schmave said:
Savage said:
Back to Detroit! The Former Motor City has got to qualify as the Mecca Of MEOVs, with its plethora of gigantic AM directional farms. Allow me to enumerate some highlights in International Orange and White:
WRDT 560 (Monroe) - 4 towers
WNZK 680/690 (Son of Cheer Radio 7) - 6
WFDF 910 - 8
WWJ 950 - 9
WCAR 1090 - 6
WDFM 1130 - 9
WCHB 1200 - 10
WXYT 1270 - 9
WDTW (Former Keener 13) 1310 - 6
WDRJ 1440 - 6
WLQV 1510 - 9
By my reckoning that's 11 stations with a total of 81 sticks, for a median of almost 7.5 towers per AM station....which has to be some kind of record. Calling All Scott Fybushes!! How about a special NERW feature or maybe even an entire Tower Site Calendar starring the Detroit Forest of AM Towers?? (And this doesn't even take into account nearby suburbs or Canada which have their own AM farms.....)
And these farms are effective ... by the time you hit Toledo, only 50 or so miles south-southwest, a lot of these stations either are not listenable or have fair signals at best. The Detroit stations are very dramatically directional ... I have wondered how different the AM dial would sound an hour north of the city with all those blasters aiming right at you.
And this list doesn't even include the Canadians, as you said. I think CKLW has further modified its directional pattern in recent years to give the U.S. even less signal at night. I remember being up near Pontiac one evening about 12 years ago and not hearing nearly what I thought I would on 800 (a much weaker signal, I should say, than I expected).
Heres an analysis of the situation north of Detroit on these DAs. First of all, there is a large part of Oakland County which has sandy to gravelly soil and is much less than the 8 mS/m shown on the M-3 Map. As a result, these stations all take a big FI hit by the time they get to Flint. I measured WJR at 3 mV/m where it should be 5 mV/m, and this is the best facility. The rest are probably less than 60% of the predicted. Conductivity improves around Flint and near Saginaw/Bay City, and goes down again as you approach West Branch. My Delco stops the scan with about 0.2 to 0.5 mV/m depending on electrical noise.
None of these groundwave signals is overwhelming once you get past southern Genesee County. WFDF and WWJ have awesome skywaves, often de facto 20:1 skywave service with several millivolt/meter FI at the Straits of Mackinac. At night, all of these stations except WJR with its ~195 degree tower have serious fading issues in the Flint and Tri Cities areas. I suspect that WXYT 1270 skywave is awesome in places like Alpena and Sudbury, given its maximum, and also WLQV 1500 though it cuts power at night to 10 kW. Similar for skywaves of WDFN 1130 10 kW and WCHB 1200 15 kW, though these have a lot of cochannel interference with the channel loading typical of higher frequencies and the shorter wavelength fading.
There is about a minus 30 mile difference summer to winter where they stop the scan.
WRDT 560 stops the scan to about Flint on average.
WNZK 690 stops the scan to between Flint and Saginaw
WJR 760 to a few miles past West Branch in the Winter, and about 30 miles less in the Summer
WFDF 910 is neck and neck with WWJ 950, stopping the scan to a few miles south of West Branch in Winter and from just north of Bay City to just south of Pinconning in the Summer
WDFN 1130 scans to between Flint and Saginaw on average, as does WCHB 1200.
WLQV 1500 scans to northern Oakland County, but daytime and critical hours skywave will often scan to about West Branch, as does WXYT 1270 but less often.
WEXL 1340 and WDTW 1310 are lost to scanning by Northern Oakland County.
R. Fry and I have both wondered what changes CKLW 800 made to their patterns. The old ones are not in the FCC Region II database. There is a database called USCAN but I don't know if the older patterns are in it. Almost every other Canadian station has old pattern information in the FCC Region II Database. CHYR 710 had the widest major lobe maximum for 5 towers in a line that I have ever seen, but it's no longer on AM.
As it stands, the CKLW pattern goes more NE and cuts considerably to the northwest, which is why it isn't that good in Pontiac.
