WSYY Tower in Jeopardy

[Peter Murray]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, SteveOrdinetz wrote:

> I'd be curious as to why the land owner is so adamantly opposed to selling 
> the land to the station, or even giving a lease extension beyone 1 
> year.  Sounds like there's more to this than meets the eye.  Almost sounds 
> like personal bad blood.  Are there separate AM & FM sites, or are they 
> co-located?  I'm not familiar with the area, and the article was a bit 
> confusing on this.

The AM site is closer to town, located within 200m or so of their studios
NW of town, on a 2+ acre leased site.  The original FM tower (pre-upgrade
from 97.7A to 94.9C2) is right next to the studios (with a 3-bay Harris
antenna still tuned to 97.7), though last I checked, it was not licensed
as an aux facility - though it has been used as such recently. The
original class-A facility was a standard 100m AAT 3KW allocation.

The current primary FM site is a 198' unlighted tower with a 10-bay
Shively antenna (using up about half of that tower space) on top of
Hammond Ridge, further NW of town. It is about a 4 mile drive down the
unpaved road, then about 1.5 miles up a rutted just-barely-passable trail
(not in any vehicle Scott Fybush owns, however) to the tower site. Sale of
the station included an old snowmobile for the winter trips.

There have been a number of 'slow pay' issues with contractors and other 
vendors in the area over the years - successfully alienating them from 
most who had any business relationship with them. It wouldn't surprise me 
if they'd done this with those who own the land under the station 
properties. It had been described to me as under 'long lease' of the 
99-year variety - and though the annual rate was quite reasonable, perhaps 
they got a bit too far behind on those payments. I would bet there is more 
to the story than that, though...

-Peter

Peter Murray (N3IXY)
Pittsburgh, PA