Re: Today's L(garble)T(garble)A(garble)R

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

Adam said that WHYN consistently pulls the highest ratings among all Western
MA AMs. Now, if Springfield, Holyoke, and other communities in the
Connecticut Valley but inside of Massachusetts constitute the area covered
by the ratings, I can understand that. WHYN does come in well in those
communities. But, to me, Western MA also includes places such as Pittsfield,
North Adams, Great Barrington, and Williamstown. If those communities figure
prominently in the ratings that Adam mentioned, I don't understand WHYN's
dominance. WHYN does not have a good signal in those communities. Indeed,
WHYN doesn't even put a signal into some of them--even during the day. The
Springfield-area station that does cover those places pretty well by day is
WNNZ. As Laurence pointed out, WHYN's signal is directed toward the
southeast. During the day, but not at night, WNNZ's signal covers a fairly
broad arc to the northwest

As for the meaning of null, in AM radio, it is a term used to describe a
place in the station's directional pattern where the signal strength is
attenuated (weakened). In directional AM stations, reception in the nulls is
often characterized by very noticeable phasing (short for phase distortion).
Phase distortion occurs when the sidebands are not attenuated uniformly over
the entire range of frequencies the signal occupies. A common result is a
signal that is audible but unintelligible. Now, if the idea that a radio
signal that carries information occupies a range of frequencies (as opposed
to just a single frequency) is foreign to you, I can't help. I had to go to
college for six years to get a BSEE and an MSEE and I've been learning more
about the subject for the 43 years since I got out of graduate school. I
can't regurgitate everything I've learned in one or even a few e-mail
messages.

I do, however, kind of resent seeing terms such as null denigrated as
technical jargon. This is a technological age. One needs a certain level of
familiarity with technology, or at least the vocabulary of technology, to
function at all. I believe that the term null is familiar even to
nontechnical people who use cell phones. Or maybe cell-phone users refer to
nulls as drop-outs. At the much higher frequencies at which cell phones
operate (as much as 4000 times as high as the frequencies at which AM
stations operate), nulls result not from the use of directional transmitting
antennas, but from propagation problems, such as obstructions between the
transmitter and the receiver.

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

----- Original Message -----
From: <anastasi@javanet.com>
To: <lglavin@lycos.com>; <boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org>
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2001 2:50 PM
Subject: Re: Today's L(garble)T(garble)A(garble)R


>
> "Laurence Glavin" <lglavin@lycos.com> wrote on
>  Sunday, December 23, 2001 1:31 PM
>
> > MY observation about a New England-based station with the same problem:
> > WHYN-AM 560 in Springfield, MA.
>
> Laurence, not being an engineer I have no idea what the word "null" means
or
> even a clue about what you just said in plain English.