From WRKO to the Prudential Tower

Thursday, May 7, Scott and I got a rare opportunity to see some very visible Boston-area facilities. We spent the morning with Entercom's John Kennedy at the WEEI transmitter site in Needham (where John tried to convince us to take as parting gifts a pile of old cart machines he's trying to get rid of) and then up in Burlington at the very visible WRKO site. After a brief visit with Maureen Carney at Fox Sports New England and a quick lunch, we drove down to Dorchester to meet Pat Monteith and Grady Moates at WUMB, then across Morrissey Boulevard for a quick tour of WLVI before ending up at Greater Media's Boston cluster studios next door.

Greater's chief engineer Art Pepin showed us around the studios, which consist of six nearly-identical studio pods, one each for WTKK, WBOS, WMJX, and WROR-FM, plus a spare for redundancy and any network programs that originate in Boston. Each station also has a small common area for talent to meet and do prep work, and access to a number of production studios, all on the second floor of the building. Sales staff are in a cube farm which we did not bother to see. After the studio tour, Art drove us over to the Prudential Tower to see the transmitters of the four of his stations which are located there. (WKLB-FM is a Lowell-licensed station and transmits from Andover, but is otherwise identically equipped.)

I forgot to bring memory for my digital camera, so there are unfortunately no pictures from WEEI.