WTIC signal (Was Re: somehow at 7 AM it doesn't seem right)

[Martin Waters]

--- Scott Fybush <scott@fybush.com> wrote: 
> Walk around our ballpark here on a nice summer
> evening and you'll see 
> just as many Red Sox hats and T-shirts (if not more,
> sometimes) than 
> Yankees...yet the Yankees get massive radio, TV and
> newspaper coverage 
> here and we Sox fans have to settle for table scraps
> and WTIC 
> skywave...sigh...

    Better than settling for WTIC's groundwave in
Wallingford, Conn., 25 miles -- tops -- from the
antenna. Its signal is so bad to start with (who
decided to put an AM antenna on top of a rocky, very
well-drained ridge, anyhow?)that it's susceptible to
interfering skywaves from -- who knows where. The
Florida station is a prime suspect. And, way before
HD, even that close it gets slop from WBAL, which
thunders in.

    'TIC fades and phases on a regular basis. And I
think that's too close to be getting any skywave. So,
it's just -- well -- annoying. I could always move to
Pennsylvania and get a killer signal . . .

     I never have figured their antenna location. They
went up on Avon Mountain right around 2930 -- like the
day after the vertical antenna was invented. Back
then, vast amounts of swamp land were just waiting to
become AM transmitter sites. 

    Connecticut broadcast historian Mike Collins told
me once that in the '60s WTIC had a plan to move the
antenna to a swamp on the Connecticut River 10 or 15
miles south of Hartford -- which would have solved
their problem with a bad signal in New Haven, day and
night. But it never happened.

    They could solve the New Haven problem and the bad
signal at night in Waterbury problem (in the bullseye
of their null to Dallas) by moving to a spot southwest
of Hartford, like Southington. But they've never asked
me . . .