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950 has been on low power lately

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Link

Anyone know whats going on? I imagine quite a bit of differed maintenace from the prior owners? Or is it work to the backup for WVAZ that is causing this? It is bad timing with the fundraising they are doing this month.
 
LINK, It does sound like their using their nightime towers. I am west of the towers so I can tell which one's they are using, daytime my
radio has to be facing north, when their on the nightime pattern my radio has to be facing east. It is 4:00PM right now and I just checked
and they are on the nightime towers.

I do not know what they are doing at the daytime site, like you said they could be working on the WVAZ backup or they could be working
on WNTD's daytime tower. This kind of thing used to happen quite often in the old WJPC/WEJM days, so it could be possible that someone
is just asleep at the switch.

It is amazing how much better the daytime 1,000 watt omni-directional signal is than the 5,000 watt augmented, heavily nulled nightime
signal is.

While I'm here I have to ask if anyone knows why they changed their nightime signal in about 1992 or 1993? It seemed as if they lowered
the power when they were WJPC and some nights it was barely audible, and when Sporting News bought them they raised the power, so
it was better at night,but, it was not the same as the original nightime pattern which in my area was almost exactly the same as the daytime
pattern. Just wondering if anyone knows what happened there. My only guess is had something to do with WAUR boosting their nightime
power from 2,200 watts with 4 towers too 4,200 watts with a fifth tower a couple years later.

I called WJPC back then when they were "rapradio" to let them know their signal had changed drastically and they told me they did not
change anything, but could not explain to me why the signal was so bad. I actually spoke to the late Charles Mootry who was running
WJPC AM/FM back then in the Johnson Publishing Company day's.
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I think in the 1992 and 1993 time period 950 may have rebuilt the night array or perhaps even moved it. I don't know why they made the change. I doubt 930 has anything to do with 950 coverage at night. Maybe if they had to move the night site and it forced a downgrade in coverage for 950. The 950 in Detroit may have something to do with it, because I think it upgraded from 5KW to 50KW.

In regards to today, I don't think they are asleep at the wheel, I think they just have a lot of work to be done on the 950 day site and are probably caught without adequate backups on the day site. They are probably waiting for replacement equipment or it could be a thief damaged the ground system in the quest for copper.

I've never been impressed with Relevant Radio's engineering on 930 and 1270. I don't know if they keep the modulation low on 930 to improve the coverage on 950 or if they just prefer to process the stations conservativelty. They put some effort into fixing 1270, but it was never really was strong sounding on the air IMO. I suspect their budget to improve the stations maybe modest.
 
You are completely right on the sound of 930AM, it does sound very weak with very bad audio. That station has always sounded
like that even when your driving close to the transmitter. That is definitely something they or whomever they sell it to should
work on.

On the subject of 950AM, I believe they got their nightime authorization around 1981 and think they have been at the same
site at 140th and Torrence since then. I didn't think about the upgrade of WJR from 5K to 50K in Detroit that probably has
a lot to do with the downgrade of the nightime signal here in Chicago.
 
My guess is the 950 day site is down. It sounds to me like they are using the night site in either directional or omni mode during the day.
 
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