KQV Gets More Attention (and it’s not even back on the air yet)

Gosh, you tear a tower site down and the whole world thinks it’s the end. Few people have listened completely as I have explained the process regarding KQV and its sale last year. I am kind of caught between a rock and a hard place in that I have lived across the hill from the tower site all my life. But I also work for the company who bought the license for the station without buying the tower site. Here is what I effectively know about what is going on with the station. Follow along and take notes if necessary.

As we all know, Calvary Inc. ceased broadcasting on 1410 at 11:59 PM on December 31, 2017. The station was to be sold without selling the tower site in Ross Township. It (the license and studio equipment, that is) was sold in 2018 to Broadcast Communications Inc. (my employer) at a price of $55,000. All the while the station was silent. In May 2018, the station was signed on to “reset the clock” for the silence authority for which you are given 365 days to rectify whatever it is that is keeping the station silent. In this case, it was relocating the transmitter. Three weeks later, the station signed off yet again, thereby “resetting the clock” for June 2019. Due to some delays, the station was signed on from Ross Township one last time in late December 2018 for about two weeks to again reset the clock. BCI, or more accurately, its sister company, Broadcast Educational Communications, Inc. has until January 2020 to sign the station on. At last report, that is expected to take place by the end of summer. The transmitter will be co-located on a single tower with WEDO (810 McKeesport) in North Versailles on which a device known as a “diplexer” has been installed. This will allow for 2 AM signals to broadcast from the same single tower without interfering with each other.

The good news about this site is that the daytime signal for 1410 will still be 5000 watts. The difference here is that it will be nondirectional, as opposed to severely directional as it had been from the five towers in Ross Township. The bad news about this site is that the nighttime signal for 1410 will only be 75 watts. Much like its sister WKHB (620 Irwin) it will have to power down severely at night to accommodate other stations on the signal. That’s still better than being “gone forever.” Will it be the same? Not exactly. Will it have an all-news format? Definitely not! That format is way too expensive to run and it is what got us all into this mess to begin with!

Now, back to my fellow Ross Townshipians… You needn’t fear that the tower site is being sold for further residential development. It was back in April that Calvary Inc. sold the 20 acre site for $765,000 to Vertical Bridge, a company specializing in tower sites across the country. According to their website, they work with broadcasters and other communications companies to provide space for various needs. It was clear from the beginning that Vertical Bridge had no intention of building a new AM array and therefore would not need all five towers.

They began the process of tearing down four of the five towers last week. They started with tower number four, which I had learned last December was the “singing tower” and drove the rest of the towers when they were broadcasting. It was one of the remaining two bearing lights. I had to see the results through the fence for myself, and of course take a few photos. In talking with some neighbors along Oakglen Road, the tower came down with very little noise after being yanked by a bulldozer. The neighbor closest to the site entrance said that they will take three more towers down and leave one for communication purposes. We’re thinking “5G”. We suspect that the northernmost tower – “tower 1” – will be the one remaining. It is the other tower that retained its lights when the FCC rules about lighting towers were relaxed.

Here are some pictures from what we could see: