WEIM Format Change

[Dan Strassberg]

WADO may have a huge night signal with 7.2 kW, but the pattern is WAY
narrower than the old 5 kW pattern. I suspect that WADO's upgrade may
actually have lowered WEIM's NIF value. If I'm not mistaken, though, WEIM
uses only three towers--not the four that Mark reported--and it appears that
a fourth tower could be added with no new land, producing a narrower
pattern, by removing the center tower of the existing three-tower array and
replacing it with two towers, creating a four-tower in-line array with
2/3 the spacing between towers of the current three-tower setup. That is
exactly what WELI did 40 or more years ago. Now, four-tower in-line arrays,
though quite common, do have their problems. They tend to have high RSS/RMS
ratios, which make for narrow bandwidth and poor stability. A four-tower
rectangle or parallelogram with spacing of approximately half-wave
side-to-side and approximately quarter wave front to back is a clearly
better design but would almost certainly require additional land. I find it
not inconceivable that WEIM could increase to 10 kW-U. With narrow patterns,
that could make it a factor on the northwestern fringes of the Boston market
(in wealthy places like Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington) where it might be
able to compete successfully with WMKI's IBOC sidebands.

Dan Strassberg, Contributing Editor
EDN Magazine | Reed Electronics Group | www.edn.com
Fax 707-215-6367 | StrassbergEDN@att.net
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Fybush" <scott@fybush.com>
To: "Mark Watson" <markwats@comcast.net>
Cc: "Boston Radio" <boston-radio-interest@rolinin.bostonradio.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2006 7:12 PM
Subject: Re: WEIM Format Change


>
> I don't know how they'd manage to get much usable power on 1280 after
> dark. WADO's night signal out of NYC is huge since their power increase
> a decade or so ago.
>
> s
>