FM radio in Chicagoland

For those of you that are "rock music oriented", you might want to try tuning in 99.9 on your dial. While the call letters are WRZA, they bill themselves as "The 9 FM". This station was recently purchased and changed formats. What was a Peotone / Kankakee based Mexican station is now a Park Forest based "rock" station. As to their format, they say it best. That is, "we play anything".

While this type of format ( or "lack of format" ) could be a real mess of thrown together music, the station is being run by many "old school" FM DJ's that you'll surely recognize. Names like Sky Daniel's from the Loop ( WLUP ) of late 70's / early 80's vintage, Mitch Michael's from the Loop & WCKG, Johnny Mars of WXRT, etc... are all on board and offer a great diversity of flavours.

From what i can gather, this station went on the air in the middle of June. Somehow, i just found them today. As such, i have to wonder how many others haven't found them yet. Given the fact that i've actually been VERY happy with the musical selections / diversity that i've heard for the last 8+ hours, i wanted to turn others onto this station. I've heard everything from Patti Smith to Snow Patrol to Bruce Springsteen to The Hives to Jimmy Buffet to Queens of the Stone Age to The Cure to Joan Jett to Metallica to Robert Palmer to the Breederz. This is not to mention a few "sneak attacks" from the likes of Snoop Dog and ( i think ) Queen Latifah thrown in. While this might sound like a mess, it's so varied that you don't mind the drastic changes of styles. Even if you do, it doesn't last long and it is MUCH better than hearing the same songs over and over again every day or two / three days.

As a side note and even more of a benefit, this station is "introducing itself" to Chicagoland with 9,999 songs in a row without a commercial. Good tunes that are quite diverse with no commercials on broadcast FM is surely a pleasant change of pace. The fact that they state that they'll never play more than 3 minutes of commercial in a row OR more than 9 minutes of commercials in any given hour once they start promoting advertising is still MUCH better than the other "rock" stations in the area.

There is one drawback to this station though. Even though they are running 50,000 watts of broadcast power, their far southside location and lack of elevation really hurt their range. Some folks on the north side & suburbs may have a hard time picking this station up. That is, unless they've got a good tuner with a decent outdoor antenna. Check it out and see what you think. If you can find their website, which they've announced but i could never catch, please post it here. Sean
>

PS... For those that are interested in such things, i found a pretty neat FM Radio based website that pertains to the Chicagoland area. It lists the various stations, their call letters, how much power they are transmitting, their locations, etc... I'm really quite surprised at how little power some of the stations are using, but then again, the FCC is now going by "EFP" or "Effective Radiated Power". This method takes into account antenna height along with actual transmitter power.

http://sprocket.sytes.net/radio/fmdial.html