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.