WCNS
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| City | Latrobe, Pennsylvania |
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| Broadcast area | Latrobe, Pennsylvania / Pittsburgh |
| Branding | Westmoreland's News Talk 1480 |
| Frequency | 1480 kHz |
| First air date | August 11, 1956 (as WTRA) |
| Format | News/Talk, Sports |
| Power | 500 watts (non-directional Daytime) 1000 watts (directional Night) |
| Class | B |
| Facility ID | 38377 |
| Owner | Laurel Highland Total Communications, Inc. (LHTC Media, Inc.) |
| Website | 1480wcns.com |
WCNS is an AM radio station licensed to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and operating on a frequency of 1480 kilohertz by authority of the Federal Communications Commission. WCNS broadcasts with a daytime power output of 500 watts, and a nighttime power of 1,000 watts. The station broadcasts non-directionally during the daytime, and uses a four-tower directional antenna pattern at night.
Beginning in 1956, WTRA signed on four years after the debut of another Latrobe AM station, WQTW, known then as WAKU. The station was owned by Latrobe Broadcasters, Inc., a company headed by Martin Barsky, and maintained studios and offices at 204 Main Street in downtown Latrobe. The station was later sold in 1966 to WTRA Broadcasting Corporation and relocated to the historic Miller Hotel on Ligonier Street, where it remained until the hotel was destroyed by a fire in 1974. WTRA general manager Albert Calisti would go on to start his own radio station, WBCW in Jeannette that same year. WCNS would then relocate to 317 Depot Street, where it would remain until the turn of the 21st Century.
Three years after WTRA signed on, a substitute DJ by the name of John Longo was hired as an employee, and 30 years later, Longo would assume the ownership of this station. Though Longo would later leave what would later become WCNS to pursue advancement opportunities at other neighboring stations, he would later return in November 1983 as an equity partner, four years after the station was sold by WTRA Broadcasting to Advance Communications Corporation [1]. With the ownership change came a new set of call letters...WCNS. The newly named station, now boasting a new country format, saw its most dramatic changes under Advance's ownership and Longo's leadership.
The station operated as a daytime-only radio station competing against WQTW for much of its existence, until it received permission in 1984 to broadcast with nighttime power. With this move, WCNS became one of only 15 affiliates in the United States at the time to affiliate with the Transtar Radio Network. The move was made to avoid a costly expense of hiring additional on-air personalities, putting the existing announcers to local news and sports duties, where their talents would be better utilized. The station then affiliated with Transtar's 'Country Coast to Coast' format. It was a bold move indeed, because stations utilizing satellite-delivered music formats were more music-intensive FM stations, and WCNS was one of the very few AM's that went the satellite route. A nearby AM station north of Latrobe, WCCS, (known then as WRID and licensed to Homer City in Indiana County) had achieved success less than a year before using the same concept.
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Wikipedia