Technical Profile: WMEZ

FM Technical Profile: WMEZ

Station Name:: Hot 94.1
Frequency:: 94.1
Format:: Rhythmic Contemporary Hit Radio
Transmitter Location:: [map] [street view] South of I-10 exit 53, south of Patterson Road. Co-located with WPMI-DT, WSRE-DT, WDPM-DT and WMPV-DT; FM stations WRGV, WTKX and WXBM.; AUX: [map] [street view] West of Gonzalez, Florida, near the intersection of Muscogee Road, Jack Branch Road and CR-97.
Power (ERP):: 77 kW
Antenna:: Omnidirectional
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Antenna HAAT:: 1,601 feet
Other Information:: 60 dBu protected contour map, from the FCC.; :

PS-The New Hot - 94.1 WMEZ-FM
Time-Present
Text-Artist - Song Title
Text-The New Hot - 94.1
PTY-Adult Hits
PI-WMEZ-FM

AUX: 34.7 kW @ 528 feet HAAT. 60 dBu protected contour map, from the FCC.
More Information:: [FCC]; [FCCdata]; [Radio-Locator]; [Wikipedia]
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[Picture] Screenshot of RDS text display on a Sony Bluetooth portable headset, showing Radio Text field.

[EZ 94] A tribute station playing the easy listening that WMEZ played years ago, along with authentic historic liners and IDs.
[Studio] Historical Street View imagery of the location of the auxiliary site that was employed after Ivan felled their broadcast tower in Baldwin County. From April 2011.
[Studio] Street View imagery of the Cumulus Pensacola stations' studios off Marcus Pointe Boulevard in the Brent community.
Owner:: Cumulus
History:: This station dates back to an original construction permit issued to Mello-Tone (Earl D. Hutto, president) in June of 1960 for a new FM station on 94.1 MHz licensed to the city of Pensacola, Florida. The original permit was for 2.46 kW from a Gates FM-1B transmitter, feeding an Andrew four bay model 1304 antenna at a height above average terrain (HAAT) of 416 feet. The studios and transmitter were located at 1301 North R Street in Pensacola, just a block south of West Fairfield Drive. A license to cover for this new permit was issued in February 1961. The original call sign assigned was WPEX. From the start, the station had an Easy Listening music format. It also ran a Subsidiary Communications Authorization (SCA) on both 41 and 67 kHz.

The license was transferred to Frederic T. C. Brewer in the summer of 1965. Strangely, they updated the studio location to "2400 West Hayes Street" which happens to be the same physical location as 1301 N R Street. A year later in 1966 they moved the studios to the Town & Country Shopping Plaza located at the corner of West Fairfield Avenue and North Pace Street. A second studio location was submitted in 1968, this time at 21 West Belmont Street in downtown Pensacola.

The station was granted a permit to change facilities in 1969, to a Gates FM-20H transmitter feeding a Gates FMC-8 eight bay FM antenna at a HAAT of 320 feet from the existing transmitter site. A license to cover for this change was filed in May 1970 and gave the station an unusual effective radiated power (ERP) of 100 kW horizontal and 55.77 kW vertical.` The station's call sign changed to WMEZ on 4 July 1972.

In the fall of 1978 the station was granted a change to the transmitter location. The application was granted to move to "Pace and Lolita St., Pensacola" which does not exist. Rather, the transmitter location was apparently moved to near the intersection of North Pace Blvd and Loretta Street. A license to cover for that move was filed in July 1979. Around this time the license was transferred to WMEZ, Inc. During this time, the station was noted for using the "Schulke" Beautiful Music format.

In 1985, a sub-company of WMEZ, Inc. called Easy Media, Inc. acquired a standalone music AM in Pensacola called WBSR. They flipped the AM to oldies while keeping their FM format the same, which was an unusual choice by this time. By the 1990's, the AM would be doing adult contemporary while the FM was still sleepy Easy Listening!

This station was granted a construction permit in March 1986 to move to one of the new tall towers built in central Baldwin County, to increase coverage of both the Pensacola and Mobile metro radio markets. This facility was for 100 kW at 1328 feet HAAT at the same tower site used today. A license to cover for this facility was granted in October 1986. The tower was shared with numerous other radio and TV stations including WPMI-TV, WHBR-TV, WJLQ-FM, WKSJ-FM, WBLX-FM and WYOK-FM.

By the early 90's, WMEZ was one of just a tiny handful of stations still doing "elevator music" on FM, so the owners finally decided to flip formats with the AM, putting the more upbeat Adult Contemporary on the FM and the easy listening on the AM. Despite the format change, the station still retained its downbeat, soft feel and characteristic lack of aggressive audio processing.; After over three decades of ownership, WMEZ, Inc. sold the license to Atlanta-based Patterson Broadcasting in May 1997. This would mark the beginning of a flurry of ownership changes for the station, as radio in the US in general was going through a great upheaval due to rapid ownership consolidation. Patterson was acquired by Capstar just a few months after they took ownership of this station. Chancellor Media, in turn, would acquired Capstar in 1999; they changed their name to AMFM shortly afterwards. They barely had time to change the signs on all the buildings before merging with Texas-based Clear Channel Communications in October 1999. Due to exceeding market ownership caps, Clear Channel was forced to divest both WMEZ and its new country-sister station WXBM. They tried to sell them off to URBan Radio Licenses in July 2000 but the deal fell through. Instead, Albany, New York-based Pamal Broadcasting would acquire the two stations. (The license eventually was spun off to a sub-company of Pamal called 6 Johnson Road Licenses, Inc., so named for the location of Pamal's Albany headquarters.)

During this tumultuous time, it appears that WMEZ was granted an auxiliary facility permit, for 6.5 kW at 541 feet HAAT from the WXBM studios north of Pace on Quintette Road (CR-184). This would come in handy in just a few years…

The 1,800 foot tower that held WMEZ along with several other FM and TV stations collapsed during Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Running on their backup facilities with limited coverage hurt the station's ratings for quite some time. With the rebuilding of the tall tower in Baldwin County underway, the station was granted a construction permit to return to their full power facility in May 2007; when they filed the license to cover in January 2008 the station was back to 100,000 watts from an antenna HAAT of over 1600 feet.; In May 2012 it was announced that longtime owner Pamal had agreed to sell their Pensacola cluster, including WMEZ, to Cumulus. Under Cumulus' ownership, the format moved progressively more upbeat until it was a direct Adult Contemporary competitor to iHeart's Mobile-licensed WMXC.

On New Year's Day 2024, Cumulus flipped the format to a Rhythmic CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio) format as "Hot 94.1". The format is intended to flank their pop-leaning CHR sister station WABD and compliment some of their other urban-leaning signals in Mobile and Pensacola.