If they had been granted the 100w license they had tried to apply for, perhaps they may have ended up using that tower to broadcast.
Probably not, actually...WTBU didn't move into COM until 1996, and the last realistic attempt for WTBU to get a license couldn't have been long after WMBR and WUMB hit the airwaves, nearly 20 years previous. Prior to 1996, WTBU was in the Myles Standish Annex (and before that, in the Myles dorm itself, and before that, in a space in the GSU that was long-since demolished to construct the big room on the 2nd floor with the pipe organ). If anything WTBU would've shared an antenna array with WBUR on the LAW Tower (IIRC, WBUR didn't move their primary out to Needham until the late 1980's/early 1990's) or they would've put something small on top of Warren Towers (the three-spired dorm next door...built in the mid-1970's and nearly as tall as the COM tower).
In fact, Warren Towers is no small part of the reason why the COM tower is essentially useless these days. Almost anything on the COM tower has significant "shadowing" to the west because of Warren. The whip about halfway up, I'm told, is an old two-way for police (may not be in use) and there is, or was, a large microwave dish also about halfway up. IIRC, that was WBUR's old STL from the COM studios to Needham, before they moved the studios to 890 Comm Ave. I remember one of my engineer friends at WBUR joking that I could have the dish for free if I could figure out how to get it down (I think it's about 12ft in diameter). :
Why not lease space on the tower for cell phone use... it would MAKE the school money instead of costing it money in especially tight financial times...
BU already leases space on some of their buildings to cellphone companies. The caller density in Boston is so high that cellphone sites must be located lower to the ground to
reduce their range, thus allowing for more re-use of the same frequencies in adjacent cells. So a tall tower is actually a bad idea for a wireless site. Plus you can't very well stealth a cellphone site on a tower like you can with a building or church steeple; if you look closely you'll see cell antennas well-hidden on some of the science buildings behind COM on Cummington Avenue.
OK, if that's how he feels about radio, then apparently WBUR is not all that important to him. It's old technology; it's not the asset that it's hyped up to be. Maybe it's time for a break. How about if he lets it go into the hands of the community?
This is no doubt simultaneously both caused by, and a reason why, WBUR has virtually no interaction, connection or reporting to BU's College of Communication - they answer straight to the Board of Trustees. If I remember my history, COM rather pooh-pooh WBUR back in the 1950's and early 1960's when it was almost all students. After the student antiwar riots of the 1960's, BU took away WBUR and made it professional-only in a long and messy process. COM still didn't take WBUR terribly seriously, and by the time it did there wasn't the greatest relationship as both COM and WBUR coveted more space when they were in the same building (640 Comm Ave).
Speaking of which, that "long and messy process" is - IMHO - the main reason why WTBU never had a chance at getting a real license. By the time memories cooled down, the last available frequencies were long gone.
