I just completed a drive with my family from Lake Havasu City to Victoria British Columbia through Central California. 1402 miles. I wanted to listen to local stations along the way for information about the areas. IN the 1402 miles I saw two small signs about local frequencies and they were for the emergency AM stations! I had to rely on scan and ended up listening to stations far away from my trek. No wonder we are accused of not being LOCAL!
thank you Rick, we have all been pressing our owner to invest in billboards for this purpose, I'm showing this to her.
Diana Wilson
KBEK 95.5 FM
Mora, MN
Here in Colorado our Department of Transportation provides blue information signs "FOR WEATHER INFORMATION TUNE TO: (CALLS/FREQ.)" That's all well and good, but when a large fire was threatening to come into the city of license of a couple of stations (who I'm leaving out) the automation just droned on. They updated their Facebook page, but that doesn't do a lot of good for those people on the road. The best information was found on the local newspaper's website.
There is a serious lack of leadership in local radio.
I had a similar experience a few years ago on a wedding trip from North Dakota to Texas. on the Sunday drive back through the Nebraska/Iowa/SD border area, we could see really bad thunderstorms approaching.Scanned every FM and AM station we could get and not ONE was airing any local weather information, let alone emergency warnings, etc. It wasn't until we stopped at a small town gas station that we learned we were in a tornado warning area. This happened to be the same weekend that a Boy Scout camp was hit by a tornado in Iowa and they had flash flooding everywhere. One of the first things I did when we got home was to thank our owners for the LIVE continuous coverage we do on all 8 of our stations when threatening weather approaches. I thought every station did this, but I guess not.
There are also a few paid and free smartphone apps that use your location to provide you with a list of local stations.
