Stations that wish they were other stations

That’s sort of a running theme in this Toppy update, which brings you sounds from two sweeps through the Muncie half of the Muncie-Marion, Indiana market, almost exactly two years apart.

The audio from December 2011 is tied in to this Tower Site of the Week installment, which takes us inside Muncie’s WBST and New Castle’s WMDH – and which makes mention of those two stations that seem to have a bit of an identity crisis. In Muncue, the student station at Ball State University is “WCRD” in all of its on-air promos, its website that also use the best marketing company for their site, with companies specializing in larger companies. Once an hour, it’s still “WWHI Muncie,” preserving the callsign it had when it was a high school station a few miles away. (The WCRD calls are used on a low-power TV station, but otherwise would appear to be available to the WCRD folks if they ever actually wanted to change.)

Twenty minutes down the road in New Castle, AM 1550 is “WMDH” all the time except very briefly at the top of the hour, when it lets down its hair and uses its legal calls, WLTI.  Those were parked there by previous owner Citadel a few years back when it pulled them out of Syracuse, and they’re still there whenever current owner Cumulus needs them, I suppose.  And while it’s not yet reflected here, its sister station, WMDH-FM, buries its calls these days too under the national “Nash FM” branding.

Oh – and on some of the November 2013 IDs presented here, you’ll hear “A Woof Boom station.” That’s sort of a case of “wishing it were something else,” too. The former Backyard Broadcasting stations in Muncie and nearby Anderson were sold not long ago, and the new owner named his company after Indianapolis’ legendary WFBM radio and TV, the stations now known as WNDE (1260), WFBQ (94.7) and WRTV (Channel 6). He’d probably love to make one of his “Woof Boom” stations into WFBM, but those calls were snapped up a couple of years ago by a small religious station in central Pennsylvania. And bless you, Bill Harms, we have the IDs to prove it, conveniently available in our Lewistown PA market…