WXKW Albany

[Dan.Strassberg]

I don't think WGY would have had a leg to stand on if it had sued.
There are no restrictions on contour overlap of fourth-adjacent AMs
(and AFAIK, at least since NARBA, there never have been any). That's
why the WGY-KOA connection was so important in this saga. As I pointed
out in my previous post, GE once also owned KOA, which was co-channel
with WXKW. Because of KOA's common heritage, it was easy for WGY to
secure the cooperation of the Denver station. As Class IB station
co-channel with WXKW, KOA could legitimately protest interference from
WXKW's nighttime signal to its protected 0.5 mV/m 50% skywave service,
which by the formulas the FCC then used, extended much closer to
Albany than it now does.

BTW, WXKW was 10 kW DA-1, six towers, in-line, end-fire. The complex
in-line end-fire array was a major part of the problem. Six-tower
in-lines are relatively rare even today, and modern ones are, by
design, never quite in-line. True in lines with a lot of towers are
finicky and have a tendency to have high RSS/RMS ratios, which are a
predictor of stability problems. Most six-tower arrays are 3X2
broadside designs. Reconstructing the WXKW array as a 3X2 broadside
was apparently not an option because it would have required acquiring
adjacent land. There was a plan to reconstruct the array as a 3X2
end-fire, but that probably would not have worked either; 3X2 end
fires do not null as deeply as do broadsides along the radials normal
to the pattern axis, and it was the null to the west of the northerly
main lobe that was the problem.

-----
Dan Strassberg (dan.strassberg@att.net)
eFax 1-707-215-6367

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Doherty" <dave@skywaves.net>
To: "Matthew Osborne" <mattosborne1976@yahoo.com>
Cc: <boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 9:07 PM
Subject: Re: WXKW Albany


>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Matthew Osborne" <mattosborne1976@yahoo.com>
> To: "Dave Doherty" <dave@skywaves.net>
> Cc: <boston-radio-interest@bostonradio.org>
> Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 7:28 PM
> Subject: Re: WXKW Albany
>
>
>>
>> Actually, I believe they were indeed on AM 850 - co-channel to
>> WHDH, and only 40 kc above WGY.  The story I heard was that the
>> moment they first went on the air WGY immediately filed lawsuits
>> and FCC complaints that they were interfering with them, which
>> prevented them from ever getting beyond the Special Temporary
>> Authority phase of licensing.  That is what doomed them...
>>
>> That's a neat story about recording the signal level toward
>> Boston - I had never heard it before, but it makes perfect sense
>> given the frequency used.
>>
>>                                         Matt Osborne
>>                                         Rotterdam, NY
>>
>> --- On Thu, 8/13/09, Dave Doherty <dave@skywaves.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I heard some stories about WXKW when working with some of
>>> the old timers in Albany early in my career.
>>>
>>> The broad picture I got was that it was basically doomed
>>> from the start because they could never make the pattern
>>> work, and the Thruway made them an offer they couldn't
>>> refuse for their property sometime around 1954.
>>>
>>> One story I heard was that every hour they had to switch to
>>> 10W-ND for a few seconds to record the signal level in the
>>> direction of Boston at some remote logging site. That would
>>> have put them on 840 or 860, I guess, because they were
>>> somewhere in the 800's and they certainly could not have
>>> been co-channel to WHDH.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>