It was just over a year ago that your intrepid Toppy Northeast Guy invaded a new market for the site, picking up a whole slew of IDs from Bakersfield, California.

Twelve months and change later, I’m finally getting around to putting some of that audio up here, and some pictures up over at Tower Site of the Week.

And by now, a fair number of the AM stations you’ll hear this week are history. KHTY 970 went from “W Radio” en espanol to Fox Sports in English. News-talk KERN traded its longtime home on 1410, with good in-city coverage, for the wide-reaching 1180 signal that used to be religious KERI. KWAC 1490 has moved towers.

We’ve also got a few bonus IDs, via DX and translators, from the Fresno market to the north, where KGED 1680 has since flipped from the standards format heard here to Spanish oldies.

There have been FM flips aplenty in the Central Valley, too, but we’ll get to those next week when we post more IDs and more pictures.

(Regular Toppy contributor Garrett Wollman was in on that April 2008 trip, too, and so you get an opportunity here to compare his all-digital airchecking approach, using a pair of Marantz PMD620 recorders, to my still-painfully-cassette-bound system. I can do more IDs each hour than he can…but his tend to sound a lot better and don’t get lost as easily. Will someone ever come out with a good radio paired with a good digital recorder that can be set up with multiple timer events?)

For the most part, we try to make sure that our annual(-ish) Big Trips cover new territory each time out. After all, if we’re going to spend two weeks on the road, especially with travel costs being what they are, yet another run through Cleveland, Fort Wayne and Indianapolis probably isn’t the way we’re going to go. (No offense to Blaine, of course.)

But every once in a while, we end up retracing our steps at least slightly. So it was on the westermost swing of Big Trip ’07, where we touched routes with the easternmost part of Big Trip ’06 with a return to Spokane, our second visit there in less than a year. This time around, we spent only a few hours, mostly visiting some studio and tower sites we hadn’t had access to on the first go-round – and picking up some IDs we missed the first time out, too. (We’ll hit one more small piece of retracing steps in next week’s installment.)

Before we got to Spokane, we got to see the drive-through directional array of KWAL 620 in Wallace, Idaho, which straddles I-90. (You can see it, too, at this week’s Tower Site of the Week.) We’ve included that ID under Spokane, just because we couldn’t quite justify creating a one-station Wallace market for it.

And we have one holiday bonus for you this week – we were back in a very frequent haunt of ours, Chicago, a few days ago…just in time to have tape rolling as Citadel flipped WZZN back to its heritage calls of WLS-FM. Check out the ID montage that launched the new calls!

…as usual, with less of a bang than a little whimper. We wrap up our massive legal ID scan of the great Pacific Northwest with a few more IDs from Seattle, plus a couple of Mount Vernon IDs that seem to fit better in the Bellingham market. (And we do it from a hotel room in Chicago while rolling even more IDs that you’ll probably hear here in a couple of months!)

No time for clever on this end, either, as we’re off to the airport for what we’ll call “Medium Trip 2007,” which will yield a whole stack of legal IDs from Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska sooner or later. (It will be followed by “Big Trip 2007,” in Utah, Idaho, Montana and vicinity, this fall, then by “Little Trip 2007,” in North Carolina and eastern Tennessee.)

But we’re still recapping the IDs from Big Trip 2006 for two more weeks. This time around, a big pile of Seattle FMs, and then next week we’ll wrap things up with Mount Vernon, Whidbey Island and that area.

Follow along in photos and text at Tower Site of the Week!

The wrapup of Big Trip 2006 is winding down, just as the planning gears up behind the scenes for Big Trip 2007, and this week we start in with a massive drop of Seattle-Tacoma IDs. Enjoy the AM this week, tune in next week for the FM dial, and visit us over at Tower Site of the Week to see all the pretty pictures…

That’s only part of the lofty title that the local newspaper gives to our featured community on this week’s Big Trip installment, Wenatchee, Washington. In full, the Wenatchee World claims to be published in “The Apple Capital of the World and the Buckle on the Power Belt of the Great Northwest.” There’s some disagreement on the former, as it appears Winchester, Virginia also considers itself the nation’s apple capital; we know of no other contenders, however, for the latter half of the slogan, which is probably just as well.

There are plenty of interesting bits of audio to be heard on this week’s episode, including three-letter-call KPQ and KPQ-FM, plus the over-the-top ID at Spanish-language KWWX, the KOHO-FM ID featuring a translator that isn’t there anymore (they ID “K262AL,” which has moved to 99.9 as K260BE, but they’re still using the old calls), and many more.

We’re winding down our Big Trip recap – our final two stops, May 9 and 16, will be Seattle and vicinity. Don’t miss out on the other half of our Big Trip coverage – see the tower pictures over at Tower Site of the Week!