“Dhoomsday” for New Kensington Radio Station?

WMNY studio – with its outdated WGBN signage – at 560 Seventh Street in downtown New Kensington. The South Asian entertainment-formatted station has been silent for close to a month. (Photo credit: Erica Dietz, Trib Total Media)

A South Asian entertainment-formatted radio station has fallen silent.

WMNY (AM 1150), licensed to New Kensington, has not broadcast any of its programming over the air, though the web stream on its website, dhoommedia.com, is still active.

WMNY broadcasts a format called “Radio Dhoom”, featuring programming in Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu and Tamil languages. The station has broadcast the format since its sale from Pentecostal Temple Development Corporation (PTDC) to two entities known as Radio 1150 Limited Liability Company and Cambria Hill Realty, in separate transactions for a combined total of $180,000 in 2018.

Cambria Hill Realty owns WMNY’s seven-acre tract of land in East Deer Township, on which its two-tower directional antenna system sits, adjoining the Murray Hill Estates housing development. Radio 1150 Limited Liability Company holds the other station assets. The station sale agreement lists Gagan Deep as the managing member for both entities.

WMNY made history in 1992 as the Pittsburgh market’s first full-time gospel formatted radio station as WGBN, under PTDC’s ownership. For more than five decades prior, the station was known as WKPA, and was a full-service station serving the Alle-Kiski Valley and Pittsburgh’s northeastern suburbs.

PTDC sold the station after acquiring McKeesport-licensed WMNY (AM 1360) from Renda Broadcasting in 2014. Both stations swapped callsigns and simulcast programming until PTDC spun the station off to its present owner.

The station, unlike most of its counterparts, does NOT have an FM translator. WMNY operates at a daytime power of 1,000 watts, and 70 watts at night, using a two-tower directional antenna system visible from the nearby Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills along Route 28. Its mostly unattended studios – still bearing long-outdated WGBN signage – are located at 560 Seventh Street in downtown New Kensington, where they’ve been located since 1995.

WMNY has been silent for at least two weeks, and no Special Temporary Authority (STA) or other relative paperwork has been filed with the FCC.

This is the second time that WMNY has been off the air for an extended period of time with no prior notice. The station was silenced in late 2015 for about a month due to “electrical and internet” issues that also affected then-sister station WGBN, according to Loran Mann, then the president of PTDC.

Mann, who was also a longtime WPXI-TV news reporter, died May 2, 2021.

Efforts to contact the station through information on its Facebook profile and website, dhoommedia.com, were not successful. Emails sent to Deep and FCC attorney of record Scott Cinnamon were not acknowledged.