Professor Doolittle rolls over in his grave (Was Re: WMMW sold)

[mwaters@wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Howard Glazer wrote:
>Today's Meriden, CT, Record-Journal reports the sale of WMMW(AM) 1470 to
>Buckley Broadcasting. Buckley plans to convert the leased,
>locally-programmed Spanish station to a relay transmitter for WDRC's
>standards programming.

        I submit this as exhibit A showing that the AM band is hopelessly
overcrowded and drowning in nighttime interference. The antennas of these
two stations are only 18 miles apart. WDRC (AM) is 5 kW, non-DA day, two
towers night, with 150-degree towers, and its pattern does not put a severe
null over  Meriden, which is just about south-southwest of it. The RMS
field listed by the FCC does not fall below the pattern RMS of 798 until
you reach 205 degrees (where's it's 738), which by my rough estimation is a
little west of Meriden. At 210 degrees, the RMS is 650. It then drops
rapidly to a low at 290 degrees. This explains the need for the Waterbury
and Torrington relay transmitters, as this null is toward both those
cities.
        But the problem in Meriden is that WDRC is bombed with
interference, despite the fact that the station dates from the 1920s and
its full-time 5 kW dates from the 1930s. So Buckley felt compelled to spend
$630,000 for a 2.5 kW, DA-2 signal on 1470 that, in the daytime, I wager,
has a big majority of its 0.5 mV contour within the 0.5 mV contour of WDRC
or WWCO/Waterbury. At night, WMMW's 2.5 kW provides a very limited
interference-free signal--maybe a roughly 10-mile radius. But since WDRC
(AM) doesn't cover the city of Meriden very well at night and is
unlistenable in the adjoining town of Wallingford (my town) to the south of
Meriden, there's a gain there. And WDRC used to have a usable signal at
this distance to the south. When my wife was growing up in Wallingford in
the 1960s, she was a faithful nighttime listener to a not-yet-famous Joey
Reynolds and the other WDRC jocks on her cheap little transistor radio.

        My Doolittle reference is to the founder of WDRC, started out of
his home in New Haven in 1922, with different calls at first. He was a
professor at Yale. The calls stand for Doolittle Radio Company. It's the
oldest surviving radio station in Connecticut. It moved to Hartford around
1930 so it could get a CBS affiliation, which the network would not give to
a New Haven station because it was too close to NYC.

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