Staunch Allies Get A Shout Out. (David B. Treadway on Facebook)

KAAY's night signal rolled right over Satsuma, Alabama, where it swept a young Bud Stacey into the ozone. I never knew he was out there until years after the station was sold away to the Christians. He and some friends put an excellent blog on the 'net, entitled mighty1090kaay (link below).  (David B. inserted a link to our blog in his Facebook post- thanks, David B.!  bs)

If you're still a fan of the station, I highly recommend you give this blog some of your spare time!

It's done from a listener's viewpoint, though insiders check in from time to time. It gives a perspective that we did not get on the air--and it's got everything about the station. It also links back to the late AJ Lindsey's (Doc Holiday #2) blog, which is another treasure in itself.

Very belated thanks to Bud, Greg Barman and Dave Schmidt and all others who are keeping the legend alive.

More comments

Here are more comments recently posted on the blog,  Click on a comment to read it in larger type. Each comment is documented with the name of the post where it was attached, and you can jump to the posting by typing the name of the post in the search box located at the upper left corner of this web page.

KAAY Signal Restored

In an e-mail from Doug Virden:

"The nighttime directional signal for KAAY has been fully restored after nearly 15 years.  The nighttime signal had to be cut back because a power plant was built a mile away from the towers right in the directional signals path.  This forced the signal to be reduced from 50kw to around 17kw at night.  According to Barry McCorkindale this led to a significant loss in revenue.

Two-thirds of the revenue the station brought in was from the nighttime signal.  There was a higher rate charged during skywave hours.  Once the nighttime signal wasn't coming through anymore the prime revenue started leaving.  More revenue left when the station was off the air twice for weeks.  There are currently less than 30 ministries still on KAAY, once revenue is lost its doubtful its coming back.  I believe it cost more than twice of what the current yearly revenue is for the station.  From my understanding it was either restore the signal or turn in the license and shut down.

 

     I'm sure the company is going want a return on their investment.  Keeping the status quo with programming won't cut it.

 

A couple of ideas for programming would be to move the sports talk station to KAAY or block all the ministries that are left into the late night and overnight hours and play 60's and 70's music for the rest of the time.

  

There is now FM competition on the religious front in Little Rock.  Salem runs three stations in Little Rock one is a full time religious block station where a lot of programs that were once on KAAY went, next is a Contemporary Christian music format, and a conservative talk station.  Younger listeners will go to these stations for that type of programming.  Another issue is the ministers that have time on KAAY are getting older and there is NO younger ones coming in to take their place."

 

I tuned into 1090 this morning, there was a good strong signal.  Good job!  Thanks, Doug!

 

Bud S. (stactes4@Hotmail.com)

We get comments....

A lot of people read this blog, and they leave comments to the postings.  But to see the comments, you have to click on the "comments" link at the bottom of a posting.  Lots of comments are still being added to popular posts from years back, and there is no way that anyone is going to check all these older posts for new comments.

So, for the next few weeks, we will be relisting comments that have been posted over the past year.  The comments have been lifted from the blog's "dashboard," and they aren't formatted all that pretty, but at least you can read them.  Each comment is documented with the name of the post where it was attached, and you can jump to the posting by typing the name of the post in the search box located at the upper left corner of this web page.

We hope that you will enjoy the info and memories contributed by our readers.  (Also, the last comment in today's batch contains a nifty link that takes you to a dropbox account of collected Beaker Street audio files!   By the way, Bud S. has some leads on new Beaker Street audio, which he is trying to track down.  We'll let you know....)

Finally, a comment about comments:  our blog uses Blogger (run by Google) for its postings.  Blogger is great for presenting essays, audio files, etc., so that the blog becomes a history or archive on its topic.  This has worked great for documenting the story of KAAY.  But it makes comments secondary (otherwise, Blogger becomes Facebook).  So, we will stick with Blogger and do a bit of extra work to flush out your comments.

Here's the first batch --- click on a comment to see it in a larger type font.

---Dave S.