102.5 to Spanish? Nahhh.....

[Scott Fybush]

At 03:06 PM 12/18/2005, Stephanie Weil wrote:

>On Sun, December 18, 2005 10:48, Garrett Wollman said:
>
> >
> > Oh, very much so.  That's why 102.5 is a $100M signals and 99.5 is
> > thought to be worth much less than that --
>
>Why can't the operator of the 99.5 FM transmitter move it to the Pru ...
>or even John Hancock building?
>
>Wouldn't it make sense to have your FM stations on the highest buildings
>in the city?

It sure would, but there are two issues.

First - 99.5 is licensed to Lowell, so any site it uses has to 
maintain 70 dBu coverage of substantially all of Lowell. That's a 
challenge to accomplish from Boston.

Second, and more critically - there's WPLM-FM in Plymouth on 99.1. 
Full spacing between two class B stations on second-adjacent channels 
is 74 km. It's 87.4 km from Wood Hill in Andover to the WPLM site in 
Plymouth. The next sizable tower location to the south is the WMKK 
tower in Peabody, and that's only 67 km from WPLM.

The FCC allows short spacing under certain circumstances, if the use 
of a directional antenna by one or both stations can prevent each 
station's 54 dBu contour from touching the other station's 94 dBu 
contour. WPLM's 54 dBu contour covers most of the obvious sites 
closer in to Boston, and even some of the less obvious ones.

Third, any station on 99.5 has to maintain 15 km spacing from WERS on 
88.9, which further restricts any opportunity to use a site closer in 
to the city.

There are less-obvious ways to move 99.5 closer in to Boston than it 
presently is...but that's the domain of expensive consultants (or at 
least me, with my billable-hours hat on :-)

s