Re: WMEX/WITS/WMRE

[Dan Strassberg <dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net>]

At 12:00 AM 3/19/99 -0500, you wrote:
> 
>It occurs to me to wonder, if they had kept the power at 5,000 watts, 
>might they have found a new transmitter site where they might actually 
>have had better signal coverage, even with the lower power.
>
In retrospect, the thing to have done was to keep the day site in Squantum
and move the night site to Waltham. This would have cost an extra $250,000
or so (cost of one more 50-kW AM TX) plus the ongoing cost of the real
estate taxes on the Quincy site. Because of CJRS and WLAC/WNLC, covering the
market at night meant moving north and west. But with a facility licensed to
Boston on a high-on the-dial frequency like 1510 with bad co- and
adjacent-channel interference, once you get away from the water, you have to
get _well_ back, to put the maximum population in front of the pattern. But,
in those days, you couldn't go too far because of the requirement for a 25
mV/m signal over the main Post Office. The 50 kW power and a site in or near
Waltham were virtual necessities.

I can imagine that a lot of engineers would also have thought the Waltham
site to be a better day site. The taller towers effectively almost doubled
the power. From either site, the day signal was beamed broadly to the
northeast, and from Quincy, it went right out over Massachusetts Bay, making
it the strongest Boston signal in Yarmouth NS. From Waltham, the signal went
over the market first. Nevertheless, the 50 kW day signal from Quincy was
OK. It covered the market pretty well because the signal to the sides and
slightly behind the pattern reached most of the population--much of it via
salt water. At the time the CP for Waltham was granted, the station also had
on file with the FCC _another_, earlier application to modify the
non-critical hours day pattern from Quincy to slightly improve coverage to
the southwest. Waltham turned out to be a disaster because of the high costs
of remediating interference, the landlord's incursions onto the ground
system, the fact that the soil conductivity was apparently much worse than
the preliminary measurements had indicated, and, of course, the ongoing cost
of leasing the land.

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Dan Strassberg (Note: Address is CASE SENSITIVE!)
ALL _LOWER_ CASE!!!--> dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net
(617) 558-4205; Fax (617) 928-4205

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