WBIX

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

WBIX was on all night last night with a signal that didn't sound good enough
to be either the normal day or critical-hours signals from the WKOX site in
Framingham. Could this mean that the station is finally testing its 2.5-kW
night signal from the WBPS site in Ashland? Maybe. WBPS has been off the air
on quite a few nights during the last couple of weeks. Conceivably, the
off-air time would have allowed WBIX to install the necessary equipment at
the Ashland site. There is a problem with this hypothesis, however. Last
Sunday 8/18, I visited the Ashland site. The entire area around the tower
bases and the transmitter building is now surrounded by a chain-link fence
topped with razor wire. (The fence must have cost a bloody fortune. It's got
to be about half a mile long.) There is a good vantage point outside the
fence, however, and from it I saw no signs of any recent activity. It would
have been smarter of me to bring along a pair of binoculars, but I didn't
think of that until afterward. Still, I saw no tire tracks on the dirt road
leading up to the fence, no equipment boxes on the ground outside the
transmitter building, no signs of excavation for adding transmission lines,
and no new ATU buildings. The site was, of course, the 1060 site before 890
took it over sometime in the mid 1990s, but most of 1060s equipment was
either removed or converted for use by 890, so it did not appear to be a
simple job to bring 1060 back on the air from the site--even though the
operation is supposed to be limited to nights at relatively modest power.

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