Now this is old-timey radio – this station WUAT-AM in Pikeville, TN reminds me a lot of a station in Mount Airy that held on like a radio museum – due to one elderly man’s love of bluegrass music and resistance against changing technology.
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013/jun/30/radio-station-delivers-a-daily-dose-of-homespun/?print
Joyce Bownds is 78 years old, and spends 6 hours a day on the air in a studio in the front window in a storefront in downtown Pikeville (Population 2,800). WUAT is 250 watts on 1110 KHz, so it leaves the air at sunset so WBT in Charlotte can light up the east coast. The Internet stream apparently stopped working, and my email to the station bounced with “mailbox full”
Good story, hope Joyce Brownds is doing OK.
May have to talk to this guy and see if he would care to expound on the reason why folks who travel backcountry roads have a tendency to ‘wave’ at other drivers as they pass by each other.
I looked up WUAM in the FCC database and it comes back with WUAM near Albany, NY. Is that the correct call sign?
Never mind – I see the typo. WUAT is the call sign.
Fixed. Typing posts on an iPhone gets a bit problematic.
The kind of radio station they have is what LPFM could become if they were allowed to operate as commercial stations to have a little income and provide publicity to local businesses. While a few AM frequencies were set aside for low power local stations in the 1928 plan, the federal government allowed the dominant large pioneers in the technology to control most of the frequencies, especially after dark.
I love bluegrass and the storefront window is a cool one. I’d alert you to a more modern version of a non profit radio station operating in a street facing window, but playing mostly modern “trance” music. If you are not familiar, that type of music is different than most others and takes some getting used to. I find it great background music because it is repetitive and don’t steal your attention, and the beat seems to help keep me moving.
The station I found is from Amsterdam and there are a lot of English speaking DJs. I like that the web site show live pictures of the studio and the people walking past it. Don’t be confused by the name, it is a PG operation, although on occasion I have found them playing an English language song with words the FCC would not like – that kind of nuance is hard for people that either don’t speak English or speak it as a second language.
It is called “Red Light Radio” and the name come from the fact that the studio and its window used to be operated as a bordello. Check it out – it is a unique experience, especially watching the sun set as you finish your late breakfast or early lunch in North America http://www.redlightradio.net/
I fully know I’m strange, but when I lived in Oklahoma, I would watch video of a UHF station with a storefront on the mall in Tulsa – the host (who I think had been a radio guy) would just engage in conversation with random people as they walked by, and admire the female office workers on their lunch break. They would have the occasional Boy Scout troop or batton twirlers put on a show. I would much rather watch a camera showing traffic on the freeway than Jon Stewart.
I agree with Art. I can watch the Yule log with traditional Christmas music for hours on end. Much better than almost all TV and especially a yard barker like John Stewart.