Don Barrett’s excellent LARadio.com did a nice feature recently on our friend Scott Fybush and his radio geekdom empire, and Tophour got a nice mention:
Scott has another obsession — he records station IDs for another Web site. “My box is out in the car right now rolling on 1220, as a matter of fact. Hmm, that’s another weird hobby. I’m also a DXer. I love tuning into different stations. I always have. There’s a certain fascination that a very, very small subset of the radio industry has with these top hour ID’s and it probably goes back to Bill Drake who obviously did it best with Boss Radio. He made a big deal with the show intros. You can have millions of JACK format all over the country, but only one of them is KCBS/fm-Los Angeles. Out of all the KISS’ in the country, only one of them is KIIS-Los Angeles. It’s hard to get that little bit of tape there but it’s also useful for me, obviously, doing hundred-thousand watts because that’s all tagged by call letter. I am not the king of this, there is a guy who is in Wisconsin now by the name of Brian Davis and Brian has a Web site that is called TopHour dot net. Brian not only collects them, he posts them on the web and his Web site is a whole collection of just legal ID’s, just the ID and the ten seconds or so from all over the country.
While Scott was in town he rolled tape across the dial concentrating on call changes at 1150AM and the stations in Temecula. “Last time I was here I got “K-DAY” but not KDAI-Ontario. I still have to do that but it’s a fun and largely harmless little hobby. There are probably, I don’t know, a dozen people I know around the country who do this. He gets a lot of visitors to the site and the people who contribute are passionate about it.”
Thanks to Don and Scott for the love.
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