Wow. I never thought of that. 4KQ another example. Thank you for bringing that to our attention.
Getting back to SEQ radio history (which is pretty much what this thread is all about), when Waynee Poo was big on 4BC, just how big was he? There’s a good post on this thread about his dirty weekend away.
I arrived in 1988 so I missed Waynee (he wasn’t even on the airwaves then). But he did make a comeback later. First on 4BC. And then on River. I never understood what all the fuss was about.
But in radio history, great radio was often breakfast jocks dominating. Long before the whole ‘morning crew’ phenomena and the current ‘Biff, Yappy and Roosy’ style of morning shows there was just that Waynee Poo, Doug Mulray, Kevin Black, Fred Botica… sure they had support acts… but it was just big boss jocks dominating AM drive.
There was a sign outside of Singleton that said tune to 9 8 1 and both logos.
Believe me, if I owned Radio Hunter Valley and got given a conversion to FM for 2NM, the new frequency is going to Power FM and 2NM is moving to 98.1. Think about it.
I think that would be too disruptive and potentially confusing to listeners. Much cleaner and easier to put 2NM on the new FM frequency (possibly 98.9).
The Australian newspaper was a popular choice for advertising competition winners. One paper for all the country rather than put ads in each state’s local newspapers.
3XY had been in limbo for months even before the AWA takeover in September. The station was reported to have been sold earlier in the year with apparent plans to relaunch the station as a solid gold/oldies station and I seem to recall that they’d even got as far as announcing their new announcing line-up and schedule details were published, but on the day of the supposed re-launch it just didn’t happen. There was no mention of what happened. The sale must have not gone through and the station continued in its existing music format which was a rock/top-40/dance music mix until the time AWA shut the place down.
There are about 40 million reasons why 3XY couldn’t just “move to 93.9”. 3KZ had paid $32 million to go to FM, and 3TT paid around $11m to do the same. And so the Melbourne stations were fruity enough just by the fact that Bay FM was booming into Melbourne in simulcast with 3XY, giving 3XY a cheap entry to the FM band in Melbourne. It caused enough of a ruckus that 3XY ended up having to split from the Bay FM simulcast and go back to a stand-alone program.
Would love it if there was an old tech here that worked on Bay FM back in the 90s that could confirm if/when they reduced their power towards Melbourne. From all reports, the Geelong FMs used to boom into Melbourne when they first launched, but that’s not been the case for some time now. I’m guessing that was changed very deliberately at some point.
But yes, as you quite rightly point out, Bay FM wasn’t going anywhere and 3XY was never going to get an easy ride over to FM without forking out big dollars. Do you know if they even bidded in the FM auctions?
The 2SM group bought 3XY because it was convinced it would win one of the AM-FM conversion licences the Federal Government was auctioning at the time. 3XY missed out and 2SM was left with a station that was losing more than $3 million a year
And the 3AK Wikipedia page:
In 1989 the federal government invited bids from all capital city AM commercial radio stations for a number of FM licences. Six of the seven Melbourne commercial AM stations bid for the two licences being offered in their market. (3AW was the only station that didn’t bid, on the grounds that its mature adult audience were not really FM listeners.) The two highest bidders were 3KZ with a record bid amongst all Australia-wide bidders of A$32 million, and 3AK with a bid of $22 million. Because of the dire financial position of Alan Bond (he was soon to be declared bankrupt), 3AK defaulted on the payment for its FM licence, which then went to the third highest Melbourne bidder, 3TT who paid only $11 million.
