Christmas in March?

Or An Early Birthday Gift... Whatever!

This is too sweet.

You likely already know how much I enjoy listening to News-Talk 740/KRMG, Tulsa… Joe Kelley & Rick Couri in the mornings, not to mention Boortz, Hannity, Limbaugh, and Savage… but, at night, they drop power, change their pattern, and other stations on the same and adjacent frequencies ingress pretty badly into Stillwater… so when the sun is down (which, of course, includes “before the sun comes up), the station isn’t very listenable.

Yeah, they’re on the Internet, but the audio quality of the stream is actually not as good as their daytime AM signal on a high-quality radio.

Well… now they’ve done it.

Yesterday, I got two alerts from their “breaking news” and “severe weather” text message systems… a minute or so apart.

What’s this?

Of course, when I read the phrase “more places,” I thought “locations,” as in, “you can hear us in more places.”

My interest was piqued (not “peaked,” as some people are wont to spell it) but I had my hands full with work.

And “locations” isn’t what they meant — at least, not in the same sense — as I was to soon discover...






Hmmm… Okay, Interesting.

“Improving signal strength” again implies listening in “more places,” but it still wasn’t what they meant.

So what were they up to, anyway?




I wasn’t able to make it out to the car to listen (too many electronics in the Central Office for good AM reception) at 2:59. I figured it would be something cool… but knowing a little bit about the FCC and the AM broadcast spectrum, my brain couldn’t cough up any alternatives unless they were changing their pattern, which seemed unlikely, or changing their power, which seemed extremely unlikely... and I already knew they were on Cox Cable (Channel 960, I believe it is... but I’m not in the Cox Cable service area).

So what was the big surprise?

I had to resort to the Internet to find it...

It’s a simulcast.

The new “place” to listen isn’t a physical place — it’s a virtual place: the FM radio dial.

Woot!

“News-Talk 740/KRMG” is now “AM 740 and FM 102.3, News-Talk/KRMG.”

Woot! Woot!

No… it doesn’t come in very well in Stillwater at all. In the house, I get nothing, and in the car, it sounds like I’m driving on the wrong side of a picket fence… but the signal is there… all I have to do is find a directional FM antenna to pull it in.

And believe me, baby, I will do it.

— 2009-03-18 07:30 ETA: Cleverness is the rule — not the exception — at KRMG, and one of the new slogans they’re using is...

“Reset your presets!”

— 2009-05-19 07:30 ETA: I have not had luck pulling in KRMG-FM Sand Springs at the house... yet. I have two problems: azimuth and elevation. LOL, geek joke. Seriously, elevation and trees. I know it’s not a pure distance issue, because less than a mile away at the top of the hill at Duck Street and 3rd, my car radio pulls it in, no trouble at all. A bigger antenna will be on the way once the budget permits... but meanwhile, and ironically (I suppose) I have found an excellent way of pulling them in: A relatively cheap clock radio from Wal-Mart, strategically placed near the coffee pot in the kitchen. Apparently, this radio is far enough away from the major interference sources in the house, and has an exceptional bandwidth/clarity tradeoff... plus, it’s the time of year when the days are getting longer, which means KRMG-AM is running at much higher power when I wake up.