Darth_vader said:
You can have your own opinions, Scott, but not your own facts.
No, you're right...I've only actually
lived in this neck of the woods, listening to radio and then consulting with actual broadcasters on actual signal propagation, for the better part of 40 years now. Clearly I have no idea what's on the air here, much less what typical radio reception is like, compared with someone tuning in a web radio from all the way across the country. And
surely I have no sense of what the terrain is like between Buffalo and New York City, either. (Hint: we have terrain here in the east, too. There's a little thing called the "Catskill Mountains" that rises up to more than 4000 feet above sea level, forming a near-perfect terrain blockage between the Empire State Building antennas, some 1500 feet above sea level, and the Buffalo area, 600 or so feet above sea level. And there's the Allegany Plateau forming a further barrier, culminating in the very hills south of Buffalo where the WDCX 99.5 transmitter is located.)
I have no idea what the heck you say you heard. If the "Buffalo" Global Tuners node is really where it says it is, it's within about 10 miles of the WDCX transmitter, which is a 110 kW grandfathered superpower flamethrower that just happens to be almost exactly along the same bearing as WBAI would be. WDCX also happens to be one of the best-engineered stations in the region. It's not often that it's off the air, and even if it were for some reason operating at "reduced power," the Buffalo tuner (if it's where it claims to be) would still have to be looking right through it to hear WBAI co-channel.
[Also: at least based on the profile of the guy who runs the Buffalo tuner, KG9NZ, he's not even in a location that allows for an outdoor FM antenna. That you heard nothing on 99.5 on his rig probably means that there's no FM antenna connected at all. But here, see for yourself:
http://www.qrz.com/db/KG9NZ]
We happen to have a very active and very passionate base of FM DXers here in western New York, many of us with actual outdoor antennas. If it were possible to hear Empire State Building FM signals from the Buffalo area (a nearly 400 mile distance for a 4 kW signal), much less to do so on a routine basis, it's damn near certain that someone out here would have done so, and would have very eagerly reported it to the WTFDA FM list and to "VHF-UHF Digest." The
fact is that in over half a century of documented active FM DXing from the area, that's not a reception path that has ever been a favorable one.
Given the choice between believing a half-dozen of the more prominent and more fastidious DXers anywhere in the country (and my own ears), or some guy 3000 miles away who claims to have heard something over a web tuner (and a "few times," at that), I know what I think.
