Re: WVBF

[Rob Landry <umar@wcrb.com>]

On Sat, 3 May 1997, SteveOrdinetz wrote:

> >Funny thing, here in N.H. the signal deteriorated when they did that.  In
> the old 'KOX-FM days they came in loud and clear on any crappy old clock
> radio, after the move reception was much iffier.

Their antenna was side-mounted on the Stainless tower, which has (if I
recall right) a 10-foot face.  The side of a wide-face tower is a terrible
place for a conventional FM antenna; you often get deep nulls (20 dB or
more) in the coverage pattern. 

One day in '82 or '83 while visiting the Stainless tower to check on
WBOS's transmitter, I found a tower crew moving WVBF's antenna around on
the tower.  According to one of the tower guys they were trying to
maximize the signal strength in the directon of WVBF's general manager's
house, so he would stop bitching about reception problems. 

There's only one way to get decent coverage from the side of a big tower,
and that's to use a "panel" antenna that wraps around the tower.  We
installed one for WCRB in May, 1988, after we'd made some mesurements of
the old antenna's coverage which revealed a "maple leaf" pattern with a
couple of really deep nulls (the ERP in the direction of Harvard Square
was found to be 41.8 watts). The new panel antenna added 900,000 people to
WCRB's 60 dBu coverage area. 

I suppose we could have moved to the Pru, as did WMJX, but the center of
population in the Boston market is Middlesex County, not Boston, and we
didn't want to sacrifice our suburban coverage.  I still think we made the
right decision.  Moving to the Pru would have cost us half a million
dollars and might have taken years (cf. 96.9).

Rob Landry
umar@wcrb.com

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