If you’ve never had the chance to visit the Finger Lakes region of central New York, you’re missing one of the best-kept tourism secrets in the country: beautiful rolling hills, quaint small towns, great food, world-class wineries, and the list goes on.
But we’re not here to talk tourism – we’re here to talk radio, and that’s been awfully interesting in the region over the last few years, too, thanks largely to the Finger Lakes Radio Group, which owns most of the commercial stations in the northern part of the Finger Lakes, the area we label the Geneva market.
After assembling a cluster of five AMs, the Finger Lakes guys have been busy augmenting them with FM signals. WAUB 1590 in Auburn added an FM translator, W251AK (98.1), which isn’t yet represented here on Toppy, but will be soon. WCGR 1550 in Canandaigua, the original station in the group, dropped its news-talk simulcast with flagship WGVA 1240 and flipped to oldies, using its new FM translator, W283BF (104.5), as the new “main” signal there.
In Seneca Falls, daytimer WSFW 1110 is about to be traded away to Calvary Chapel of Twin Falls in exchange for a translator (now W214BR on 90.7) that Calvary’s been running from the WGVA tower in Geneva. That means WSFW’s visitor information format will be going away, to be replaced (I suspect) by an FM simulcast of WGVA.
And in the southern Finger Lakes (the area we designate as the Ithaca market), the Radio Group gang moved WFLR-FM (95.9 Dundee) more than 20 miles southeast to the Ithaca market, turning it into top-40 WFIZ (95.5 Odessa). Here, too, an FM translator came into play: W245BL (96.9 Dundee) is now “Country 96.9,” replacing the old WFLR-FM. Its nominal primary is WFLR (1570 Dundee), which had been part of the news-talk network based at WGVA.
Over the winter, I’ll be adding newer IDs from the last few months that bring this saga up to date (not to mention updating Saga’s own HD2/HD3/translator fun over in Ithaca), so stay tuned!
Leave a Reply