WFME -94.7FM Transmitter

[SonoSational18]

If you moved 94.7 to the ESB it would be farthher away from WJLK so not an issue.  It would be closer to 94.3 in Smithtown as well as co-channel WMAS.  As far as the downgrade to a B1, that would depend.  If your aim was to cover NYC proper it might be an advantage to be lower power but with the stick in Manhattan.  On paper, 94.7 from West Orange still looks pretty good.  The only real downside in coverage is SE Connecticut, far-northern Westchester, and portions of Long Island.

[d21ofnj]

If you haven't looked at the coverage map yet, here you go. 

http://maps.google.com/?q=http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/contourplot.kml?gmap=2%26appid=1438416%26call=WFME%26freq=94.7%26contour=54%26city=NEWARK%26state=NJ.kml

[Scott Fybush]

If you moved 94.7 to the ESB it would be farthher away from WJLK so not an issue.  It would be closer to 94.3 in Smithtown as well as co-channel WMAS.  As far as the downgrade to a B1, that would depend.  If your aim was to cover NYC proper it might be an advantage to be lower power but with the stick in Manhattan.  On paper, 94.7 from West Orange still looks pretty good.  The only real downside in coverage is SE Connecticut, far-northern Westchester, and portions of Long Island.

It seems paradoxical, but WJLK doesn't factor in because it's closer to WFME than WWSK is. WJLK has been short-spaced to WFME (63 km is the current distance) continuously since 1964, and as a result WJLK can move right up next door to WFME - or at least it could if there weren't other stations in play, too.

WWSK is also "pre-1964" short-spaced to both WJLK and WYBC-FM, but not to WFME.

[badjef]

If you moved 94.7 to the ESB it would be farthher away from WJLK so not an issue.  It would be closer to 94.3 in Smithtown as well as co-channel WMAS.  As far as the downgrade to a B1, that would depend.  If your aim was to cover NYC proper it might be an advantage to be lower power but with the stick in Manhattan.  On paper, 94.7 from West Orange still looks pretty good.  The only real downside in coverage is SE Connecticut, far-northern Westchester, and portions of Long Island.

If your aim was to cover Manhattan, the signal overload from existing Empire signals make the coverage maps deceptive. From West Orange, the signal vector is from the side angle, where the Empire signals are (for all intents and purpose of discussion) downward.

WFME blankets Eastern and the Northern Shore of New Jersey very well. But not The City.

Jeff in Sa-ra-so-ta!

[Giacomo Siffredi]

Whether Cumulus attempts to move the 94.7FM signal at all will depend on what their intentions are for the station. The Northern New Jersey audience is a very diverse and, in some regions, a very wealthy one. Foregoing them to capture some Long Island listeners may not justify the costs and maneuvers exhausted on such an endeavor.

Augmenting WFME's stick value is apparently what occupied much of the time spent this year on Mt. Pleasant Avenue in West Orange, NJ. The signal was relocated to the taller tower, specifically to reduce shadowing interference incurred by transmitting from the shorter tower. Family Stations Inc. only accepted the inferior situation for the past 40+ years, and I'm sure the enjoyment of their audience and not the prospect of any future sale was the primary objective in their minds when making this move Nonetheless, the fact may be that by making this move, which included a mandatory power reduction, Family Radio may just have maximized the WFME facility to its fullest potential.

With all due respect, I think many posters here are oversimplifying the situation. Just because 100.3FM moved from a location near to WFME's present location to the Empire State Building in 1983, that does not mean that 94.7FM can do the same thing. Over the past 30+ years, the regulations have changed and the FM band has become more crowded. Crain's reported the WFME sale to be in the neighborhood of $40 million, which is about 53.3% of the 101.9FM transaction between Merlin and CBS. There's a GOOD REASON for that rather large price difference. Perhaps the sale price is reflective of the limitations to this particular FM signal, despite it being situated only about 15 miles west of New York City in Essex County, New Jersey.

[TimeIsTight]

WFME does "blanket" most of NYC very well from West Orange.  Of the eight-million people in NYC, only 1.6-million of them live in Manhattan.  And many of those people live on the Westside, and in the central part of the island where the underlying geology doesn't allow for building skyscrapers.  I'm talking about areas like Greenwich Village, The West Villiage, the Meat Packing District, Chelsea, Soho, Little Italy, Chinatown, Morningside Heights and the Upper West Side.  The signals from West Orange to those folks are not blocked or lost in the canyons of New York, and sometimes in other places the Jersey signals go right along the sidestreets, while the perpendicular signals from the ESB are blocked by buildings in the neighborhood.

Back in the 90s I had a friend who lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side in the area north of the Museum of Natural History.  He was a great fan of Jukebox radio coming off the top of an apartment house on the other side of the river, and up the Hudson in Fort Lee, NJ.  He was doubtful when I informed him that Jukebox Radio was a 35-watt translator, and the Empire State signals he sometimes had trouble receiving clearly were 6-kw.  But that was the case.

There are nearly 16-million people living in the defined New York Radio Market, and only one in ten of them live in Manhattan, and only a fraction of them live in areas where the tall steel buildings wreck their FM reception.  And if you have spent a lot of time in those tall steel buildings you know that broadcast radio signals don't usually penetrate more than a few feet inside the windows even if the signal comes from the ESB, or when it came from the WTC.  From its current location, WFME is not at any more of a disadvantage in those Manhattan buildings than anybody else. 

From WFME's transmitter site you can clearly see across Staten Island and Brooklyn, and up into the Bronx and Westchester.  Sure, there are some people out on Long Island that don't get as good a signal from West Orange as they do from the ESB, but they represent only a small fraction of the total market.  Most radio stations ignore large chucks of the potential market with their formats.  A programmer who decides on a Spanish language format, automatically ignores the vast majority of potential listeners who don't understand Spanish.

Cumulus will just have to ignore that small percentage of the market that can't get the signal, and concentrate on pleasing more of the folks in the areas where it has the strongest signal on the dial.

[ai4i]

I keep hearing the year 1964 repeated.
Is that the year in which B's were upped from 20KW@500' to 50KW@500' (150m)?

[luperm]

Hey!!  97.5 on LI is still (supposedly) for sale. Citadel could buy that and really have a full market combo.

[w9wi]

I keep hearing the year 1964 repeated.
Is that the year in which B's were upped from 20KW@500' to 50KW@500' (150m)?

Basically, what happened in 1964 was a MAJOR change to the FM rules.  Today's power and distance regulations were established.  Stations that were already authorized for facilities that didn't comply with the new rules were allowed to operate under the *old* rules. 

Probably the most important changes in the early 1960s were:
- The establishment of minimum distance separations for stations 400KHz apart.  (94.3 vs. 94.7)  There had been no minimum.
- The establishment of the Class C station.  There was no such thing -- and yes, the limit for Class B was 20kw -- but if you weren't in the northeast, you could ask the FCC to waive the limit and they probably would.  As long as no interference would result, **THERE WAS NO LIMIT TO HOW MUCH POWER COULD BE AUTHORIZED**.  There's where "superpower" stations like the 470kw operation in Grand Rapiuds came from.


See http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2009-title47-vol4/xml/CFR-2009-title47-vol4-sec73-213.xml. (FCC regulation 73.213)

Grandfathered short-spaced stations.

    (a) Stations at locations authorized prior to November 16, 1964, that did not meet the separation distances required by § 73.207 and have remained continuously short-spaced since that time may be modified or relocated with respect to such short-spaced stations, provided that (i) any area predicted to receive interference lies completely within any area currently predicted to receive co-channel or first-adjacent channel interference as calculated in accordance with paragraph (a)(1) of this section, or that (ii) a showing is provided pursuant to paragraph (a)(2) of this section that demonstrates that the public interest would be served by the proposed changes.

[ai4i]

Basically, what happened in 1964 was a MAJOR change to the FM rules.  Today's power and distance regulations were established.  Stations that were already authorized for facilities that didn't comply with the new rules were allowed to operate under the *old* rules.

Thanks, I never knew that.
Were any stations running big power on a class "A" channel?
Does a receiver have to have a 10.7 MHz IF to pass part 15 and be sold in this country?
When and why did the UN relinquish 89.1?