WHAZ is a Christian radio station licensed to Troy, New York and serves New York's Capital District. The station is owned by the locally based Capital Media and broadcasts on 1330 kHz at 1 kilowatt daytime, 49 watts nighttime from a transmitter located on Van Schaick Island in the neighboring city of Cohoes. WHAZ's programming is also simulcasted on four FM stations on the fringes of the market.
History
WHAZ is recognized as being one of the oldest radio stations in New York State and claims to be the Capital District's second-oldest station. It first signed on in the summer of 1922 using 790 kHz in a time-share agreement with WGY. The station was operated by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At the behest of General Electric, which desired to operate its flagship station WGY with an unlimited schedule, WHAZ was eventually authorized to switch to 1300 kHz. The NARBAfrequency shift of 1941 moved WHAZ to 1330 kHz, daytime-only operations in an historic three-way timeshare with another timeshare in New York City, The Jewish Daily Forward's WEVD and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society's WBBR. With the launch of WRPI FM on November 1, 1957, and most of the school's programming on the AM band being transmitted via carrier-current WRPI AM 640 by that time, WHAZ's future became expendable, only being operated on a rather minimal basis...and programming Classical music. The station was eventually sold in 1967 to new owners who decided to program the station with a Christian religious format, which holds to this day. In 1973, WHAZ nearly added an FM variant of its programming on 107.7 MHz, however the death of the station's then-owner led to those plans being scrapped by his children in favor of country music with the station becoming WGNA, now the regular #1 station in the market. WHAZ was sold again to the predecessor of current owner Capital Media in 1978. The Camps spent several years trying to increase WHAZ's power. Its daytime signal only provides Grade B coverage of the market's second-largest city, Schenectady, and its nighttime signal is mostly limited to Rensselaer County. However, all of their requests were turned down, since the FCC was unwilling to risk causing interference with the New York stations, had by 1983 purchased the airtime of WBBR's successor WPOW. Beginning in the 1990s, WHAZ expanded to FM through the acquisitions of four stations, including WMYY 97.3, WBAR-FM 94.7, and WMNV 104.1. In 2005, WZEC was acquired and converted into a classic Christian Contemporary format for the Bennington, Vermont area under the WHAZ-FM callsign, and later converted to an outright simulcast of WHAZ.
