Re: 1060/1200

["Daniel Strassberg" <Dan.Strassberg@worldnet.att.net>]

The towers are 440' high--198--degrees and are umbrella (guy-wire)
top-loaded to an electrical height of 225 degrees. I think the engineers
have to have considered using the tall towers as part of the proposed
50-kW-U arrays. Here are the problems: Canadian Class Bs receive
daytime-skywave protection from US Class B's. The Ottawa station (CFGO?)
would have to be protected from daytime skywave. From what I can tell,
there's no way to do that in an array that uses the tall towers. WKOX could
run 50 kW DA from the tall towers during noncritical daytime hours, however.
Contrary to what you said, the proposed 50-kW day pattern puts a somewhat
smaller signal to the north, west, and south than does the current 10
kW-ND-D operation. The daytime signal behind the proposed array must be
based on not increasing the cricitcal-hours skywave toward Ottawa. For the
reason I'm about to describe, I doubt that the engineers felt it would be
worth the cost to install separate D and CH patterns. The second problem
appears to be WLIB, which must put a 0.25 mV/m daytime signal onto the coast
in southern Rhode Island. Without a waiver, WKOX has to protect that
contour. I think the best facilities for 1200 would be diplexed with 1510
and running 50 kW DA-2. Regardless of the COL (Watertown?, Belmont?,
Arlington?), 1200 would become a true Boston signal and would be quite a
valuable property. I would think WKOX, so upgraded, would be worth about $12
million. Of course, the new owners (who apparently have not yet taken
posession) may have agreed to pay more than that.

--

Dan Strassberg, dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net
Phone: 1-617-558-4205, eFax:1-707-215-6367

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin J. Waters <mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu>
To: Dan.Strassberg@worldnet.att.net <Dan.Strassberg@worldnet.att.net>
Cc: boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org
<boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org>
Date: Saturday, October 23, 1999 1:24 PM
Subject: Re: 1060/1200


>        IMO, the best opportunity anyone has for creating a new major
>fulltime AM signal for the Boston market is with the WKOX CP or some
>modification of it. I'll put aside the question of why bother, so I can
>back sooner to my workshop where I'm developing an improved buggy whip <g>.
>        A way to improve the WKOX CP, IMO, would be to keep the two
>existing tall towers and add to them as necessary (the CP calls for two
>towers daytime and three towers nighttime). The FCC data seems to suggest
>that the CP provides for their replacement. No tower height is shown for
>the current operation, but we know they're very tall and the daytime non-DA
>RMS is a very high 432--indicative of something around half-wave towers.
>The CP specifies electrical height of 85.6 degrees, and the
>latitude-longitude is very slightly different. It seems significantly more
>costly to demolish two large towers and build three new ones than to add to
>what you have. However, maybe they did it that way because they need to
>shorten the towers to cut down skywave interference to some other
>station(s).
>