>
> 1- Was 1050 AM on the air before 1060 AM was?
> 2- Would the fresh water of the Delaware River make any
> difference with AM reception? (I know that salt water and/or
> marshes sure do.)
>
> While there, I scanned the dial for baseball coverage. The
> Thunder were carried locally by 1260 AM. I picked up the
> Phillies on 920 AM (Trenton), 1210 (Philadelphia) and on one
> other station further up the dial. I can't remember who it
> was. Oddly enough, despite the Thunder being a Yankees
> affiliate, I was only getting the Yankee game (at the Boston
> Red Sox) via WCBS-AM 880 of New York City.
>
The sequence of calls on 1050 in New Yok city was WHN, WMGM, WHN, WFAN, WUKQ, WEVD, WEPN. Don't ask me the years of the flips; I don't know.
As stated by someone else, both 1050 in New York and 1060 in Philadelphia date back at least to the 30s. 1050 is probably older than that; back in the '20s, it likely shared time with one or more now-long-dead stations in New York. However, both the New York and Philly stations got their present facilities when NARBA (the North American Regional Broadcast Agreement) went into effect on March 31, 1941. The stations would have been on different frequencies before NARBA, but whether they were 10-kHz apart and both 50 kW with directional patterns that protected each other, I don't know. I would guess probably not, because it was NARBA that established 1050 as a Mexican clear channel (the current Class A occupant of 1050 in Mexico is XEG, whose location I don't know) and a separate US-Mexico treaty granted the US the right to use the frequency for one 50 kW full-time Class II (now Class B) station in New York City that used the same directional pattern day and night to protect the Mexican border. WEPN's current array in Lyndhurst NJ was apparently preceded by another at the same site with the same configuration of towers, but probably with towers of lesser height. The current towers are approximately half wave.
Somebody said that KYW's null toward Trenton did not necessitate having an affiliate in Trenton for network programming because people in Trenton could tune in to one of the big New York 50-kW stations that carried the same programming. Well, NBC's Red Network, for which KYW was the Philadelphia affiliate, didn't always look at it that way. The New York key station for the network, WEAF 660 (later WNBC, WRCA, and currently WFAN) had excellent coverage of central New Jersey. Before the station moved (along with WCBS 880) to its present diplexed tower near City Island in Long Island Sound in the Bronx, WEAF's 50-kW transmitter was in Port Washington on Long Island's north shore, and the signal, which was directional to the west, reached New York City over a salt-water path. Because of the directional pattern, WEAF probably delivered a stronger signal to Trenton in those days than WFAN does now. But The Red Network had its own Trenton affiliate to fill in KYW's null--WTTM 920, which ran 1 kW-U DA-2 (I believe).
As for the conductivity of fresh water, the FCC's conductivity maps show fresh water as having a conductivity of 8 mS/m. A lot of land in New Jersey and New York's Hudson Valley has the same conductivity. By contrast, Long Island's south shore shows a conductivity of 0.5 mS/m; southeastern New England shows as 2 mS/m, Parts of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas show as 40 mS/m; the Los Angleles area shows as 30 mS/m, and salt water shows as 5000 mS/m. So does the water flowing in the Delaware River have much effect on medium-wave propagation in that area? No, not much, because the soil happens to have about the same conductivity as fresh water.
