Like Scott mentioned last month, I have retired from Toppy and have turned the site over to Senor Fybush. Toppy turned eight last year, and like a good Dick Van Patten dramedy, eight is enough for me. Before I disappear, however, I do want to take a second to thank everyone who helped the site during my tenure, whether with contributions or ideas or whatever. I've made a lot of friends from the site, and it's been great fun. Thanks also to Lou, Scott, Blaine, Jeff and Bill for being wonderful co-conspirators.

I have several boxes of tapes in my home office that I need to get through and discard, so this won't be the last time you see my name around here...it's just next time, it'll be as a contributor and not a JWRTP*.

Thanks again, friends. It's been a ride.

* Jerk Who Runs The Place

We apologize for the brief interruption in Toppy service over the weekend. As you've probably gathered by now, there are some changes going on here at Toppy-land, as new management settles in here at the site.

Fortunately, it's very friendly new management. After many years as the head honcho of all legal-ID-dom, Toppy founder Brian Davis is handing off the reins to fybush.com, the web's premiere destination for radio geekdom.

Over the next year or so, Toppy will become more fully integrated into fybush.com (or perhaps vice versa), providing you with one-stop shopping for tower site photos, legal IDs and the latest radio industry news and information.

All the radio goodness you've come to expect from Toppy will stay right here, and I'm looking forward to working with Lou, Jeff, Blaine, Bill and of course Brian himself to maintain the quality of the Toppy experience.

We'll even be re-opening the inbox pretty soon.

It should be a fun ride. Thanks for coming along with us!

Scott Fybush
Slightly shellshocked new proprietor
Tophour.com

Ah, alliteration...the mark of the true radio nerd.

Toppy will be taking the rest of the year off as we get rested and ready for a big 2010.

Happy Holiday-Of-Your-Choice and we'll see you next week!

As you may have caught on Sunday, we are welcoming a new name to the Toppy fold: welcome Bill Harms, who has become the sixth Tophour editor and will be posting his wares on Sundays. Here's Mr. Bill in his own words:

I am a radio nut! Although I have not made a career of broadcasting, I have always loved radio. I am an avid DXer, especially any broadcast station on any band.

On a more personal level, I am a middle aged Grandpa who has been married to the same sweet woman for over 30 years. She more than tolerates my radio obsession, and has accompanied me on many of my forays to visit radio stations and record TOH IDs.

Including DX catches, I have over 5000 unique radio station recordings. Of course, not all of them are TOHs or good quality. Right now, I am concentrating on parts of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia which have not been covered. Additionally, I have recorded TOHs from other parts of the country and even some foreign stuff, including Korean stations with TOH IDs and call letters.

I am looking forward to participating in this project and hope to have lots of fun.

On another note, we will be reopening the site to contributions in the near future. Stay tuned for an announcement on that later in the week.

Welcome, Bill!

Due to upcoming changes at Tophour, we are no longer accepting contributions. All files that were contributed prior to July 3, 2009 will be posted, but no further contributions will be accepted.

Please e-mail me with questions.

If you've contributed anything lately (and you're not Garrett), you might consider re-sending: it seems that some contributions got caught in the Gmail spam filter and ended up deleted. I'd hate for anyone to think I'm simply blowing you off -- I just don't have your stuff anymore. Thanks to all for your patience.

When a contributor has an entire month named after them around here, it seems like a good idea to actually bring them aboard in a more official role.

That's why I'm glad to announce that Jeff Lehmann is joining the Toppy Mod Squad as a co-editor. Jeff will be posting IDs on Saturdays from his extensive aircheck collection from all over the country but specifically the Northeast. Except, of course, the One True Rochester, cause Fybush will mess him up.

Jeff is a serious radio geek: he scored his amateur license at 13, is a long-time member of the WTFDA and maintains the nerepeaters.com repeaters database.

Lou, Scooter, Blaine and I are glad to welcome Jeff to our little shack, and look forward to what he'll bring to the site.

Since the beginning of Tophour, I've always been proud of not only what we do, but the way we did it: the site always looked good.

Well, except for a period of time stretching from last November until today.

Long story short, we had to move the site to a new host. The then-Movable Type powered blog that ran the site did not handle the move as well as I'd have liked. So, we moved to the WordPress platform and to get the site back up, I did a quick redesign that looked okay in Photoshop and punishingly awful in real life. The move also killed a bunch of features that many of you told me you missed. So, in an effort to get the site back to pretty, get the feature set we were missing back and even add a few new toys, it was time for a redesign. What you see here is the result of nearly two months of work, and I'm really quite pleased.

• Some of the things that you asked for included a more obvious indication of which IDs are new. Starting today, when a new file is uploaded, it will be denoted by a "new (day of the week)" tag in bold red letters for a week.
• You asked to be notified by e-mail when the site is updated. You'll notice a "Subscribe To Toppy" link on the right...enter your e-mail address, and you'll get notified when new posts are created.
• You asked for better search functionality, and you've got it. You can now search our update text for articles, and search for specific station clips from any audio page.
• We're also doing a better job of denoting our partner sites on each page, and also giving you a specific place to look for the latest site info -- which won't get buried by other updates.

Feel free to post your comments, and if you find something that isn't working, please let me know. Enjoy!

It’s hard to believe, but Toppy celebrated its sixth birthday earlier this month. (Well, the Toppy concept turned six this month; for the first six months of its life, Toppy was something called “Brian’s Legal ID Shack” and was hosted at various free website hosts.)

While the site has grown tremendously in that time, there’s been one area where we’ve been lacking: the western half of the US. We have an okay selection of IDs from the west (and growing, thanks to Scott’s Big Trip), but it's difficult for us to gather them -- the westernmost Toppy editor lives in Wisconsin -- and as a result, we’re still missing much of the west. Markets like San Diego, Austin, Salt Lake City, Denver, Tucson and San Antonio are bare, if not nonexistent. To that end...

Tophour is considering adding a fifth co-editor...and it could be you!

We're looking at all avenues to boost our western time zone content, but a new western co-editor would be my first choice. If we move forward, this co-editor will focus primarily on (but not limited to) scoring IDs from the western United States, and would post on Mondays. If you want to play, it’s because you dig what we do and not for a check, cause there’s no money in it. We’ll make it easy for you by providing a detailed handbook on How Things Work Up In Here, and you'll get to write up snarky little comments like we do every single week.

If you’re interested, drop me a note at brian@tophour.net, and tell me a little bit about yourself, including your name, where you’re from and why you’d want to join in this madness.

Or, you could book a vacation, take a bunch of radios and send us the tapes. You know, whatever’s easiest. Either way, I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for reading, visiting and making Toppy what it is today. We couldn’t have done it without ya.

So, after a much longer than expected move, we're back in business. (The first update will be Friday.)

If you're a geek, here's the Cliff's: we moved the site to a new host. The old Movable Type blog that ran the site did not handle the move as well as I'd have liked. This was the impetus to move to WordPress, and we did a redesign at the same time. But when we tried to integrate the audio, it Blew Up Went Boom. There are still some kinks here and there (let's just say that Firefox is our friend), but we're back, baby.

Thanks for your patience. Welcome home.