Music of your Ham

Albert W. Ham is responsible for many things. He wrote hundreds of jingles, a sin in itself. He was an A&R man at Columbia records. (He did a lot of mood music and schlock exotica) He wrote the song "I'd like to teach the world to sing" He owned Mayoham Music which syndicated his television news packages. He also is the creator of the satellite-fed Music of Your Life radio format. Egads man, have you no sense of decency?"

Al's life had ups and downs. Columbia fired him in 1959 after a gaffe where he was dubbing applause on a Tony Bennett record.. and he dubbed it in the wrong places! But this horror show began in 1978. It's been three decades and today they operate with about 50 affiliates which may not sound like many to you, but there are only about 350 stations left even vaguely in format these days.

Al started out I think rather innocently missing the music of the 1940s. In the 70s Big band music was on the wane, Glenn Miller, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Harry James, and even dixieland groups like Bob Crosby were all big on the air. In the 1970s they were really nowhere. Al though this might be an untapped market. He was right. He mixed big band and 50s pop vocals and it took off.

There are some claims to WAIT-AM in Chicago debuting the format. But in this case I side with Ham. In 1977 Al had a radio show on daytimer 1530 WDJC-AM in Bridgeport, CT. It was there he tested out all-big band programming. I can prove this because IN may of 1978 Billboard wrote him up a full-page article.The response was good enough locally that he looked around for an ally. He found. He crossed paths with Jim West formerly of the Artie Shaw orchestra presently of 830 WCRN-AM and together they convinced Bob Lappin at WMAS to try the new format. It went well-enough to begin syndication. They shipped reels around the country. The format was referred to as "Nostalgia." Billboard described it as "non-rock oldies" A term that's ironicly more accurate now.

The target demo was 50+ , the very definition of a hard sell but the format had a great TSL, an average of 3 hours spent listening. It was almost as good as the Beautiful Music format. Other networks launched compete ting programming. In 1990 he sold it to a company called "AM Only." AM Only got rid of the reels and put Al's programming on a satellite feed. WGCX-AM was their first test station. In 1990 Al gave the format a tweak to keep the format focused on 50 year olds. It's been 20 years.. his original target demo was now 70+.. he had to trip some of the older releases. But now with AM Only, and some strange arrangement with the staff of WGCX...there were getting to be a few too extra cooks in the kitchen. Suddenly, nobody was allowed to use the word "nostalgia" anymore.

They asked Chuck Southcott from KPRZ-AM in Los Anglees to rework the playlist. WinkMartindale came thru and fluffed the branding as well. By 1996 Jones Radio network was syndicating the format. Jones had their opinions too, they tweaked the playlist even further away from big band. Jones had reach btu they peaked out at around 110 affiliates. No matter what they did to the playlist.. their demo was dying off. The format struggles on today slowly chipping away at the big bands and adding more and more oldies. Al Ham died in 2001.

STL and TSL

The Studio-to-Transmitter Link (STL) is what allows the tower to be in one place and the radio studio in another. In the early days of radio, the music, the DJ, the transmitter, antenna and tower all shared the same real estate. This was a big step forward as it allowed two things.
1. Ideal rather than compromised tower placement
2. Clusters with shared towers and studios.

So you gotta take the good with the bad. The original form of an STL was a wire connection. This could be laid as a dedicated cable at great expense or more commonly supplied by the phone company, which in that era would have been American Telephone & Telegraph Company's Bell system.

Both would be an analog wired circuit, typically a dry pair of straight wire with no intermediate devices. They had no no transformers, compressors, or any kind of audio processing. The upside was that the lines could be used for AC or DC current. The downside was that frequency response was inconsistent especially over long distances.

Studio-to-transmitter links, and to some degree inter-city relays are familiar elements of most radio stations. They allow stations the flexibility to build their studios in locations that may be miles from the transmitter, allowing certain creature comforts or marketing opportunities. To all but those who must maintain them, they are a silent and sometimes forgotten step in the transmission chain

The legacy form of an STL is a wired path. Traditionally supplied by the local telephone company, an analog wired circuit was once the most common form of STL. The most basic type of circuit is a dry pair. This is a straight-wire path between two points. There are no active or passive devices between the source and destination. This type of circuit is also sometimes called a burglar-alarm circuit because it is commonly used for signaling by monitoring companies. Because there are no transformers or equalizers, these lines can pass ac and dc voltages. Their frequency response can be unpredictable and will suffer at long distances.

Modern STL is wildly more advanced using digital data, point-to-point microwave connections, dedicated T1 lines, or a broadcast on another licensed radio frequency ouside the AM & FM bands usually in the 950 Mhz band. Most stations using an STL have a transmitter-to-studio link (TSL) that returns transmitter data. Both the STL and TSL are considered broadcast auxiliary services (BAS) by the FCC and require separate licensing from the CP under their facility ID.