WGBH-FM, WRCA

[dan.strassberg@att.net]

Today's FCC actions show that WGBH-FM has refiled its application to move to 
the WBZ-TV tower with 21 kW at 323m HAAT and that WRCA has finally filed the 
other half of its application to change COL to Watertown, move to the WUNR site 
in Newton along with WKOX, and to increase day power to 25 kW. An application 
to move night operations to the same site and increase night power to 17 kW was 
filed approximately a year ago.

WGBH-FM's ammended application purportedly demonstrates that, although its 
proposed site is much closer than its present site to WZBC, when you consider 
the existing prohibited overlap between WBUR-FM and WZBC and the existing 
prohibited overlap between WGBH-FM and WZBC, fewer people in WZBC's normally 
protected 60 dBu service area will receive any prohibited overlap. The reason 
for this seeming contradiction is that many people who now receive prohibited 
overlap from WGBH-FM will be free of such overlap, whereas many people who will 
receive new prohibited overlap from WGBH-FM already receive such overlap from 
WBUR-FM.

As for WRCA, you gotta hope that the station is proposing this idiotoc move 
because it is under tremendous pressure to vacate from 750 South St in Waltham. 
As I predicted before I saw any coverage maps, the big power increase buys a 
substantial loss of coverage and hardly any areas of improvement. If Beasley is 
proposing this move just so that it can say that WRCA is a 25 kW station, good 
luck to them! Beasley has never been known as an operation whose management had 
an overly generous endowment of brainpower, but this application seems to prove 
management's stupidity beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, if WRCA has 
to move, management has litle choice of where the station can move. Moreover, 
it's scarcely a foregone conclusion that the necessary environmental approvals 
can ever be obtained for construction of the five towers that WUNR, WRCA, and 
WKOX propose to share at the WUNR site. (WKOX would share only three of the 
five towers.) 

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