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Directional FM

A good friend of mine was chief engineer for Radio One in Indianapolis. He moved the old school soul station downtown where it was short spaced and required a directional antenna. He was so displeased with the directional antenna that he soon moved the site back to the south side of the city.

A directional FM antenna may reduce you signal by 90% or more in certain directions. That's not such a good thing.
 
Harvey_Dogg said:
A good friend of mine was chief engineer for Radio One in Indianapolis. He moved the old school soul station downtown where it was short spaced and required a directional antenna. He was so displeased with the directional antenna that he soon moved the site back to the south side of the city.

A directional FM antenna may reduce you signal by 90% or more in certain directions. That's not such a good thing.
Click to expand...
May be talking about two different things. Licensed directional FM antennas are used for the purposes of eliminating overlap into another station or allocation. Pretty sure in your example, you're talking about what some antenna manufacturers call: "pattern optimization". It's done by using parasitic elements with a normally omni or standard pattern antenna to increase field strength in a certain area, but in theory not enough to be classified as a licensed directional antenna. For a while back in the 90's some stations got NAL's for running pattern optimization, because the station knowingly didn't have an antenna design in line with what was filed in the CP, nor as licensed. Essentially, they would put a standard pattern number in the application, then buy an optimized version of that same antenna.
 
In the case of WLAV-FM, the actual measured design Composite Maximum/Minimum ratio is about 21.6 dB, meaning there is only about 234 watts radiated toward WWDV 96.9 and WDRV 97.1. Granted, it goes toward Lake Michigan, but there are a lot of people in Ottawa County that used to get roughly 50000 watts radiated in that direction, before the signal gets to Lake Michigan.
 
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