WSMN Sold And Expected Back On The Air Soon

[Dan Strassberg]

It's unclear to me whether WSMN can find a suitable daytime site for
anything more than a temporary operation. Based on the radiation in the
former three-tower-pattern minima, nighttime operation with around 25W from
the 900 tower should be perfectly legal. This would be consistent with a
Class D AM, which has no responsibility to cover anything at night. It's OK
if the ends of the ground radials are beyond the NIF contour ;>(. Probably
not too good if the power is so low that you have to stand inside the
protective fence around the tower base to get a usable signal ;>) But days
are a different problem. Maybe not for a temporary operation under STA but
certainly for a license, a station has to radiate an inverse-distance field
of at least 140.7 mV/m @ 1 km. This is the equivalent of 250W into a tower
of about 56 degrees in height with a standard ground system (120 radials 90
degrees in length). By my calculations, such a tower needs to be only 96'
high at 1590 and could be even shorter if top loaded. From WSMN's old site,
the station could run only about 25W if it had been nondirectional. The 900
tower is only 1.5 miles north of WSMN's old site. I suspect that WSMN's 25
microvolt/meter contour (important for protection of WARV) and its 0.25 mV/m
contour (important for protecting WUNR) would encroach more deeply into the
protected coverage of those two stations if WSMN were to run 250W days from
the 900 tower. So although the FCC might allow WSMN to operate temporarily
from the 900 tower with more than 25W-D, I doubt whether a license would be
granted for 250W-D or anything close. Since finding a site for a DA sounds
like a completely forlorn hope, WSMN's best hope would appear to be to find
an existing tower (cell tower) in or near the north end of Nashua, get
permission from the tower owner to add a skirt-fed Folded Uniple antenna to
the tower and hope that 250W-D or thereabouts would work put the requisite
signal over Nashua while reducing interference to WARV and WUNR.
Alternatively, two 100' towers somewhere in South Nashua might be
satisfactory if a site could be found where the neighbors didn't hold up the
project for years. Such an operation would have a reasonable chance of being
allowed enough daytime power to actually cover Nashua with the requisite 5
mV/m daytime signal.

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Laurence Glavin" <lglavin@lycos.com>
To: "Mark Watson" <markwats@comcast.net>; "Boston Radio"
<boston-radio-interest@rolinin.BostonRadio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: WSMN Sold And Expected Back On The Air Soon


> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Mark Watson" <markwats@comcast.net>
> >To: "Boston Radio" <boston-radio-interest@rolinin.BostonRadio.org>
> >Subject: WSMN Sold And Expected Back On The Air Soon
> >Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2005 20:55:36 -0400
>
> >
> >    Today's (7/1) Nashua NH Telegraph reports that WSMN (1590
> > Nashua) has been sold by current owners WSMN Broadcasting LLC to
> > Absolute Broadcasting, who also own WSNH (900 Nashua). Thomas
> > Monahan, head of Absolute Broadcasting, sais he pursued the sale to
> > keep WSMN from being sold to a national company.
> >
> >    WSMN has been dark since Jan. 31 after the W.Hollis St. property
> > that the studios and towers were located was sold to developers
> > planning to build housing on the land. Monahan hopes to have WSMN
> > on the air again by Aug.15th. from a temporary transmitter site
> > while looking for a permanent site, and plans to have a mix of
> > local news, talk, music...
>
> One quick question:  if there's a market in Nashua for at
> least ONE locally-oriented AM radio station, why not do
> it on AM 900 and keep the problematic 1590 frequency dark?
> Or maybe put a 250-watt NDA on 1590 in a place like Milford as a
>  back-fill-in
> for AM 900?  OK that's two quick questions.
>
> --
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