Dont touch that dial

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Dont touch that dial

Postby OpenMike » Sun Jul 22, 2007 2:49 pm

Don't touch that dial
Old-Timey AM740 May broadcast from a modern-day building, but its sound is straight out of the 1950s
Alison Broverman, National Post
Published: Saturday, July 21, 2007

Despite the old-timey sound, AM740 is relatively new. Formerly AM1250 (which is now Joy, a Christian station), a staticky oldies station that could only be heard between Oakville and Orillia, AM740 received a programming overhaul and an exponentially bigger audience base in 2001 when it made the move to the 740 band. Radio veteran Stevens was hired on as program director to redesign the adult contemporary middle-of-the-road station.

The 740 band is one of the last "clear channel" 50 kilowatt powerhouse stations in North America ("a dinosaur, but in the nicest way," explains Stevens, an affable man with a warm, radio-ready voice -- indeed, he hosts Vintage Favourites on Sunday afternoons). This means that they broadcast from a single tower, with no requirements to adjust transmission (local and regional channels are subject to all kinds of complex transmission regulations, depending on the time of day). The nearest 740 frequencies that are as strong are in Calgary and Tulsa, Okla. So AM740 can be heard as far north as Thunder Bay and as far south as Washington, DC--and even farther at night when most local and regional AM stations go off the air.

"That's why the CBC held onto it for so long," explains Stevens. When CBC finally made the move over to FM, the valuable 740 bandwidth became available and CHWO won the bid. "Ours was the only proposal for a middle-of-the-road station aimed at the 50-plus set," Stevens continues. "It's a demographic that's often ignored by most commercial radio. When CFRB made the switch to all-news talk radio, it left that niche wide open."


AM740 seems to be filling that niche admirably. April's ratings report places the station within the top five in Toronto's commercial radio market, and they haven't fallen out of the top 10 since coming on the air in 2001. Their strong signal and quirky programming attract listeners from all over the continent -- a solid 40% of the station's audience is located outside the GTA.

And though I've long since fixed my car's FM band, and I'm still well outside their target demographic (I'm 25,and AM740's most commonly heard ads are for funeral homes and hearing aids), I'm still hooked on the AM dial's little time machine.
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OpenMike
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