Soxless Boss

[Dan Strassberg]

Cape Cod too. WRKO is almost local there because so much of the path from
Burlington is over salt water; WEEI is barely audible on the Cape at night.
In AM, transmitter location, directional pattern and frequency are VERY
important. WRKO has a substantial edge on all counts. When Hildreth picked
the Burlington site for WLAW--presumably before World War II--he picked the
best available site in the area for a full-time AM, especially given the
fact that he was siting a station in Lawrence that was really designed to
serve Boston. WBZ has a better site but that site works so well because
WBZ is the only Boston AM that's directional to the west. The WROL site,
which used to be WHDH's 5 kW site, is great too because the signal reaches
so much of the market via salt water. Putting an ND station there is not so
bizarre (when it was 5 kW, WHDH was ND days), but putting a station that was
directional to the east (as WHDH was at night) in a site that is (north)
east of the COL, was definitely an example of brilliant out-of-the-box
thinking decades before the term out-of-the-box thinking was coined. I
rather doubt that the Saugus site would have worked for the larger
three-tower array that WHDH built when it increased to 50 kW, but
conventional thinking took over and WHDH moved to Needham. I suspect that a
key reason was that, had the 50 kW WHDH remained in Saugus, the big power
increase would not have bought any improvement in coverage to the west. The
station had to directionalize to keep the signal to the west about where it
was with the lower power (at least at night). Moving westward and
directionalizing to the east was the obvious way to take advantage of the
higher power. But unlike the Burlington site, the Needham site gets no
advantages from salt water.

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "R Trovato" <xtrovato@yahoo.com>
To: "Sean Smyth" <ssmyth@suscom.net>
Cc: <bri@bostonradio.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 3:33 AM
Subject: Re: Soxless Boss


>
> > >Bostonradiowatch.com is reporting that the games will be
> > >moving from WEEI to WRKO.  How does this make any sense?
>
> WRKO has a better reach into Southern NH than WEEI does.
>
> That to me is the only difference.