Aerostar Communications of Utah is purchasing KEGH-FM (Woodruff, UT) along with booster stations KEGH-FM1 (Ogden, UT), KEGH-FM2 (Bountiful, UT), KEGH-FM3 (Salt Lake City, UT), and KEGH-FM4 (Provo, UT) for $1,100,000 cash. KEGH-FM has been in the SLC Divestiture Trust II for six years. It was part of the Simmons Media Group divestiture of stations in the Salt Lake market.
Aerostar’s Michael Call also has interest in Mav Radio Holdings license of KNIV-FM (Lyman, Wyoming) serving the Salt Lake-Ogden-Provo market. Greg Merrill of Media Services Group represented SLC Divestiture Trust II in this transaction.
A previous deal with AASAA Media LLC was approved by FCC in June of 2016 but did not close. Aerostar Communications, LLC is currently operating KEGH-FM under an LMA.
Interesting… It’s one of a long list of stations (https://bit.ly/hUmpyFM), most with Class C signals (89kw at 2123′) on Class A channels (107.1, 102.3, 103.1 etc.), all licensed to tiny rural towns, and radiating from Humpy Peak (https://bit.ly/wUmpy) in the Uintah mountains (far east of Salt Lake) through a 20-panel (might be a record) Shively 6016 antenna. It’s as close to nowhere as you’ll find a U.S. FM master antenna for a big fleet of stations. The only town of any size within sight of the tower is Evanston, WY, pop. 12,000, 43 miles away.
They’re a clever hack. Love to know who thought it up. See, while the signals of all these stations are terrain-shadowed in the Salt Lake market by the Wasatch Mountains, the site is close enough to put the predicted 60 dBu contours of the signals over the Salt Lake metro, but far enough from Farnsworth Peak (home of all the big Salt Lake FMs) to allow class C signals to drop in on second-adjacent channels. So all the Humpy Peak FMs can put up boosters (up to 20kw!) at elevated locations on the east side of Salt Lake, Provo and Ogden.
Thus the boosters are actually the stations, and that’s what this sale was about. The 20 panel antenna on Humpy is for signals almost nobody listens to. That 20-panel gain cuts down transmitter costs as much as possible. (They’re all 7.9kw.)