Port Huron’s Hot AC Favorite – 96.9 WBTI

I grew up with radio. When I was a teenaged kid with a twelve-transistor Panasonic, my favorite stations had youthful deejays, energetic sound, were all local – no satellites back then – and played the latest Motown and British Invasion hits with a few oldies. Not that many songs had been around long enough to become old, hi. Once the format evolved, forty records became the limit. For lack of a more descriptive term, they were called top-forty stations. As radio audiences matured and fragmented, the format that concentrated on current hits became known either as CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio) or Hot Adult Contemporary.

The only station serving Port Huron-Sarnia that re-creates that classic hot, contemporary, youthful top-forty sound is Lexington’s WBTI, “The Bluewater’s Best Of The 80s, 90s, And Now.”

So how did the quaint port town with the gift shops and pickle works and haunted marina end up with the market’s only teenaged kid station?

96.9 is a class B regional frequency in this part of Michigan, with higher power limits than class A frequencies originally assigned to smaller towns for local coverage. A full-power station on 96.9 in Michigan’s Thumb would interfere with its neighbors on the dial. The Federal Communications Commission, however, now authorizes class A power on class B frequencies. Putting WBTI on the air required limiting its power and re-assigning 96.9 to Lexington; far enough from Detroit and 97.1 WXRK, but close enough to Port Huron to cover it with a strong signal.

Port Huron is an unusual radio town. St. Clair County is part of the Detroit radio market, but Port Huron supports five commercial stations. Sarnia, Ontario contributes another four. Port Huron by itself is unrated. Arbitron, the radio industry’s standard for audience measurement, groups the PH Five with Detroit stations. To compete for local advertising dollars, the Five rely on word of mouth, a visible presence in the community, and lots of promotion.

I see that WBTI van all over town. Those stickers too; that, as radio station stickers go, are pretty sharp-looking. I hear it as well, in places like the no-frills supermarket where the in-store music is a boombox near the checkout counters, tuned to WBTI.

For times and locations of current WBTI local promotions, visit their Web site, www.wbti.com.

A modern-day guru, wise beyond his years, once said: if it’s too loud, you’re too old. He may be right. I do find myself lowering the volume now and then, but also cranking it up during WBTI’s All-80s Request Lunch and All-80s Weekends, when favorites come on. Like Blondie’s “The Tide Is High,” the first record I ever bought with a seniors’ discount, the week I turned 50; and “Major Tom (Coming Home)” by Peter Schilling. (If one must have a song with one’s name in the title, let it be a cool one.)

Satellite-delivered programming, while sounding slick and perfect and professional, has also eliminated local content on many small-market stations where salesmen and reporters, in addition to deejays, once learned their craft. WBTI is all live and local. I’m sure that, for many of the deejays, it’s their first job after college radio or broadcasting school. It’s a kick to hear someone talk over the intro of a song, maybe a flashback that charted before they were born, and “hit the post” — stop just before the vocal starts — perfectly.

Another unusual aspect of Port Huron, and Sarnia, stations is having a sizeable audience in another country. WBTI frequently acknowledges its Canadian listeners. Its liners — the promo blurbs between songs — that name random pairs of towns in its listening area always include one in Ontario. Temperatures are also given in degrees Celsius, and public service announcements plug non-profit events across the border. For a while, the top of
the hour ID was “Lexington-Sarnia-Port Huron;” making WBTI the only US station I’d heard with a Canadian city in its legal ID.

Analog broadcast radio’s advantages over satellite-delivered product are still portability and local content. With dozens of music channels available on-line or via dish, some folks still miss hearing a live person telling them about things that can see and do in their home towns, whom they can take with them to the back yard or the beach. The Panasonic still plays; it has FM and gets WBTI just fine. On the beach, where it’s still happening in the summer, only the music has changed. From Supremes and Stones to Pink and Nickelback.