OK, This Is A New One

[Kevin Vahey]

I highly doubt the 1510 towers are 350 feet high.



On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 6:25 PM, Laurence Glavin <lglavin@mail.com> wrote:

> Numerous AM stations with higher than just one- or five thousand watts
> occasionally promote their
> power during their broadcast day, especially 50,000-watt stations. FMs are
> less likely to do so because at least in
> areas of the country where 50K is the upper limit, they often run a lesser
> true ERP from atop skyscrapers and
> mountaintops. Here in Boston, WGBH-FM often announces that its tower is on
> Great Blue Hill, but I
> don't recall any mention of their granfathered 100K power authorization.
> But until today (Thursday, 05/02)
> I don't think any AM station referenced its TOWER HEIGHT. But I was just
> checking out WUFC-AM 1510
> to see if they were getting any calls (very few) during the much
> ballyhooed Pete Sheppard show. After
> he signed off, there was a promo for one of their weekend shows described
> as being scheduled just
> before kickoff (did I mention it''s the month of May?), a promo that
> wasn't ashamed to use the cliche of cliches
> "he tells it like it is". Then came the station ID, that was preceded by
> this fact: "broadcasting with 50,000
> watts on four 350-foot towers". I can't imagine that many of the station's
> listeners (probably not a
> large number) would be impressed by this revelation. Come to think of it,
> at 6:00 pm in May, WUFC is running
> its full daytime pattern, which only requires two towers! So boasting
> about one's tower efficiency is something
> new to me. When I lived in Spokane, I knew someone at the station then
> known as KHQ-AM 590 and
> he personally boasted about the station's 800-foot (180 degree) tower, but
> it was a combined AM
> broadcast antenna AND the supporting tower for KHQ-TV then channel 6. He
> was right that it outperformed
> KXLY-AM 920 by quite a bit (another fulltime 5,000-watt NDA) and KGA-AM
> 1510 (what a coincidence) which
> ran 50,000 watts NDA during the daytime via a quarter-wave tower. If I
> drove 70 or 80 miles from Spokane, KGA and KXLY
> practically disappeared by KHQ held on (eastern Washington State is a bit
> flat however). To the best of my
> recollection, KHQ-AM never promoted its tower height.
>