David Gleason builds a radio group in Ecuador in the 1960's

Ecuador 1964 - 1970 David Gleason's radio stations in Ecuador : Radio Musical Canal Tropical Núcleo Radión Teleonda: Ecuador's first FM station.
In 1964, in a further attempt to finish my next-to-last year of High School, I found an opportunity to study in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with assitance from Herbert Evans, the head Peoples Broadcasting (Nationwide) Unfortunately, when I arrived, there had just been a revolution to depose the sitting president, Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy. Schools in Guayaquil were unable to overcome a disrupted bureaucracy and admit a new student, especially one without the necessary "normal" prerequisites in Ecuadorian history and such.	Ecuador lies ont the Equator in Northwestern South America. In 1965, the population was just under 4.75 million.	My original destination of Guayaquil is on the Southwestern coast of Ecuador, slightly inland on the Guayas River. This is Ecuador's largest city, but it is hot and humid year-round. It has long been the economic force of the nation, with the main banks and industries. Quito is in the central mountains, and, at 10,000 feet above sea level, cool and Spring-like all through the year. It is the capital, intellectual and diplomatic center of Ecuador. In 1964, Guayaquil had about 1.2 million residents, while Quito was a city of about 900,000.
	Quito. Circle indicates first location of Radio Musical and arrow shows Nucleo Radion location

Ecuador: Biography Chapters
1. Arrival


Click to hear the Instrumental Ecuadorian National Anthem	Click to hear the Ecuadorian National Anthem with chorus.

My passport stamped for my first entry to Ecuador

Not wanting to go back to the US, and abandoning the formal "exchange" program that got me Ecuador, I traveled to Quito, the capital, where I was told greater leeway was granted to foreign students in deference to the diplomatic community. That was true, and I was accepted at the Colegio Americano ("Americano" refers to "The Americas" and not the United States of America) where I was introduced to classes unknown in Ohio such as Logic and Ethics, as well as practical ones like "Redacción Comercial" (Business Spanish). All instruction, of course, was in Spanish.


	The Colegio Americano campus around 1964. Click on the picture to read about the Colegio Americano. The school was founded in 1940 by Galo Plaza Laso, former President of Ecuador and General Secretary of the Organization of American States. President Plaza is shown in the panel at the left, standing in the center of the group.

My Ecuadorian "parents" Florence and Dr. Galo Ballesteros at their home in
El Batán overlooking the northern part of Quito.

Amid a busy course schedule, I found time to visit most of the stations in Quito. At one, Radio Ecuatoriana, the owner invited me to do a radio program with Top 40 hits from the US every Saturday. I also answered some of the station's English correspondence, like this request for a reception verification. I couldn't spell or proofread then, either. The show, called "Gringolandia," lasted until I made the decision to have my own radio station.

The letter to the left, received by a radio listener in Pennsylvania in 1964, confirming reception of Radio Ecuatoriana is signed by the station owner and one David Gleason.

While browsing the stores and sights in Quito's colonial downtown, I spotted a store with a radio transmitter in the window. I went in to see it, and the proprietor, Ing. Al Horvath, saw me peering into the innards of a 1,000 watt radio transmitter with uncommon interest and curiosity.		Carlos Guarderas Barba in 2005. Carlos managed Ing. Horvath's business
Somewhat amazed about my interest in a transmitter (I looked every bit of 17... or less), I explained my several years of "work" in radio. Horvath confessed that he had built the transmitter hoping to sell it to someone, bundled with a license his son in law, Carlos Guarderas had obtained for a new AM in Quito (where there were already about 40 other AM's).		Unfortunately, no one wanted that frequency: 570 AM. In Ecuador, stations did not use towers, preferring instead to use long-wires hung between tall wooden poles. Of course, a low frequency would not tune easily in to such a short antenna, and so this channel was available... for a price of U$S250 dollars (I had to buy the transmitter I had been admiring, too. And the tower. And the ATU... there was a catch of kinds.).

Independence Square in Quito, circa 1967. The Cathedral is behind the park. The picture was taken from the portals of the Presidential Palace.	The Central Bank is flanked by t he entrance to the Cathedral.
	Quito is only a few kilometers to the South of the Equator. Here is the monument as it looks today at latitude 0. Because the city is at an altitude of 10,000 feet the climate is "Spring-like" all year around, going from just above freezing late at night to the mid-70s' during the daytime.

My late father had been an investment banker and managed money all his life so most of my birthday and Christmas presents were shares of stock, not Roy Rogers 6-Gun sets. From that beginning, I had saved and invested since I was in the QSL card business, and had a little stashed away. I decided that a city of 700,000 with nearly 40 operating stations badly needed one more.
Francisco Aguirre Gómez of ORC	I bought the transmitter equipment from Horvath, and headed to Mexico to get record contacts and to buy jingles from Organización Radio Centro and Francisco Aguirre Jr. At the same time, I established contacts with the major Mexican record labels to receive new releases. Peerless, RCA, Musart, Gamma, Orfeón, and Columbia all were happy to hear about the first pop music station in Ecuador.

Larry Cervon managed Gates Radio Company in Quincy, Illinois. I purchased all the studio equipment from Gates during a visit to Quincy. The former Gates factory was on this street in Quincy, with the Mississippi River at the end.

In September, 1964, we were ready to put the tower up. The transmitter site was on a flat hilltop to the NE of Quito which we happily found had nice conductivity because it was very loamy and less rocky than other areas of town. Quito lies along a long sequence of valley areas in the high Andes.

Here are a series of photos of the construction of the transmitter site
for Quito's new HCRM1, Radio Musical, on 570 AM.

The transmitter site before any construction in late August of 1964. The city of Quito lies below the site, which was over 10,000 feet AMSL. The view is form the Northeast, looking over the central and northern part of the city.

Plowing the furrows for the 120 ground wires that will be buried under the earth... 8000 meters of copper wire or enough to lay a single strand from the site to downtown Quito.

The "caseta" or transmitter building was prefabricated, and sported a very
handsome pure asbestos roof.

The land is plowed in preparation for the laying of 8,000 meters of ground wire.

Construction begins with the transmitter building, prefabricated by a local carpenter.
Note the land freshly plowed and turned to make burying of radials easier. 5 miles of copper was buried for the ground system. At the time, other stations simply buried an old car radiator as a ground!


A nice hole is ready for the tower base to be poured and then cement is poured in it and cures in its wooden form; bolts to hold the tower base are protected by a cloth cover. Below, Ing. Al Horvath looks at the form for the tower base prior to pouring concrete.

Ing. Horvath surveys the base and the frame for the doghouse (antenna tuning unit)- The interesting scaffolding had a purpose: the tower was erected top section first and winched upwards, with new sections being added to the bottom. A crew of farmers manually held guy wires and ropes as the tower rose.

The first and topmost section is assembled; other sections lie to the right.
Note the beacons and lightening rods on the tower.

This old truck carried the winch that pulled the tower upwards using the wooden scaffold as a gin pole.


Seen from the scaffold, here the tower is part way up, and still not tensioned properly. There is, in fact, a pronounced lean at the top.	"Towering" over Quito from the suburban area of Bellavista, HCRM1 looked to have a huge tower. In fact, it was only 100 meters high, with enormous top-loading to work on 570.

My first business card as owner of a radio station. "Director" was a more common term than "General Manager" and indicated, of course, ownership as well. When Radio Musical went on the air, there were nearly 40 other AM stations in this market of 700,000.

This was the cover of the original sales presentation for Radio Musical... Quito stations did not have such things in 1964 and all rate cards were verbal! (and rates, were, shall we say, fluid.) HCRM1 had the highest rates in the market... and a commercial limit of 10 minutes an hour at a time when 30 minutes was common. Click HERE to see a list of all the competitors in 1964!
To serve this market, Radio Musical went on the air the 5th of December of 1964.

The first cart machines in Ecuador were at Radio Musical. It also had the first solid state audio chain (Audimax and Volumax).

Click on the picture for a higher resolution view of the studio.

A "57 of the Week" from the late 60's.

Click on the chart to see a more readable PDF version.

As befitting a Top-40 station, Radio Musical had its "57 of the Week" and the list of the city's most popular songs was published every Sunday by the Diario El Tiempo in Quito, and the entire hit parade was counted down at 5 PM! (The #1 song was by Argentine duo Fedra & Maximiliano, and the #8 ranker was "Suspicious Minds" by Elvis Presley.

Radio Musical played the hits no matter the language... there were many French and Italian songs on the list as well, and we made an annual trip to the San Remo Festival in Italy to bring back the competing songs which always found great acceptance (and was sponsored by Ing. Luigi Perotti, the importer of Borletti sewing machines).

Radio Musical played lots of hits from the US; of course, they were not available in Quito anywhere. So my mother, each and every week of the year, went to a record distributor in Cleveland and sent the new songs that had just debuted on the WIXY chart! A few days later, the same songs were heard on Channel 57 in Quito, to the obvious delight of our listeners

Patricio Toro, one of the best announcers on Radio Musical and Canal Tropical. Click on the photo for an interview (in Spanish) with Patricio where he describes how he was hired by me. Part of that interview appears below:

"Later... I received several phone calls from a gringo who spoke horrible Spanish that I could not understand, who invited me to visit a station he had just built and which had the the absolute best technology that existed at the time, and which had recruited the best announcers of the time and I thought he was playing a joke on me and I never paid any attention until I got a call from Guillermo Jácome, one of the the best voices ever and he said that Mr. David Gleason, a US citizen, had called me and he requested that I come for an interview to the facilities of

the station that would become Radio Musical AM. I went and they offered me a salary that was ten times greater than what I was making plus all the required benefits, and later it became the leading radio group in the country, Núcleo Radión, made up of Radio Musical, Canal Tropical, Radio Fiesta on AM and Teleonda Musical on FM, the first commercial FM (in Ecuador) At Canal Tropical, I spent a wonderful era in my career and was also the official voice of the Núcleo Radión and of Teleonda FM. "

The station was located in this building on Avenida Colón in the more modern northern part of Quito for its first 3 years. The signs on the second and third floor say, "Núcleo Radión" which was the name for the growing station cluster after Canal Tropical-805 was added in 1966.

In 1967, we were evicted from the building for being too noisy for the other tenants. In less than a week we built new studios and moved the three operating stations with no loss of airtime. The ugly SAAB car was mine, being my first experience in trade deals (three-for-one, anyone)


(Picture from the future transmitter site of HCTM-FM located at the 14,000 foot level on Mt. Pichincha overlooking Quito from the West.)
	"Official letter of Verification" sent to a listener in Texas who received Canal Tropical in its first year of broadcasting. Note that by late 1966 there were 6 sets of call letters for the group. Click on the letter for a more readable PDF version of the letter.

From the International Radio Club of America's DX Monitor from December of 1964 comes my DX report as well as the report of noted Denver area DXer Larry Godwin who visited my station while touring South America by Jeep! Click the scan above for a better quality PDF of the page.

A "6 AM-Midnight" summary form a 1969 Datos, S.A. survey of Quito. In upper income levels, my stations were #1, #2, #7 and #10 and accounted for nearly 50% of listening. In middle income, 4 of the top 11 were mine, and three stations had 20% of the lower income audience. Click on the partial table for the whole page of these 1970 ratings.

Interestingly, the #2 station in 1969 in upper income was an independent FM, Teleonda. This station was the first independent FM in northern South America and was profitable in its first year on the air.

1965. Radio Musical was a daring venture in retrospect. Against over 30 competitors, all with block programming, appeared the first Top 40 station in South America. Advertisers thought it was a ridiculous proposition, as they were used to sponsorable block programs, not a 24-hour music format. No one advertised. Our first client didn't pay his bill... (I learned that it is not a sale unless it pays.) A competitor referred to us as the "pocket station" as only kids with pocket transistor radios listened.
Anyone with more experience in Ecuadorian radio would not have done this crazy project.
By the sixth month, HCRM was only billing about $50 a month.

We were a month away from bankruptcy.
In June, a box arrived from Guayaquil, the major ad center for Ecuador. It was from McCann-Erickson, and had orders and acetate commercial disks for every radio account they had, and for 15 to 20 spots a day each! McCann had done a survey. The little new station was #1. Within weeks, we were sold out.The station was under such demand that by the end of 1965, clients could only by Run-of-Schedule spots and a quarter of the schedule ran between midnight and 6 AM. In the Datos surveys, it was frequent to see the evening hours with shares in excess of 75% of listening; the hours after 10PM came close to 100%.

In the pre-fax, pre-Internet world, several groups of independent radio stations were formed to exchange ideas through private newletters. One group was the International Broadcasters Idea Bank, a group of 100 stations in the US, Canada and australia. I joined as the only Latin American member in 1965. One of the newsletters I sent is at the left. Click on it to read the whole report which describes sales, promotion and other activities of my stations.

The "owner's" office at 1027 Avenida Amazonas in Quito. Records were the decorating motif as can be seen from the following pictures, too

In the Radio Musical Canal 57 studio (second from left) with production manager Edwin Almeida (left) and "El Pollo" Fuentes, Chile's top pop singer of the era. Fuentes was taking listener calls as part of a concert the station presented in Quito.

At the "board" (a Gates Yard) at Radio Musical. The Fairchild reverb, the Yard power supply and a CBS Audimax were in the rack.

In an article in the Quito daily paper "Hoy" Francisco Febres Cordero writes about La Mariscal, the traditional upscale neighborhood of Quito where Radio Musical and its sister stations were located. In the article, he shows how much Radio Musical was a part of the culture and history of Quito in the late 60's.

"Muchos años después -desplazados que fueron los caballos a sectores ignotos- los autos continuaron simbolizando en La Mariscal el paso de la niñez a la adolescencia: los "hijitos de papá" paseaban por la avenida Amazonas en un incesante tránsito circular de todas las tardes a la salida del colegio y todo el fin de semana, sin otra misión que la de ser vistos por la parroquia y la de admirar a las quinceañeras que, a su vez, cruzaban en sentido contrario una vez tras otra vez tras otra vez, al ritmo de las melodías de Enrique Guzmán o Alberto Vásquez, que Gabriel Espinosa de los Monteros o Pepe Rosenfeld hacían sonar en la consola de Radio Musical. A través de una de las ventanas de esa casa, identificada con el número 1027, se dejaban ver los primeros disck jockey de la radiodifusión, para recibir, con sonrisa conquistadora, el saludo de sus fans.

"Many years later, the horses having been removed to more remote areas, cars continued to symbolize in La Mariscal the passage from childhood to adolescence. The rich kids drove back and forth along Amazonas Avenue every afternoon after school and every weekend with no other goal than that of being seen and admiring the young ladies, who followed the same circular route in the opposite direction to the beat of the songs of Enrique Guzmán or Alberto Vázquez that Gabriel Espinosa de los Monteros and Pepe Rosenfeld played at the console of Radio Musical. From the one of the windows of that building, identified with the number 1027, you could see the first disk jockeys of (Quito) radio, who were ready to acknowledge with a winning smile the waves of their fans."

A local magazine features the Radio Musical chart and night jock Gabriel Espinosa de los Monteros.
The text reads:

"History, for Ecuador, begins at Radio Musical in Quito, which, in addition to being the first link in the Núcleo Radión (group) opens the era of "disk jockey stations." Non-stop programming, always agile, obviously informal, but always dynamic and happy.

Success is total in the Capital of the Republic, making it necessary for Canal Tropical to soon appear, satisfying dance music fans with the same style of radio. Both stations reach, and still hold, the highest positions in the ratings."
No greater compliment have I ever been paid. I was just 20 at the time.

1966. Radio Musical's success included the overnight show, where tropical dance music was played; the show was sold out at daytime rates. This unusual condition for a post-midnight shift was widely commented and I was worried that someone might "take" the format fulltime on a competitor.

One of the other 40 AMs, Radio Pacífico, on 805 kHz, had tried to compete with the Radio Musical format. They lost all their money in the attempt. Fausto Vallejo Silva, the owner, offered me HCFV1 for $2,500 or S/. 50,000. I snapped it up, closed the station and had the transmitter chucked down a ravine (this was pre-environmental awareness).

A new station appeared in its place... using the name of the overnight show, "Canal Tropical." I decided to tune the new station into the tower of the first. Below is the the ad published by the consulting engineer and showing the diplexer and ATU for the first such operation in all Ecuador.

Canal Tropical debuted on the 21st of May of 1966. It was pure cumbia, porro, gaita, mapayé, with a bolero or two thrown in for flavor. High energy jocks played the hits 24 hours a day on this tropical station with Top 40 formatics. A 15-day ratings sweep was half way through that Saturday, but HCFV managed to show nonetheless... at #1 in middle and lower income listeners! And the station’s working class appeal was a perfect complement to the upper income youth appeal of its sister station.

The first song on the air was Sonia López' "La Pollera Colorá" which was a hit cumbia at the time. , click here.

Canal Tropical, HCFV1 was diplexed into the same tower as Radio Musical using a tuning and rejection unit designed by Ing Al Horvath.

Growth
What do you do when you are sold out for two years, besides raise rates every few months? You buy or build new stations. This ad was from an advertisers guide published in 1967. There were now four stations, including one very special one: Ecuador's... and Northern South America's very first independent FM station.

1967. At this time, Quito had only one TV station and no independent FM facilities. A license was requested for the country’s first commercial independent FM. Going on the air at midyear, easy listening HCTM1 maintained a stance of "no commercials" for 6 months.

In fact, I had not intended to sell advertising on the station ever; it was a tribute to my first job in radio at an FM. But at lunch with a client, the distributor of Ecuador's only instant coffee, I was asked to have my salesperson drop by for a contract on the FM. When I mentioned I did not sell ads on the FM, I was asked to name a rate... I simply multiplied my highest AM rate by four to discourage the deal. Surprisingly, he said yes... so I said, "the spots are only 20 seconds" and was told this was fine.

The appeal of the format among advertisers became so high that "Teleonda" achieved sellout within its first year. The format was a hybrid of beautiful music and the traditional folk and national music of Latin America. Three song sets would include two instrumentals, and a vocal which might have been a tango, a vals, a pasillo or a bambuco as well as trios and folksongs. Total commercial time in each hour was two minutes, in six twenty-second spots.

A year later, Teleonda became the first stereo station in the country and moved its transmitter to a small mountaintop overlooking the city. We went stereo by modifying a test bench stereo generator intended for radio repair shops and injecting it into our home made exciter. It lit the pilot light on radios and had true stereo separation!

As can be seen from the ratings from a few years later (graphic of Datos, S.A. table above on this page), Teleonda was #2 in upper income listenership, and in the top 10 in middle income audience. The station was always sold out... and this was before 1970! FM had arrived and was successful in Ecuador before the average FM in the US or Mexico was!

Thia ad appeared in an advertising trade publication emphasizing the variety of formats on the Núcleo Radión Quito stations
"We have 4 stations with the taste of life.
And what flavor do you have?"

Letterhead and cards for the group a few years later. Note that there were FM simulcasts on each of the 3 AM stations, and two independent FMs for a total of 8 stations in Quito alone.

1967. Our only failure. Next to Radio Musical's 570 frequency there was a rural station, some 60 kilometers outside of Quito, at San Pedro de Amaguaña in the same province of Pichincha. It was HCSP1, at 595 kHz. Recognizing that the station could fit into the Quito dial, I bought it via an intermediary and moved it to Quito and had it reassigned to 590. A transmitter site was built right off the Panamericana Sur, about 4 km south of the Villaflora, in nice wet land. The stations signal covered parts of 6 provinces.

I wanted to create the Ecuadorian equivalent of Mexico City's Radio Centro, a nostalgia format with boleros and trios and romantic crooners. The playlist was extensive, as opposed to the Top 40 style of my other stations. It was called La Voz Amiga. Nobody listened.

Nobody. I learned a lesson about playlist length, at some cost. I also learned the art of the move-in, taking a rural station and moving it to the big city. Of course, nobody called it a "move in" yet!

But in 1968, I changed programming. The one music format was still missing: Ecuadorian folk music, the music of the indigenous population. Another station had shot up in ratings with the format, so 590 AM became Radio Fiesta, and immediately made a profit. And quashed the competitor, too. Although the listener target was not much sought by advertisers, there was considerable profit to be made in messages for rural areas and greetings in general. Sold at a premium, each stopset consisted of many "meet me at the bus from Quito" and "your mother had her operation in the city and is fine" announcements.

The 1967 Asociación Ecuatoriana de Radiodifusión met in Guayaquil for its annual assembly. Here is the opening reception picture with a number of other station owners.

One of the meetings at the 1967 AER general assembly. Front row, far left is Guillermo Jácome, operations manager of the Núcleo Radión group.

In 1968, the Interamerican Asociation of Broadcasters held its convention in Quito. I was asked by Arch Madsen, the US delegate, to assist in the organizing of the event. Here is a surviving snapshot of the opening night reception. To the left is Rafael Guerrero Valenzuela, owner of CRE and Tropicana in Guayaquil. The location is the Hotel Quito Intercontinental in the capital.

1969. Another FM license was requested, and HCTT1 signed on in 1968 with a mix of paid embassy programming and classical music. Within a year, a weekend rock program had proven itself so successful that the station became the first contemporary FM in South America, playing the latest Stones, Beatles and Zeppelin cuts.

During this same year, the original three Quito AM stations installed simulcast transmitters on FM. The 5 stations in Quito accounted for nearly half of all radio audience in the market. During the period between 1964 and 1969, I was sole owner, manager, group programmer and sales manager, as well as chief engineer.

Such multi-functioned owner-operator descriptions were common. One owner in Quito, Numa Pompilio Castro of Radio Cosmopolita, also did his station's morning show where he would identify himself as "Numa Pompilio Castro, dueño, propietario, locutor y portero" or "Owner, operator, announcer and janitor."

With the announcement of the discovery of petroleum in the Orient to the East of the Andes and the construction of a pipeline, I applied for and was granted AM stations in Lago Agrio (in the jungle) and Bahía de Caraquez (at the pipeline's end on the Pacific. I also built a mini-Musical in Ambato on 1480 and licensed but never built Radio Musical 840 AM in Tulcán.

1970. The economic situation in Ecuador looked to be rapidly deteriorating, with runaway inflation, currency controls and shortages of everything. For 6 months, I lived in Washington, D.C. while preparing for the F.C.C. First Class Radiotelephone operator’s license. At the same time, joined EZ Communications as operations manager for WEZR in suburban Fairfax, Virginia as well as assisting in the transition of the company’s WEZS in Richmond from classical music programming to Beautiful Music. Additionally, I did market research and community ascertainment for an application to construct a new Class B FM in the Norfolk, Virginia area.

1970. The economic situation in Ecuador looked to be rapidly deteriorating, with runaway inflation, currency controls and shortages of everything. For 6 months, I lived in Washington, D.C. while preparing for the F.C.C. First Class Radiotelephone operator’s license. At the same time, joined EZ Communications as operations manager for WEZR in suburban Fairfax, Virginia as well as assisting in the transition of the company’s WEZS in Richmond from classical music programming to Beautiful Music. Additionally, I did market research and community ascertainment for an application to construct a new Class B FM in the Norfolk, Virginia area.
The objective of this move to the U.S. was to establish a relationship with a company that was rapidly expanding into FM broadcasting and in which a substantial investment would be possible upon the sale of stations in South America.

While in the Washington DC area, I took the FCC First Class licence exam.

1970. Unable to immediately sell the stations, returned to Ecuador and in partnership with the Bank of Guayaquil, built individual AM stations in Cuenca, Quito and Guayaquil, the country’s top 3 markets. (My associate and partner in this venture, Attorney Jaime Nebot Saadi, was the leading presidential candidate in the 1996 elections and is presently the Mayor of Guayaquil) The Guayaquil station, using the Canal Tropical format from Quito, quickly rose to #1 in the million plus market of Guayaquil.
Failure of Bank of Guayaquil (closely associated with 1970’s losing political party, the CFP), and dangerous political unrest forced a hasty emergency departure from Ecuador, in late 1970.


The Radio Musical-sponsored Mini in the Ecuador cross country motor racing event in 1967. Ing. Eduardo Cruz drove the car. To the left, Ing. Cruz next to another of his vehicles which I helped sponsor, the HCTT "Teleonda Musical" VW. HCTT1 was Ecuador's and the Bolivarian nations' first FM station.

Finally, I want to mention all the fine people who were part of the Núcleo Radión team from 1964 to 1970.
Guillermo Jácome Jiménez Jorge Endara Pepe Rosenfeld Gabriel Espinosa de los Monteros Pedro Chassi Roberto García Ulpiano Orozco Jorge Obando Jorge Obando Edwin Almeida Marañon (QEPD) Lucho Castellanos Fabricio Cifuentes Patricio Toro Vicente Córdova Mary Lou Parra	Fausto Vallejo Patricio Moncayo Ing. Fred Simon (Telco) Ing. Eduardo Cruz (QEPD) Ing. Al Horvath Alberto Rivadeneira Byron Guerra Matilde Lalama Marco Díaz Susana Játiva Patricio Moncayo ... and many more. (If underlined, there is a link to more about this person)

HCRM 1 transmitter site in Bellavista overlooking Quito.
This station fell silent in 1996, 32 years after making radio history
as the first Top 40 station in all South America.