The first jock, heard through most of this short scope, doesn’t mention his name, but he does say that Ed Thomas is coming up, with passes to Great Escape in Lake George, NY. We couldn’t nail down the date of this, either, but the jock congratulates the Waterville Legion Little League team ‘on their win’ and heading to the championship series. Someone probably remembers when that was.
Interesting items heard – well, first off, this was recorded on a cheap tape recorder. You can actually hear bleed through from another recording underneath this aircheck in the background. As for the station itself: while this is CHR, its a rock-heavy format and you don’t hear (because I scoped it out) the numerous dead segues that punctuate this format. “Kiss-102” uses sweepers, mainly out of stop sets, but NO JINGLES are heard here, and the jock’s mic sounds un-processed. Listen about 8 minutes in, and you’ll hear something that’s often heard when listening to FM stations from fringe reception areas – an airline pilot can be heard talking to, presumably, an airport tower. That happens when an airliner is almost directly overhead and the pilot transmits; FM broadcast frequencies are apparently a harmonic of the air frequency.
This station evolved quite a bit in its journey to its current Adult Contemporary “Mix 102.5” format. Starting on 5/10/82, it was WUUU, known as “U-102”, and adult contemporary station. Then after a frequency swap, the former 93.5 WKDY Country moved to the 102.5 position. WKDY became CHR WSKS “Kiss 102” on 12/8/95, then changed to Country again, this time as WRBY “Bob 102.5” before flipping back to AC as today’s WUMX “Mix 102.5” on 3/16/04.
Aircheck #1,329 since May 2, 2002!
Assuming the radio receiving this signal had a 10.7MHz IF, that would put the aircraft traffic at 7:43 and 8:11 on 123.9MHz which is a valid air band frequency.
I had a radio back in the early 1970’s that had the same problem and it wasn’t just on fringe stations. I would receive aircraft on it with strong stations too and actually enjoyed hearing the planes. I did not know anything about the air band or frequencies used in those days but enjoyed hearing the pilots talking. Living in the NYC area there was ample air traffic to listen too (and I do now but with good receiving equipment).
This tape is actually from 1996. I’m JD Redman, the jock who was mentioned as going to be live for some of these remotes. I did SO many remotes at this station…The first jock that was talking was Mark Anthony. Ed Thomas is only on the last break of this aircheck. Yes, that tape deck was very cheap. All our tapes sounded like that, bleeding from other sources. We used to say that station was held together by making tape and lots of love.