ESPN 1530 WCKY

WCKY (1530 AM) is a commercial radio station licensed to Cincinnati, Ohio, and serving the Cincinnati metropolitan area with a sports radio format known as "ESPN 1530". Owned by iHeartMedia, its studios are located in the Kenwood section of Sycamore Township, while its transmitter site is in suburban Villa Hills, Kentucky.

In addition to a standard analog transmission, WCKY is available online via iHeartRadio. WCKY is a class A clear channel station, sharing the frequency with co-owned station KFBK in Sacramento. WCKY's daytime coverage is not nearly as large as that of other 50,000-watt stations, in part because of the reduced groundwave characteristic of its fairly high transmitting frequency. Its daytime city-grade signal only covers the Tri-State Area and the outer suburbs of Dayton. By comparison, WLW, aided by the superior groundwave of its much lower frequency of 700 kHz, can be heard at city-grade strength in large portions of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. However, WCKY's daytime signal provides at least secondary coverage to most of southwestern Ohio (including Dayton), central Kentucky (including Lexington and the outer suburbs of Louisville) and eastern Indiana (as far as the outer suburbs of Indianapolis). WCKY has a long history of a powerful night-time signal, and its country music programming of the 1950s and 1960s brought listener responses from many points even outside the United States. It can still be heard in much of eastern and central North America with a good radio; it can be picked up as far as Chicago, Detroit, Wichita, and Miami. Nighttime power is fed to all four of its towers in a directional pattern, concentrating the signal in the Cincinnati and Dayton areas, while the Indiana side of the market only gets a grade B signal at night. WCKY and KFBK mutually limit interference with each other; however, as Class A stations, both receive more protection than other stations on this frequency. For this reason, WCKY does not have to change to its directional signal until three hours past local sunset. The only station it is required to protect is KFBK, and Sacramento is on Pacific Time, making sunset there three hours later than in Cincinnati, so WCKY's signal will not travel toward KFBK until after dark.