WKBR (was: Has The Mouse Gone HD?)

[Dan Strassberg]

Well, that doesn't necessarily have to happen. The best-known case of an AM
DA coexisting with an industrial use is outside Los Angeles, where KTNQ 1020
and KXTA 1150 share a five-tower array (half-wave at 1020; better than 200
degrees at 1150) with a huge one-story warehouse whose roof hosts the ground
system. Both stations run 50 kW (KXTA is officially 44 kW at night) and the
warehouse was built around the towers years after they had already been
constructed. (Actually, KXTA's diplex with KTNQ was constructed years after
the warehouse went up.) I assume (but don't know) that the warehouse
surrounds the guy-wire anchor points in the same way that it surrounds the
tower bases. I suppose that the towers could have been re-guyed when the
warehouse went up, but that sounds more expensive then just building the
warehouse around the anchors.

Although the tower bases are on the ground, not on top of the warehouse, I
suppose that the ground system on the warehouse roof qualifies this
installation as a rooftop DA. If so, it's not the only one in the US. A
small 1510 station (KMZT 8 kW-D/230W-N DA-2) licensed to Piedmont, in Marin
County, north of the Golden Gate Bridge, has its five-element DA atop a
warehouse near the waterfont in Oakland. In this case, the warehouse was
there before the antenna. The station recently added night service and added
the fifth element to the array, which consists of four towers arranged in a
parallelogram; the fifth element is a drop wire suspended from the midpoint
of a horizontal wire joining the tops of the two towers on the west side of
the paralellogram.

The point is that, if the land is sufficiently valuable, there are ways of
sharing its use. My guess is that Silberberg will retain ownership of the
land and will lease it for a long period to the owners of the industrial
park. That should provide him with a way of preventing misuse of the land
(as when the owners of the 411 Waverley Oaks Industrial Park in Waltham
mounted lights to illuminate their parking lot on the newly constructed and
not-yet-in-use towers of what was then WITS). Also, the rent that Silberberg
receives on the land should pay for the cost of running the radio
station--assuming that he never finds a way to make money from selling
advertising on the station.

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

----- Original Message -----
From: SteveOrdinetz <steveord@bit-net.com>
To: <boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 12, 2004 8:07 AM
Subject: WKBR (was: Has The Mouse Gone HD?)


> Laurence Glavin wrote:
> >I was scanning AM frequencies in the twelves, and noticed horrendous
> >hash on WKBR-AM 1250, Manchester, NH.
> >The honchos at WKBR and
> >WTSN may want to cry "foul" because this interference is occuring
> >about 35 miles north of the WMKI transmitter, almost
> >into NH!
>
>
> I'm wondering what future WKBR has anyway.  Apparently Steve Silberberg
has
> gotten the OK from Goffstown's lack-of-planning board to build an
> industrial park on what is currently WKBR''s tx site.  The site was logged
> off about a year ago, and last weekend I noticed that bulldozers had been
> at work...some of the work seemed awfully close to where the ground system
> would be.  Since that station hasn't had either any appreciable audience
or
> revenue in close to 20 years, the land (45 acres) has gotta be worth far
> more than the license.  I really doubt he (or whoever buys the property)
> really wants a 5 tower DA taking up half the property.
>
>
>