Changes in Philly

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Fred Stiening

Iconic B103 in Philadelphia is beeing sold to Entercom (CBS) and Entercom’s Country WXTU-FM is being sold to Beasley. The bottom feeders are devouring the whales

Inside Radio report

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7 Responses to Changes in Philly

  1. CC1s121LrBGT says:
    July 20, 2018 at 4:13 pm

    WXTU had WIFI before anyone else in the world. 😉

  2. CC1s121LrBGT says:
    July 20, 2018 at 11:39 pm

    The other Philadelphia station in the switch, WBEB 101.1 FM is also interesting – it is on the exact same frequency as WCBS 101.1 FM in New York City, about 100 miles away. In the south and west where FM stations are allowed to use more power, it is common to hear an FM station for 100 miles. WCBS, I believe, used to transmit non-directionally from the World Trade Center and WBEB from the Philly TV antenna farm.. so there is always a lot of interference in NJ… and a circularly polarized receiving antenna would be ideal.

    Nearly all the Philly and NYC FM stations are on adjacent channels, but there is one other frequency that the two cities share – what is the frequency and what are the call letters in the two cities that are on that frequency?

    • Fred Stiening says:
      July 21, 2018 at 2:44 am

      The NorthEast (and SoCal) is a special case because of the high Station and population density. The FCC has a special B license type that accepts short spacing and lower power.

      There is also active talk about creating a C4 FM license class similar to LPFM that could wedge new commercial stations in between existing stations with much lower power.

      • CC1s121LrBGT says:
        July 21, 2018 at 10:48 pm

        That’s right. The LA area has some short-spaced stations on the same frequencies. I believe there are some exceptions in the border areas as well. AM stations in Mexico are allowed to use 10x as much power (from memory going back to the 1970s) as AM stations in the USA…. there may be similar things on FM. For example 103.1 used to be a frequency for lower power stations and they can be geographically close together than frequencies with higher power per the FCC rules… but if a station on the Mexico side uses very high power on a frequency like that, the FCC will not use that frequency as near it as it would to an American station.

        FWIW- The other frequency shared by the Philadelphia and NYC markets is 100.3.

        http://streamingradioguide.com/streaming-schedule.php?stationid=9860 WHTZ (formerly WVNJ) actually broadcasting with the tower in NJ)

        and
        http://streamingradioguide.com/streaming-schedule.php?stationid=9860 WRNB in Philadelphia (tower is in Media PA)

  3. Fred Stiening says:
    August 9, 2018 at 4:06 pm

    For the first time in a long time, WBEB slipped from #1 in the ratings. The prior owner was very focused on the advertisements – testing them to see if listeners liked them. He viewed the listeners as his customers, not the advertisers. He kept the amount of commercial minutes small. He got in financial trouble a few years ago. In six months, look for WBEB to fall out of the top 10.

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