WCTW
FCC | |
Facility ID | 63527 |
---|---|
Class | A |
ERP | 4,700 watts |
HAAT | 114 meters (374 ft) |
Links | |
Public license information | |
Webcast | Listen live (via iHeartRadio) |
Website | 985thecat |
WCTW (98.5
History
The 98.5 frequency, the first FM station in Greene County, first came into being in early 1988 as a construction permit bearing the WCKL-FM calls as a sister to
In late 1991, Straus Media (owner of
Poughkeepsie expansion
In 1998, Poughkeepsie based translator W292CM (106.3 MHz) signed on with a simulcast of WCTW's programming. With nearly no promotion, WCTW showed in the Poughkeepsie ratings in the spring of 1999, nearly tying the full-power WTND, itself a Straus station. Seeing an opportunity, Straus decided to flip WTND to a variation of WCTW under the WCTJ calls that August. W292CM would soon switch to simulcasting sister station WTHN and now relays WDST.
The presence of WCTJ was both a blessing and a curse for WCTW. The addition of an audience in a rated market allowed the WCTW end of the Cat stations to work with a larger budget and allowed WCTW to phase out satellite programming given the ability to use such tools as
WCTW and WCTJ were split in October of that year with WCTJ keeping a frozen, all-automated version of that format until December 23 of that year when it flipped to
Post-2000
With the Clear Channel purchase of Straus came the later sale of the Catskill stations (and WBPM) to Concord Media, a front company with ties to Clear Channel that existed to warehouse additional stations controlled by Clear Channel. The Clear Channel/Concord combination moved the studios of those stations to a new location in Hudson and, with it, WCTW returned to a mostly-satellite fed format which would remain for the next several years.
In April 2005, WCTW would change its format to
In May 2009, WCTW reverted to
References
- ^ "Facility Technical Data for WCTW". Licensing and Management System. Federal Communications Commission.
- ^ "FCCInfo Structure Registration Results". fccinfo.com.
- ^ "R&R-1996-07-19" (PDF). americanradiohistory.com.
External links
- WCTW in the FCC FM station database
- WCTW in Nielsen Audio's FM station database