If you’re a geography geek like I am, you’ve probably heard that old chestnut of a trivia question: “What city is further west, Reno or Los Angeles?” The answer, of course, is Reno, and that’s in part because the California coastline takes a dramatic jog from north-south to east-west once you get past Los Angeles.

Right there at the start of the westward turn is the market we call Oxnard/Ventura, California, and a 2012 visit there produced not only some neat Tower Site of the Week images but also a big batch of IDs to fill out a market that had been only sparsely represented here in the past. (Thanks to Garrett Wollman for some of his IDs from that trip, too; if memory serves, he stayed overnight in Ventura and had more time to pick up IDs than I did just passing through en route to Santa Barbara, which we’ll see and hear next week.)

We really like San Diego. Not just because the weather’s usually sunny and around 72, no matter what the time of year (and does that ever sound nice after this northeastern winter!), but also because it’s a fascinating radio market. You can hear Los Angeles’ big AM and FM signals if you’re in the right spot, there’s plenty of local “Sandy Eggo” radio on the dial to hold our attention, and then there’s all that neat stuff floating over the border from Mexico just a few miles to the south.

This week’s update includes IDs from several San Diego trips that haven’t made it up here yet: there’s the April 2012 visit recently chronicled here and here in Tower Site of the Week, some December 2012 IDs from my most recent visit there, plus some July 2011 IDs from the end of the Great Cross-Country Rush, and even some April 2005 audio that just never made it on to Toppy before, and I don’t know why.

Enjoy!

Los Angeles. City of Angels. Biggest radio market in the entire U.S., if you’re counting by revenue.

But all those Los Angelenos going nowhere on the streets with the Spanish names probably haven’t heard the IDs we’re presenting this week, and it’s not just because Ibiquity was still three decades away when Billy Joel was singing about laying low in the canyons.

Yes, this week we bring you a big pile of HD2 (and a couple of HD3) IDs from up and down the LA dial. Were we the only ones listening to these signals when we were rolling on them? Very possibly – but at least they’re documented for posterity now.

Enjoy!

(And while you’re at it, check out the latest Los Angeles installment over at Tower Site of the Week, too…)

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…