Bluegrass Returns–To The VA Burbs
NotionsCapital is reporting that bluegrass radio has returned in the non-HD format. WAMU killed bluegrass a while back and then offered it on one of its HD-channels. It’s been found on the radio in Great Falls…
*photo courtesy of the Bluegrass Blog.
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2:23 pm
Whoa. If anyone can make sense of that NotionsCapital entry please let me know. I take it you can listen to bluegrass at 105.5. A casual reader could almost figure that out on their own.
9:29 am
Sorry I confused you, jimmyappleseed. Other readers seem to have followed the story. The situation is certainly a confusing one, which the original post uses hyperlinks to condense and clarify. To recap:
1. WAMU-FM has two ghost stations no one listens to, HD-2 and HD-3. You can only hear them with special radios that nobody owns, and only in a small area.
2. Bluegrass music, locally significant and a distinctive feature of WAMU-FM broadcasts for 47 years, was moved off the air, first to the Web and then to ghostly HD-2, where no one can hear it. The “purge” was greeted by public protests covered by CP, the Post, the New York Times, and other local and national media. 4,000 angry WAMU members requested the return of their pledge payments.
3. WAMU-FM has a low-power repeater station in Great Falls, VA. It broadcasts a regular FM signal at 105.5 instead of 88.5 (the frequency of the station’s 50,000 watt main FM signal).
4. The Great Falls repeater once rebroadcast the regular WAMU 88.5 signal, but at 105.5. More recently, when ghost station HD-3 carried alternative music from Towson, the Great Falls transmitter rebroadcast that HD-3 programming but as regular FM, at 105.5.
5. WAMU’s ghostly HD-3 stopped using the Towson programming. WAMU got FCC permission to take the Towson programming off the Great Falls FM transmitter and replace it with the Bluegrass content heard (or not heard) elsewhere on ghost station HD-2. WAMU also got highly unusual (and technically questionable) FCC permission to boost the Great Falls FM repeater from 38 watts to 250 watts.
6. The result: WAMU-FM has returned Bluegrass to regular FM radio, but only in the Great Falls-Reston area, and at 105.5 instead of 88.5.
7. “Hear Bluegrass radio but only in Reston” is the latest twist in a 57-year-old music radio story, and part of a heated local controversy begun eight years ago.
8. Even if you don’t like Bluegrass, there are two aspects of wider significance: The nationwide homogenization of public radio programming at a time when other media struggle to develop local content, and the questionable wisdom of the HD Radio(tm) enterprise.
There are more details in the post and its hyperlinks at
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/broadcast-bluegrass-returns-in-reston/
5:03 pm
When I can (some what) pick this station up around the Faifax City area, it plays great BlueGrass music. I wish I could receive it county wide. It would be my primary listening station.