Crossborder FM reception - it's not 1985 anymore!
> I was reading on the CRTC website that Toronto might be
> getting a low powered station on 98.7 in the near
> feature...a licence has been applied to a station that
> specializes in carribean/soca/reggae music...If this goes
> through, Kiss 98.5 might not be able to heard in some areas
> of Toronto. What is going on here? Is Toronto blocking out
> Buffalo station by applying for these low powered stations
> which might not even generate a 1 share in the book.
First point, before anyone gets too alarmed about this "98.7" - read the CRTC decision a little more closely and you'll see that while the CRTC granted a license for this new station, it specifically stated that it could NOT use 98.7 and would have to find a new frequency before it can go on the air.
That, however, has nothing to do with Kiss and everything to do with being second-adjacent to CBLA at 99.1.
Sometime in the early nineties, the US and Canada mutually agreed to stop protecting each other's FM signals at the border. As far as the FCC is concerned, CFNY's 102.1 signal simply does not exist in Albion, and as far as the CRTC is concerned, WKSE's 98.5 signal does not exist in Toronto.
The rules still say that a Canadian signal can't interfere with a US signal on US soil, and vice versa, and that's kept the dials from getting too messy in areas like Vancouver/Seattle and Montreal/Plattsburgh-Burlington.
Buffalo/Toronto, however, is a special case, because of the way the rules are written and because the transmitters are so close to the border. 102.1 is a great example of this. In order for the Albion 102.1 signal to be interfering with CFNY on Canadian soil, it would have to have a desired/undesired signal ratio of less than 40 dBu on Canadian soil. In other words, 102.1 Albion's 60 dBu contour (city-grade reception, basically) would have to overlap with CFNY's 100 dBu (really, really strong) contour. But because CFNY's transmitter is right on the edge of Lake Ontario, at the CN Tower, its 100 dBu contour comes right up to the border, so as long as Albion's 60 dBu never touches Canadian soil - which it doesn't - there's no problem with Canadian regulators. (Interference over the lake doesn't count, either.)
In the other direction, this principle allowed Canada to put a whole slew of signals on the air in Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, London and vicinity that were co-channel with the Buffalo signals. Again, as long as their 60 dBu contours fell even one inch short of the border, they weren't considered to be interfering with the Buffalo stations on US soil.
In the real world, of course, it's not that simple, and many of those stations discovered that the actual received interference FROM Buffalo was a major headache. Several have changed frequency as a result, though the CRTC has then gone and reused the Buffalo channels for new signals, which then experience the same headaches. And the beat goes on...<P ID="signature">______________
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