decent recording, or stations which for whatever reason refused to ID at TOH. Sigh...

This week we will start out with the 11 stations which were recorded on layovers at Chicago both going and coming. There are a couple of new stations in this bunch - WIQI 101.1 and WLEY 107.9.

Hope you enjoy listening to them.

Till next week

Bill

Thanks to Lance and his posting of the recent changes in the Washington DC market, I decided to post some new other new stuff in the market. Since October I have been re-recording stations in DC, and in the process came across some stations new to Toppy. So here they are.

WSPZ 570 licensed to Bethesda MD is a recent call change from WTNT coincident with a format change from all talk to all sports. It is branded SportsTalk 570.

New station, WURA 920 Quantico VA, signed on in December 2009 and plays Tejano music.

The latest in a long line of occupants of 1050 is WBQH Silver Spring MD. A power increase to 3500 watts has increased its coverage area. Its current format is regional Mexican.

WCRW 1190 Leesburg VA is a new kid on the block, sort of. In 2008, WAGE 1200 applied to the FCC for permission to change frequencies from 1200 to 1190 and increase power to 50,000 watts daytime. However, that would mean the then-occupant of 1190, WBIS Annapolis, would have to leave the channel. Earlier in 2010, the owners of WBIS paved the way for this change to take place by taking over the WAGE facility and abandoning the license for Annapolis. The station broadcasts music and Asian news.

Despite being new to Toppy, WPWC Dumfries VA 1480 has been around since the early 1960's. I finally got around to making a decent recording last month on a trip to the area last month. The station calls itself a DC-based, globally-minded progressive music and talk radio station, and it is branded as React 1480.

I also uploaded some clips of the changes that Lance noted earlier this week. I will add that as of Saturday 3 December the calls WBGR are being used on both 860 and 107.9. Also, Family Radio in Baltimore has moved its foreign language programming from 860 to 750, at least for now.

I am not done recording the all of the other stations in the market and will post them when I am finished.

Next week I will give a wrap-up report of my Big Trip to Washington State. At this point, I can say it was a success.

Till next time!

Bill