Random Items of a Weekend Nature

Just some items floating around:

KELLY VISIT UPDATE: OMW has heard some more feedback on what we guess could be called "David Kelly's Recent Vacation Plans".

The former Browns beat reporter for Clear Channel talk WTAM/1100 Cleveland was heard on something of a busman's holiday in Northeast Ohio...doing at least a couple of games of high school football play-by-play, and appearing on the mid-morning show hosted by WTAM's Bob Frantz.

We hear that Kelly's been having a great time as a voice of the St. Louis Cardinals' top farm team, the AAA Memphis Redbirds.

And although his "first love" is football (he is, after all, the son of Browns great Leroy Kelly), and Cleveland is his hometown, we hear it'd take a better job than his previous WTAM post to bring him back home. And we hear Kelly maintains his own Browns season tickets...

WTAM IBOC?: We have yet to confirm this, but speaking of WTAM, it appears the station is testing its IBOC/HD Radio carrier.

Though we thought we'd heard them testing, the OMW World Headquarters - and much of the area - is a bit too close to 1100's Brecksville transmitter site to distinguish the telltale splatter of the IBOC "hash" on adjacent frequencies 1090 and 1110. But long-time OMW tipster Nathan Obral out in Lorain County tells us it's quite evident there.

WTAM programmer Ray Davis, in an appearance a number of weeks ago on the station's Mike Trivisonno afternoon drive show, confirmed that 'TAM would eventually flip on the HD Radio carrier. But that's not really a surprise, as Clear Channel has been doing so at stations across the country...

ESPN 1300 NIGHTS: An OMW reader, catching our earlier item about the presence of the "ESPN Cleveland - 1540 Days, 1300 Nights" logo on the ESPNCleveland.com website, decided to drop the latter half of that combo an E-Mail question about the news.

WERE/1300 operations manager Jim Davis tells our reader that "he's not at liberty to say" as far as confirming the ESPN Radio presence on the Radio One talk station.

We're still wondering if the "1540 Days/1300 Nights" scenario is the final configuration in the land of "ESPN Cleveland"...though it would appear they'll start that way, soon.

And we mean "soon", as the rumblings we've heard would put the new format on the air sometime in the next couple of weeks or so. A bet at the "When WKNR Loses the ESPN Radio Rights Sometime Next Week" window would be a solid one...