1450 AM WLEC - Do they reduce power at night?

[Buckeyes2001]

Radio-locator.com shows them at 1000W day and night but in Vermilion and Lorain, the station is often hard to pick up at night but comes in very clear as far as Avon during the day. Do they reduce power at night or it is just from all of the co-channel interference?

 

[Goldilocks94941]

Way back in the late 1970s I lived in Port Clinton, which I recall is about 15 miles or so west of Sandusky. I found the WLEC signal, back when they had to reduce to 250 at night on the Class IV frequencies, only made it about 7 miles out of Sandusky before the jumble of interference made it unlistenable. Couldn't even really listen to it well driving over the Sandusky Bay bridge on Hwy2.

With everybody sticking to 1000 w at night now, I imagine it hasn't really improved since then. It seemed to me at the time to be a lot less night coverage than you'd get on other class IV AMs like WCWA Toledo (at least 15 - 20 miles), so maybe WLEC's tower location lacks something, or there's just too much coming in from elsewhere on 1450.

THe nighttime noise is a big part of the loss in AM listenership, as I hear it. And with no local stations going very far between the East side of Toledo and Elyria, CKLW and WJR had to serve as the big locals for Ottawa and Erie counties before the FMs took over. I worked for a bit at WRWR, which was Pt Clinton's FM local station, but still didn't use their full power allocation to read more than 20 miles or so.

It's too bad Sandusky, and the middle point on the Ohio Lake Erie shore, never has had any high powered stations to serve all of "vacationland" and reach as far as Toledo and Cleveland. Do the local Sandusky FMs even make it into Lorain? I guess WFRO-FM in Fremont is the closest thing to a big signal there, and they never went to the full 50kw, 500 foot tower they could have had.

 

[w9wi]

Radio-locator.com shows them at 1000W day and night but in Vermilion and Lorain, the station is often hard to pick up at night but comes in very clear as far as Avon during the day. Do they reduce power at night or it is just from all of the co-channel interference?

Radio-Locator.com is correct.

The vast majority of Class C stations are 1,000 watts day & night, non-directional. 1450 is reserved for Class C stations.

Your second supposition is correct; it's lots of co-channel interference.

To oversimplify a bit, the difference between the four classes of AM station:

All classes: Daytime groundwave coverage is protected from interference.
Class A: Nighttime groundwave and some skywave coverage is protected.
Class B: Nighttime groundwave coverage is protected.
Class C: Class C stations use the same facilities day & night. Daytime groundwave is protected: it's assumed that's enough to protect the night facility. (as you've observed, it isn't...)
Class D: Nighttime coverage isn't protected at all.

 

[Buckeyes2001]

Way back in the late 1970s I lived in Port Clinton, which I recall is about 15 miles or so west of Sandusky. I found the WLEC signal, back when they had to reduce to 250 at night on the Class IV frequencies, only made it about 7 miles out of Sandusky before the jumble of interference made it unlistenable. Couldn't even really listen to it well driving over the Sandusky Bay bridge on Hwy2.

With everybody sticking to 1000 w at night now, I imagine it hasn't really improved since then. It seemed to me at the time to be a lot less night coverage than you'd get on other class IV AMs like WCWA Toledo (at least 15 - 20 miles), so maybe WLEC's tower location lacks something, or there's just too much coming in from elsewhere on 1450.

THe nighttime noise is a big part of the loss in AM listenership, as I hear it. And with no local stations going very far between the East side of Toledo and Elyria, CKLW and WJR had to serve as the big locals for Ottawa and Erie counties before the FMs took over. I worked for a bit at WRWR, which was Pt Clinton's FM local station, but still didn't use their full power allocation to read more than 20 miles or so.

It's too bad Sandusky, and the middle point on the Ohio Lake Erie shore, never has had any high powered stations to serve all of "vacationland" and reach as far as Toledo and Cleveland. Do the local Sandusky FMs even make it into Lorain? I guess WFRO-FM in Fremont is the closest thing to a big signal there, and they never went to the full 50kw, 500 foot tower they could have had.

WFRO 99.1, WCPZ 102.7 and WGGN 97.7 all come in very clear in Vermilion and in most of Lorain, at least on my car's radio. 100.9 WMJK starts getting fuzzy once you get near the Vermilion/Lorain border presumably due to the presence of 100.7 WMMS's signal. What's interesting is instead of hearing WMMS's signal splatter over onto 100.9, it's more like added white-noise which causes an apparent weakening of 100.9's signal. Same thing will happen when I try to tune in 100.5. Perhaps someone can explain that phenomenon. I'm guessing that has to do with WMMS broadcasting an HD signal.

 

[Broadway Bill]

It's too bad Sandusky, and the middle point on the Ohio Lake Erie shore, never has had any high powered stations to serve all of "vacationland" and reach as far as Toledo and Cleveland. Do the local Sandusky FMs even make it into Lorain?

Yes, K96 (WKFM, 96.1, Huron) covers Erie County, Huron County, and BOOMS into Lorain County. You can even listen to it driving into the west side of Cleveland.

 

[CaptBob92]

My first job in radio was at WLEC in 1965. At that time they had a ground radial problem and had installed a folded dipole antenna on their tower. This would be a series of wires down each of the four sides.

Being a neofite I wanted to see how far the station went on 250 at night so i drove around one evening. To the South they were good for about 4.5 miles into Castalia but not behond. To the East we covered Huron easly but then again, the tower was on the East side of Sandusky. To the West another 5 miles tops.

I ran the same check in Knoxville Tenn some years later. They had a station on 1450 with a full half wave tower, about 300 feet tall, and another nearby on 1400 with a quarter wave tower. Both ran the exact same transmitter and processors and both were located in swamps.

I wanted to see if the higher tower sent the signal further on a local channel at night. The answer was no. Best coverage was maybe five to seven mile tops depending on how much interference you could stand.

Other local stations I remember measuring include WMAN at Mansfield that covered only to Galion at night that's maybe seven miles tops.

So the short of it is a station on a local channel , 1230,1240,1340,1400,1450 or 1490 is good for only about seven miles at night and no, raising all the stations to 1kw night does not improve things as it just raises the noise level on the channels by the same amount. The increase to 1kw nights was done to overcome local power line interference which was building up at the time.