WBUR Cape Cod now broadcasting on 89.1 FM, WBUH Brewster

[Jeff Lehmann]

A friend of mine was thinking that it possibly has to do with the amount of hazardous signal (or whatever the proper term is) reaching the ground around the tower due to the low height. The theory was that a horizontal only signal wouldn't send as much signal to the ground below the extremely low antenna as a circular pattern would.

Not sure if this is the real reason or not, but wanted to throw it out there.

Jeff Lehmann

> On May 28, 2014, at 11:14 PM, Scott Fybush <scott@fybush.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 5/28/2014 6:15 PM, Laurence Glavin wrote:
>> 
>> Everything written about this facility has pointed to a fair amount
>> of haste top get the station on-the-air STAT.  WBUR has invested in a
>> transmitter, horizontal-suelement only antenna and rental of a tower,
>> I assume for some period of time.  I suspect that the FCC will some
>> day receive an application to upgrade the facility, at least by
>> adding a circularly-polarized antenna and maybe a top-mounted stick
>> with greater altitude.
> 
> I don't know why WBUH was built h-pol only. There's nothing about the required protections to other stations that mandates h-pol only. WBUH's tightest protection is to WERS, and it clears it by virtue of the fact that the overlap between the two stations' 54 dBu protected contours falls over water off the South Shore. If WBUH were to raise antenna height, it would have to reduce power accordingly so that the overlap doesn't hit land, which it would do somewhere around Marshfield. In this case, there's probably little to be gained from trading height for power; there's certainly not any terrain on the Cape to be overcome.
> 
> It's not an issue of channel 6 protection, as it would once have been; in that case, WBUH might have been built v-pol only, if it would have fit at all within the protected contour of WLNE.
> 
> As quickly as WBUH had to be built in the window between acquiring the CP from Home Improvement Ministries and the CP expiration date, it was not built in haste. Mike LeClair and his engineering team at WBUR knew what they were doing, and I'm sure they had a reason for h-pol only.
> 
> Perhaps it was to alleviate multipath from the signal refracting over the bay as it travels between the transmitter site and the mid-Cape? Or perhaps it was just to reduce the amount of transmitter power output needed to make the desired (and rather high) ERP? I know it was already a rush for the transmitter manufacturer to deliver a high-power transmitter on short notice at the TPO needed for the h-only signal.
>