AM Technical Profile: WIOL
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- Frequency:
- 1580
- Format:
- Contemporary Hit
Radio
- Transmitter
Location:
- [map]
[street
view] On 4th Street in the city of Columbus, just east of
Jackson Avenue and the Riverdale-Porterdale Cemetery.
- Power (ERP):
- Day: 2.1 kW
- Night: 45 watts
- Antenna:
- Day and night: 1
tower
- Other
Information:
- 0.5
mV/m Daytime
Groundwave Service Contour
from the FCC's Public Files
[FCC]
[FCCdata.org]
- [Radio-Locator]
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[Wikipedia]
[Facebook]
[Studio]
Google Street View of the Davis Broadcasting company's offices in
Columbus.
Owned by Davis Broadcasting Inc., of Columbus
- History:
- 1580 came on
either in late 1954 or early 1955 by Muskogee Broadcasting Company
as WCLS (CoLumbuS). The station originally was 1 kW daytime
only. It's not clear what the format was early on. Starting
around 1965 the station was airing programming mostly aimed at black
audiences, with a smattering of country music (!) here and
there. By then, the station had also added nighttime
service. Through the latter part of the 60's and into the 70's
the station was Top 40, but with 1 kW and a top end of the dial
position, it had a hard time competing with WDAK's giant signal on
540 kHz. By the end of the 70's, the station had taken on a
MOR (middle of the road) format, and by 1981 it was doing
gospel. The calls changes to WIZY in February 1984, and to
WEAM in April of 1985, still with the gospel format. That
later morphed into a more general black-oriented religious
format. Muscogee Broadcasting transferred the license to Davis
Broadcasting in April, 2001. Davis later put the gospel into a
simulcast with a station southeast of the city that they owned on
100.7 MHz, christening it WEAM-FM.
- The simulcast ended at some point in
2009, when this station flipped to sports as "The Zone". The
station was then teamed up with another FM in the area, WIOL, licensed
to Waverly Hall. Shortly thereafter, this station became WIOL to the
companion's WIOL-FM. By 2011 the station was listed as a Yahoo!
Sports Radio affiliate. That was later dropped for ESPN, and
both stations went as "95.7 ESPN Columbus". A more recent
development has this station carrying CBS Sports Radio, except during
afternoon drive time, when it simulcasts the FM's ESPN
programming.
- The station received a
permit in 2016 to relocate from their old Ingersoll Road tower site in
Phenix City for an existing tower in Columbus, just southeast of
downtown. In the process, the power went down slightly during
the day, and the night power dropped considerably as they went from a
directional two tower array to a single tower day and night.
The station added a new translator in March 2020, when David
Broadcasting signed on W283DF. The format flipped from CBS
Sports Talk to Contemporary Hit Radio (CHR) in September 2020, a
change that went completely unnoticed until mid-January 20201 when it
was first reported by Radio Insight.