Jul. 23—The effort, which will be audible throughout New Haven County and down to Stamford and available online and with an app, awaits final Federal Communications Commission approval. The station already has a transmitter that has been tested, meaning that FCC approval could come at any time, Landry said.
"It is imminent," Landry said.
Landry is the former operations manager of now-defunct commercial radio station WQUN, which the university owned and operated. The AM radio station left the air on May 31, 2019, but was restarted a year later by longtime Connecticut radio man Clark Smidt as WATX-1220 AM to satisfy FCC requirements and retain the license for another six months. It returned to the air on May 8, 2021 and still broadcasts with reduced power, this time with Smith and Landry doing an 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. show Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Smith said.
The new station will essentially be WATX also carried on FM airwaves and over the internet and apps, said Zion, a sometime radio performer at WPLR years ago who now owns the station. He said Barber and Landry are crucial to his new effort's success.
"They were the foundation of WPLR at one time. They built that radio station," Zion said. "Brian and Pam are the best people you could put together for an effort like this. They want to serve radio and make it back to what it used to be for the rest of Connecticut."
A longtime friend of Zion's, who was known as the Z-Man on WPLR, Smith and Landry said that Zion is the kind of entrepreneur who can make their community-based station work in the turbulent world of American radio, which like most other forms of US communications has had chunks bitten out of it by the internet and satellite and app-based efforts like Sirius-XM.
"Steve Zion is really into everything so this is as high-tech as we want it to be," Smith said. "If we have a need for it, Steve will go and get it. He's that kind of a guy."
The fun of the new station will be it being community-based instead of a corporate initiative, Smith said.
"We don't have any strict guidelines as to how long we are talking. We can go out with that without having to worry about a three-minute limit," Smith said.
"If an interview is going great it will last a long time so whoever is talking can promote their businesses or whatever they're doing," Zion said. "We are probably doing things that no other radio station would be interested in."
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