550K for 550AM

[DG02816]

Down here in Philly, the WFIL part of the 560/990 diplex adds 32.6 degrees of top loading to 2 of the WNTP towers which are 91 deg. tall at 990. I imagine something similar would need to be put in place in Burrillville, with perhaps 'FIL-like power levels(7.3 kW-D, 8.1 kW-N)to get 5 kW equivalent at 550.

 

[Dighton Rockhead]

This line of speculation sure has been a whole lotta fun, and it sure gets the creative juices flowing, so I might as well keep the ball rolling......

Although the 990 diplex idea would make the most sense for a Salem 550 upgrade....SUPPOSE....Peter Arpin refuses to part with 990, and....INSTEAD....makes 1320 available?

Then....Salem would be looking at a possible diplex off the Falls Pond North Attleboro site of 1320.

Under this scenario....It's possible 550 might still be able to city-grade Pawtucket from the 1320 site, given the relative closeness to 550's current site. If not, then a change of COL to Seekonk becomes the next most logical choice.

Speculation......Speculation......Ya just gotta love it! ;D

 

[VelvetR]

.....This also makes 550 and 1590 again similar:
according to VelvetR, they both ran Beautiful Music-style formats for awhile.

The music format on 1590, originally WYNG, was much different from that of WXTR (550) during the several years of "The Wonderful World of Music". The WYNG format was very serious with back-announced music blocks oa about 13 minutes duration. T'was I who put that format to bed when Attleboro Radio Association bought it and changed over to a very localized Warwick-East Greenwich mode. The WXTR format followed a couple of years of "Demand Radio 55" format which was heavy on oldies and show tunes though without personalities and a lot of pre-packaged stuff that you might call "liners" these days. A lot of the voice stuff came out of KTHT near Denver and there was reciprocity with Providence (OK, Pawtucket) voices being heard in Denver and a couple of other markets, though I forget which.

The Wonderful World of Music was a different fish altogether. It was a twist on a format used at WRCH in Hartford. Yes, the big orchestral sound with about 4-5 vocals per hour BUT everything else was pure spoof, lampooning the WLKW model. I wish I had kept some of the comic stuff from that era. Local voices were mellow and there was a restrained sort of personality.

Some of the voicing came from a guy in Minneapolis, John Rydgren, whose voice was actually deeper than that of Thurl Ravenscroft who you probably know as the voice of "Tony The Tiger" (Kellogg's cereal commercials) or, perhaps, as the voice on the Christmas record of The Grinch. I believe Thurl also was the voice of The Grinch in the kid's movie.

The musical signature package for the Wonderful World format was written by Bob Way who was then PD at Air Trails Network's WEZE which ran a vaguely similar, though straight, format. Bob and his partner Sam Fox also composed the original NFL team marches. The instrumental parts involved over 20 instruments and were recorded at Bavaria Studios in Munich, Germany. The vocals were recorded a day later at Union Tonen Studio, same city. Some of the vocalists (there were 10 or more) had played instruments in the previous session. The fly in the ointment was that some of the vocalists did not speak English - only sang it. The result was that a few of the 30+ vocal pieces were unusable due to the vocalization: "The Vonderful Vorld of Music....WXTR....Rhode Island". Most were OK and the instrumental signatures were incredibly good. Bob did one 60-second fill piece that had natural breaks at 10, 15, 20 and 30-seconds. Same sound-different length.

Appropos of nothing, Bob did some instrumental sigs for a station I do some pro-bono stuff a couple of years back wherein you would swear you could hear call-letters but there were no vocals and it was all done by editing together individual notes from professionally available libraries. He toyed with it for a day and came up with 75 pieces in every imaginable form from classical to rap with Bossa Nova, Tango, Waltz, Disco and Lord knows what else, each one with the sig fairly screaming call letters but without a single letter spoken. But I digress....easy to do when you've been away from a microphone for some years.

On the technical side, the 1320 site has expansion limitations and the real estate would be really expensive. It's a mongrel array with towers of different height and cross-section that I recall then C.E. Ray Arnold cursing every week when he checked the monitoring points. I don't think one could reasonably assemble enough land to make it happen. The COL coverage of Pawtucket is probable, given the nighttime pattern, and it probably would work out well for a daytime 5-kW directional protecting WDEV (Waterbury, VT).

The idea of convincing somebody else to adopt a Pawtucket COL might be a good one and it might actually solve some problems for another station though I'm not going to comment on which one.

The 990 SITE still has the best real-estate potential and everything I've heard suggests the existing six towers are in condition that suggests replacement. Do that and you can get into sizing the towers for 550 and hanging a short folded unipole on each of a subset of them for the 990 signal. Not an honest diplex but I've seen it done successfully. I still babysit an ND folded unipole and it's a never-ending series of icing and wind-damage disasaters.

Of course this is all speculation and everything mentioned is expensive, especially in design and tower construction but, hey, it keeps some of us old-timers thinking a bit and some of you younger folks drooling. Meanwhile, I'll be surprised if Salem even tries to buy another AM in the Providence Market in less than two years and maybe even not then.

 

[VelvetR]

Correction to post immediately below. I did a little additional research and was about to modify the below when time ran out for editing.
So, please disregard the "On the technical side" paragraph below and substitute the following:


On the technical side, the Falls Pond (1320) site looks curious. I believe the land owned by the station is not big enough for additional towers/ground systems and it's in an area where buying more might be prohibitive though in today's economy it's a crap shoot. Last time I saw the site there was a mongrel array with towers of different height and cross-section. I had recalled it as being two towers but now I see three on Google Earth with two of one height and one somewhat taller. There's also a fourth tower on the site, I have no idea whose, that seems unrelated to the AM operation. That tower could make for some interesting engineering what with re-radiation potential but I won't say it's impossible. The COL coverage of Pawtucket is probable, given the nighttime pattern, and it probably would work out well for a daytime 5-kW directional protecting WDEV (Waterbury, VT).

 

[N1WVQ]

The 4 towers are all for 1320. The 4th tower isn't used in the daytime.

 

[DG02816]

WARL has 2 towers 91 deg. high, one 120 deg. high, and one 140 deg. high at 1320...,good luck top loading THAT
to work at 550! Did the station just have 2 towers in its 1 kW days as WARA?

 

[DanStrassberg]

WARL has 2 towers 91 deg. high, one 120 deg. high, and one 140 deg. high at 1320...,good luck top loading THAT
to work at 550! Did the station just have 2 towers in its 1 kW days as WARA?

The top loading would be but a small part of the problem! Of WARL's four towers, the two that are farthest from each other are a mere 56 degrees apart at 550. One pair (#s 2 and 4, I believe) appear to be about 10 degrees apart at 550. Within the WRNI arrays are two towers that are probably even closer than 10 degrees, but they are not used simultaneously. I suspect that if you were to try to co-locate 550 and 1320, you'd find that you could use only one of the 1320 towers at 550. All the rest of the 550 towers would have to be new. Not a propitious start.

 

[fullabaloney]

And the bottom line is no one really cares about any of these stations anyway

 

[VelvetR]

And the bottom line is no one really cares about any of these stations anyway

Which, of course, is the point. Salem loves to buy "throwaways" and make something - at least a little something - out of them. Remember, with them it's not ALL about the numbers; it's about having the "message" available in the markets.

Still, I think they will not make any additional move until they see how they do with 550, probably a couple of years anyway. Then they may either reach out for another station or just pull out of the market. If they're going to just use 550 as a repeater of their Boston signal they won't need to do anything, really, about a local studio beyond rehab of what's left at 55 John Street. The flooding? It's seldom enough that Salem could simply ignore the occasional down-time though somebody would have to be sure the equipment was secure.

 

[DanStrassberg]

This thread is missing an opportunity to speculate about 550's new calls. Scott Fybush sort of suggested in the latest NERW that the new calls have already been selected. I have a hunch (but no inside info) that Scott knows what the calls will be but has been sworn to secrecy. Salem has a history of, umm, resurrecting old calls. So does anyone know whether WICE or WXTR or WPAW or WGNG is currently available for use on AM? And BTW, nobody said that the new calls have to be ones that were used on the same station; they could be calls that were used on a different station in the market. Salem has revived calls of other stations; WNYM is an example, although in the case of the current user of those calls (970 in Hackensack NJ), the previous WNYM (WWRV 1330) diplexes from the towers of the current WNYM. So does anyone know whether WJAR or WHIM is available for use on AM? If 550 is going to do preaching/teaching, WHIM could be a logical choice.

 

[fybush]

This thread is missing an opportunity to speculate about 550's new calls. Scott Fybush sort of suggested in the latest NERW that the new calls have already been selected. I have a hunch (but no inside info) that Scott knows what the calls will be but has been sworn to secrecy. Salem has a history of, umm, resurrecting old calls.

I did? ???

I know nothing, in this particular case. I don't think any of the old 550 calls - WICE, WXTR, WPAW, WGNG - have enough resonance in the market to matter much to Salem, which seems more interested in keeping heritage calls they've acquired than in resurrecting old ones just for the sake of resurrecting them. (The WNYM calls in New York may be a special case; the first WNYM on 1330 was Salem's first entry in market #1 back in the company's earliest years, so perhaps those calls have sentimental value to Salem.)

To use WJAR would require permission from WJAR-TV. I believe WHIM is in use in Florida, and WPAW is (or at least was recently) in use in North Carolina. WXTR was in use on the 730 in the Washington DC market, but that station just changed calls.

Since the new 550 will be essentially a simulcast of WEZE on 590, I suppose a reasonable guess for the new calls might be WPZE, the calls Salem briefly used on 1260 after moving WEZE to 590. But that would require getting permission from Radio One, which is using the WPZE calls on FM in Atlanta. I have no idea if that's likely to happen or not.

 

[DG02816]

WHIM is indeed being used by the 1520 licensed to Apopka.

 

[DanStrassberg]

Since the new 550 will be essentially a simulcast of WEZE on 590, I suppose a reasonable guess for the new calls might be WPZE, the calls Salem briefly used on 1260 after moving WEZE to 590. But that would require getting permission from Radio One, which is using the WPZE calls on FM in Atlanta. I have no idea if that's likely to happen or not.

In Boston, WPZE stood for 'Praise." In Providence, it could stand for that as well as "Providence's (version of) WEZE." Doesn't 590 put quite a strong signal into Providence without benefit of a local simulcast? Does Salem subscribe to Arbitron in Providence? (Not clear that doing so would be worth the expense to them.) Good signal or no, it seems unlikely that 590 by itself would gather enough of an audience in Providence to show up in the ratings, but Salem must have some reason to believe that a 590 simulcast in Providence would generate enough revenue to produce a decent ROI. Is 1220 the only format competition? Or did they buy the 550 signal because they have had so much success around the country with low-on-the-dial AMs and when one pops up at a good price, they just can't resist?

I suppose this paragraph is really a subject for the Seattle board, but the low-on-the-dial AM in Providence is what made me think of it: Raises the question of whether Salem might have its eye on KVI (which just dropped conservative talk for oldies; Salem is now picking up conservative talk on 1590 in Seattle). Salem is huge in Seattle and they just spun off KKMO (Tacoma), thereby possibly freeing up cash for an acquisition. Is Salem in a position to make Fisher an offer they can't refuse? Salem already has 820, 1300, 1590 and an Ex-bander in Seattle and they might also have an FM and/or another AM that I've overlooked.

 

[DG02816]

Dan,
Don't forget WARV, also on 1590.