We’ve gotten a little behind here at Toppy HQ about posting this month. We can’t blame the snow – that all landed east of us, over on top of Jeff in New England. We can blame our now-former hosting company, which left us high and dry for a little while until we could get moved to our own dedicated server.

Anyway, here’s a big pile of audio to catch you up: we have the last Minneapolis-St. Paul stragglers from Big Trip 2013, including more HD subchannels than you ever wanted. Plus there are IDs from two Canadian markets new to Toppy, Kingston, Ontario and Belleville, Ontario (check out the relevant Tower Site of the Week installment here), plus a batch of South Bend, Indiana audio to go with this Tower Site of the Week.

A note on the Canadian stuff: to the extent Industry Canada and CRTC enforce their ID rules at all, it’s mainly to say the call letters, with city of license apparently optional. So anything that actually includes the callsign counts for us, for Toppy purposes. That would probably have made Brian tear his hair out, but he’s down in sunny Mexico right now (hey, how about some nice XH– IDs for us, boss?) and so he’ll never even notice. (Don’t tell him!!)

The end of our “Big Trip 2013” found us returning to our starting point in the Twin Cities from our ultimate destination, Fargo – but not without some fun along the way. Last week in Tower Site of the Week, we showed you a big chunk of the Fargo market’s studios and towers, and this week we close out our books on Fargo-Moorhead IDs, nearly completing the set.

But that’s not all – this week’s Site of the Week and Toppy updates also add the new Fergus Falls MN and Alexandria MN markets to our audio collection here….and stand by for the final installments next week as we probe deep into the St. Cloud market!

As you’ll read in this week’s Tower Site of the Week, my visit to Fargo, North Dakota in the summer of 2013 was the culmination of a long journey to visit all 48 of the contiguous United States (and the tallest TV tower that stands in any of them!)

It also filled in some big gaps here on Toppy – from a distance, I collected the very first Bismarck ID to appear on this site (on a huge AM signal that covers the whole state and then some!), as well as a big pile of Fargo-Moorehead IDs to augment the one lonely one that had been on the site, the first batch of which appears today. You’ll hear the rest here next Wednesday, plus more Fargo towers on Site of the Week this Friday. (And order your Tower Site Calendar now for Christmastime delivery!)

Well, OK, the areas around Brookings and Watertown, South Dakota aren’t exactly “new,” having been there doing their thing for more than a century now. But they were new to us when we hit them along the long road that was Big Trip 2013 (photos and stories on Tower Site of the Week) – and except for one lonely Watertown ID, they’re brand new markets to Toppy, too! Enjoy…and check back on Site of the Week this Friday as we get to Fargo…

It was a nice sunny summer August day when we visited Sioux Falls, South Dakota on Big Trip 2013.  Sure sounds nice on this snowy November night 1000 miles to the east! (Check out the pictures on Tower Site of the Week here, and order your Tower Site Calendar 2015 at the Fybush.com shop while you’re at it.)

You can’t drive from Rochester to Erie today, thanks to a record-breaking wall of snow south of Buffalo. But that’s OK: today’s Toppy update is a thousand or so miles to the west on I-90, taking in a chunk of southern Minnesota that should probably be moved to its own “Austin-Albert Lea” market separate from where we put them in Rochester (the other one) when we get around to it. And it continues into the eastern fringes of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota market, which has been woefully under-Toppyed until now.

The matching pictures are over at Site of the Week, of course!