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1550 twins

cyberdad said:
See if you can find a DX 375 on ebay or someplace. Small enough for travel and fantastic for a.m. My old beater no longer has an external antenna (but still works for fm and sw anyway) and the speaker doesn't work. Still outperforms my Eaton E-10, Yacht Boy PE300, and Sony SRF37 for AM DX. And those latter three are all damned good radios!
Click to expand...

Thanks I'll look into it.
 
I passed by the new WZRK tower site on the west side of U.S. 41 today. The site is clearly visible from the highway. There is still a For Sale sign on the property (2 acres of land). Although I didn't notice it on my way north, this afternoon on the southbound trip I thought I saw signs of fresh dirt in the middle of the site and maybe also at the south end. I could be mistaken though; it is hard to see when you're driving in rush hour traffic. There are no structures on the property yet.

It looks like a tiny site for an AM station. In fact, according to the engineering section of the application, some of the radials will be truncated at "the property line". This may reduce the signal to the east and west slightly, but I assume they would not care about that since most of their audience is presumably located to the south.

I wish the site were a little further north. I will not enjoy having another strong local signal on that end of the dial. Intermod city...
 
[email protected] said:
Don't expect to see any site construction until the FCC approves the application and issues a "Construction Permit".
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Not necessarily. There's nothing in the FCC rules that prevents you from putting up a tower and getting the transmitting plant ready, as long as you don't put it on the air before the CP is received. The owners might prefer to build now, while the weather is favorable. It depends on how much risk they are willing to take. They could lease the land with an option to buy conditioned on getting the CP. There don't appear to be any major obstacles to granting it. They can probably just move their existing transmitting gear from either site to the new one.
 
I just figured that building a facility before being granted a Construction Permit is a bit like putting the cart before the horse. You'd better be darn certain the CP will be granted before dropping the cash.
 
I recall a few years back I happened to notice an application to move WCSJ to a small town near Tucson, Az. and change freq. to 670 ! That one was denied. This app. looks like it will be granted. Still prior construction is a financial risk.
 
Yes, there is risk, but if you have the right consulting engineer and attorney, they can have valuable insight as to the possibilty of it being granted -or a battle. I had great people (but expensive) around me when we were in that phase, and it paid off.

In another building, we also had a much bigger project and many towers and possible challenges, so we didn't buildi until it was really time. BTW, that became a foreign language station, that is now a money machine.
 
audioguy said:
[email protected] said:
Don't expect to see any site construction until the FCC approves the application and issues a "Construction Permit".
Click to expand...
Not necessarily. There's nothing in the FCC rules that prevents you from putting up a tower and getting the transmitting plant ready, as long as you don't put it on the air before the CP is received. The owners might prefer to build now, while the weather is favorable. It depends on how much risk they are willing to take. They could lease the land with an option to buy conditioned on getting the CP. There don't appear to be any major obstacles to granting it. They can probably just move their existing transmitting gear from either site to the new one.
Click to expand...

There does seem to be some limit on the amount of construction you can do before the CP is issued -- you can't build the whole thing before the CP:

http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:v1DOBToU7TcJ:copyrightroyalties.com/tower_construction.pdf+%22premature+construction%22+FCC&hl=en&gl=us
http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:-y4oh7wOGWMJ:www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Databases/documents_collection/86-77.pdf+%22premature+construction%22+FCC&hl=en&gl=us

I was somewhat surprised to see those relatively recent citations. I know they've cited stations for premature construction in the past, but didn't realize it had happened in the last 50 years.

My guess is Congress'* point was to prevent applicants from building in advance and then complaining that the big bad FCC cost them thousands of dollars by refusing to let them use the equipment they spent good money on. (i.e., using the existing facilities as a means of pressuring government to give them the nod in comparative hearing)

It does seem it's permissible to do certain work (ground work for erecting towers is specifically mentioned) if local weather conditions would make it impossible to do that work in winter.

* It seems the ban on premature construction is in the Communications Act.
 
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