WZAD
| City | Wurtsboro, New York |
|---|---|
| Broadcast area | Catskill Mountains region, Orange County, northwest Pennsylvania |
| Branding | 94.3/97.3 The Wolf |
| Slogan | "This is Hudson Valley Country" |
| Frequency | 97.3 MHz |
| First air date | 1990 |
| Format |
Country music (simulcast of WKXP Kingston) |
| ERP | 620 watts |
| HAAT | 219 meters |
| Class | A |
| Facility ID | 74285 |
| Callsign meaning | WiZArD (former station name) |
| Owner |
Townsquare Media (Townsquare Media Poughkeepsie Licenses, LLC) |
| Sister stations | WALL, WCZX, WEOK, WKNY, WKXP, WPDA, WPDH, WRRV |
| Webcast | Listen Live |
| Website | hudsonvalleycountry.com |
WZAD (The Wolf) is country music radio station licensed to Wurtsboro, New York that serves the Catskill Mountains region, Orange County, New York, and Pike County, Pennsylvania. The station is owned by Townsquare Media and broadcasts on 97.3 MHz with 620 watts ERP from a tower between Wurtsboro and Monticello.
WZAD's programming is a simulcast of sister station 94.3 WKXP Kingston, an arrangement that began in March 2006. Prior to this, WZAD had simulcast the programming of another sister station, 97.7 WCZX Hyde Park.
WZAD first signed on in 1990 as part of a wave of new FM stations in the wake of the FCC's passage of Docket 80-90 which loosened class/frequency restrictions. The station began its life as The Wizard a locally based open-format station allowing DJs to choose their own music, featuring everything from contemporary folk and rock to jazz and country, with an evening talk segment and new age, world and classical music on weekends.
The station was sold in the early 1990s and immediately fired all its on-air staff and changed to a satellite-based oldies format that had a playlist spanning from the birth of rock until the mid-1980s. The station later hired new DJs for its morning and afternoon hours, but was otherwise automated outside of some syndicated programming on weekends.
The oldies format would last until early 1996, when WZAD's second owner sold the station to the Poughkeepsie-based Crystal Radio Group. With this sale, Crystal saw an opportunity to strengthen its WCZX (Oldies 97-7), an oldies station in Poughkeepsie by upgrading its format and simulcasting the programming to cover most of the Hudson Valley. When Crystal took control of the stations, WCZX and WZAD were merged into one station, Oldies 97-7/Oldies 97-3, from Crystal's headquarters in Poughkeepsie with some of WZAD's local staff making the move. However, with the move came a historical reduction on WZAD's end given that all post-1975 music was stricken from the playlist given WCZX's heavy 1955–1969 musical base. The name would be modified to Oldies 97 in early 1999 to sound less unwieldy.
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