WBZ Coverage

[Martin Waters]

 Mark Casey wrote:
>WBZ's directional signal pattern toward the West, creates a slight null 
>directly to the east, just above Provincetown, affecting the southern coast 
>of Nova Scotia very little. Still, WBZ has a very good signal at 
>Provincetown, but there are other Boston AM stations that are louder there.
    I once did some amateur math on the back of a napkin and figured that WBZ's pattern sends around the equivalent of 90 or 100 kW at its strongest point, which is very close to due west. The null on the backside is not at all slight. It' almost total, but only over a narrow section of the compass close to due east. The only reason it gets to Provincetown is the salt water. But rolling off a ferry in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, one morning, well after sunrise, the ground wave was clear and steady.

Kevin Vahey wrote:>My recollection is 1030 would become unlistenable at night near Sturbridge
>but around Exit 2 in Lee it would lock in and it would be the strongest
>signal on the dial all the way to Chicago.
    I don't usually experience these signal problems on car radios. Going east on the Pike, by the time I reach the Sturbridge rest area, at night, WBZ is solid, same as daytime. And it sounds decent -- without any serious ground wave/sky wave interference -- from around the Ellington truck stop on I-84 in Connecticut, or even farther out.
    This applies to about two hours or more after sunset. It's been my experience that the interference is noticeable mainly when the sky wave is weak and fluctuating just before and after sunset. And, it's possible that folks are hearing sky-wave interference from the several stations to the west on 1030 that don't go to mini-power or shut off until their local sunset, which is later by as much as around an hour, maybe more in some cases. The FCC plays make-believe about such interfering sky waves, but the sky waves didn't get the memo and they show up anyway. Sometimes you don't hear any audio signal, just fluctuating noise, "beating."
    IMO, once the WBZ sky wave builds up and remains steady nearly 100 percent of the time, it sort of "takes over" from the ground wave way out here on the edge of the usable ground wave zone. At my house near New Haven, WBZ's signal is overall better at night than during the day. I'm almost out to the0.1 millivolt ground wave contour, but at 115 miles from WBZ, I'm far enough away to get a decent sky wave.