TOWER
While we didn’t have the catastrophic failures of the KLIZ tower (“Lessons of a Major Guy Line Project,” March 1), WLIB (1190NJ) had several other types of guy problems and had to change all the Phillystran on our five-tower DA.
Fortunately, we had nondirectional towers, so lowering power and shifting tower feeds was the trick. Still, your heart is in your throat when they are doing each tower. Not as bad as a tower lift to replace a base insulator, but close.
Timothy Braddock, KD2MRW
Long Valley, N.J.
ROYALTIES
Responding to “BMI Asks Court to Maintain Most Recent Rate,” reported in January at radioworld.com:
Why don’t you tell it like it is with the organizations that have proliferated to obtain monies from radio and television in the US? BMI has petitioned the court to leave the rates as they have been, not disclosing that a lot of their star artists have fled to GMR. Therefore, we as radio and TV should pay less based upon the number or percentage of artists they represent having moved to GMR. And if artists flee ASCAP or SESAC, those organizations too should take a hit in what we pay, if we have to pay GMR more.
What is not being said is: There is only one pie, one amount that radio and TV should have to pay writers, and if there are four or 20 or 100 little “lemonade stands” (i.e. licensing rights organizations), we as an industry should not have to pay more and more and more, but split what we’ve been paying more ways. I can’t stand the hypocrisy of the artists saying “we don’t need radio,” yet they certainly want their music played on radio, and they want the payments.
Stop beating around the bush and put it out there that the licensing organizations are demanding ever more from an industry that is showing little to no growth. They are trying to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Rick Fritsch
KBZQ(FM)
Lawton, Okla.
VISUAL RADIO
After reading the article about visual radio in the March 1 issue, my first thought was that broadcasters like the late great Steve Cannon from WCCO radio wouldn’t fit in this modern environment. Lash Larue and Ma Linger were something that he wanted to be entirely theater of the mind.
Scott Todd
Field Engineer
EMF Broadcasting
Cambridge, Minn.
LOCAL RADIO
I read the featured story, “We Are the Heartbeat of the Town” about the Giant 96 radio station (RW March 15). I found this story to be very interesting because this station sounds very similar to our stations. Ours is a family business with my wife Loretta, our son Joseph (JR) and our 13-year-old grandson, who also works behind the board during local games.
Our AM station, KFUN, went on the air on Christmas day 1941, 18 days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which sent the US into World War II. Soon after that, the War & Censorship Department officials started going around the country ordering radio stations not to announce war news in a foreign language. Back then, KFUN(AM) was the only station serving Northeastern New Mexico and is the sixth oldest station in the state of New Mexico. This past Christmas, we celebrated our 75th year of broadcasting.
The founders were in a battle of their own with the U.S. government because the owner refused to obey the “war law” and would not stop broadcasting war news in the Spanish language, which at the time War Department officials considered to be a foreign language. Long story short, he was threatened with losing his FCC license, a $10,000 fine and 10 years in prison, and the government would also take all his and his wife’s personal belongings away, including losing the radio station and private land where the station building and tower stood. There were many other stations back then that were also ordered to obey the war law, which today’s owners or managers most likely don’t know this history about their station.
Joseph P. Baca
Owner/Partner
Las Vegas, N.M.
KFUN(AM) & KLVF(FM)
