WERM (1220 AM) is an American

radio station Radio broadcasting is the broadcasting of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based rad ...

licensed to serve the

community A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...

of Fairhope, Alabama, since 1961. The station's

broadcast license A broadcast license is a type of spectrum license granting the licensee permission to use a portion of the radio frequency spectrum in a given geographical area for broadcasting purposes. The licenses generally include restrictions, which va ...

is currently held by Donald H. Pugh Sr., through licensee Eternity Media Group WERM, LLC. WERM broadcasts an Urban Gospel music format to the greater

Mobile metropolitan area The Mobile Metropolitan Area comprises Mobile County, Alabama, Mobile in the southwest corner of Alabama in the United States. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census the metropolitan area had a population of 430,197. The Mobile metropoli ...

, including Mobile County and Baldwin County, Alabama. This station formerly broadcast a

tradio Tradio is a type of phone-in radio program formatted to provide a venue for listeners to freely advertise items they have to sell or trade. The concept is analogous to classified ads in local newspapers and most prevalent in the south and midw ...

show called ''The Gulf Coast Swap Shop'', local news, and select programming from the CBS Radio Network.

History

This station began regular operations as WABF on August 12, 1961. Licensed to Eastern Shore Broadcasters, Inc., the station was originally part of the J. Dige Bishop Stations Group. It broadcast with 1,000

watt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of Power (physics), power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantification (science), quantify the rate of Work ...

s of power, daytime-only, to protect WGAR (now WHKW) in

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–United States border, Canada–U.S. maritime border ...

, from

skywave In radio communication, skywave or skip refers to the propagation of radio waves reflected or refracted back toward Earth from the ionosphere, an electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere. Since it is not limited by the curvatur ...

interference. Almost two decades later, Eastern Shore Broadcasters, Inc., sold WABF to Bee Cee Broadcasting, Inc., in a deal that closed on July 1, 1978. In March 1992, Bee Cee Broadcasting, Inc., reached a deal to sell WABF to Jubilee Broadcasting Company, Inc., for $350,000. The deal was approved by the FCC on April 20, 1992, and consummated on May 11, 1992. In February 1999, Jubilee Broadcasting Company, Inc., contracted to transfer the

for WABF to Gulf Coast Broadcasting Company, Inc. The deal gained FCC approval on May 5, 1999, and the transaction was formally consummated on May 20, 1999. In June 2001, the station applied to increase its nighttime signal strength from 4 to 30

s while eliminating the directional array in use both day and night to reduce

interference. The FCC granted a

construction permit Planning permission or building permit refers to the approval needed for construction or expansion (including significant renovation), and sometimes for demolition, in some jurisdictions. House building permits, for example, are subject to bu ...

for these changes on October 1, 2001, with a scheduled expiration date of October 1, 2004. With construction and testing complete in January 2002, the station applied for a new

to cover these changes. The FCC granted the new license on March 11, 2002. Effective August 10, 2016, Gulf Coast sold WABF to Donald H. Pugh, Sr.'s Eternity Media Group, LLC for $105,000. The station was granted

special temporary authority Special Temporary Authority (STA) in U.S. broadcast law is a type of broadcast license which temporarily allows a broadcast station to operate outside of its normal technical or legal parameters. In the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) st ...

in April 2016 to operate daytime only with 1 kW from one of the WERM towers in Mobile, and it began using that facility as of September 2016. The tower at the WABF studios on Section Street in Fairhope was later taken down. Although the new ownership moved the studios and transmitter, the format remained more or less the same, with a mix of softer oldies and standards. Within a month of beginning operation from the STA site at the WERM tower in Mobile, coverage issues in Fairhope became apparent and the station moved the temporary broadcast back to Fairhope, first from a location near their new studio in downtown and later from a longwire off Twin Beech Road, just a half mile from the old transmitter site. In early February 2017, the format and programming moved to WERM 1480 in Mobile, while that station's gospel programming moved to this frequency. This change was reported to be permanent. On December 6, 2017, the stations swapped call signs, with this station assuming the WERM calls.

References

External links

* {{Mobile Radio ERM (AM) Gospel radio stations in the United States Radio stations established in 1961 1961 establishments in Alabama ERM