WAMG Doing Transmitter Work? Its Effect On WGAM

[Laurence Glavin]

WAMG-AM 890 licensed to Dedham, MA has a CP to increase nighttime power. On a few occasions lately, the station seems to be sending more daytime power northward than usual. I can't attest to the fact that the two are related, but on those occasions when WAMG is strong in the Massachusetts section of the Merrimack Valley, it swamps the signal of WGAM-AM 900 in Nashua, NH. Does the management at the latter know about this?

 

[chrish]

WAMG is as must be done proofing the new nightime pattern during daylight hours,
it is going quite well and will be completed soon.

Chris Hall CE

 

[nhradiochild]

Does anyone find it mildly interesting that these 2 stations share the same letters in their calls? ;D

 

[Laurence Glavin]

WAMG is as must be done proofing the new nightime pattern during daylight hours,
it is going quite well and will be completed soon.

Chris Hall CE

This means that WAMG-890 will have a MAJOR signal due north. Oh...by the way, I note that the WLLH-AM Lawrence transmitter has been off-the-air for two weeks at least. It has revealed how p*ss-poor the Lowell signal is even during the daytime (at night? fuggedaboudit).

 

[chrish]

This should answer any WLLH questions:
The WLLH Lowell transmitter was of the air for a few days during the past few weeks due to serious vandalism to the building, the STL transmission line and isocoupler

WLLH Lawrence is in the same boat that Lowell was last fall when the Harris SX-1 was replaced with a new Harris DAX-1 due to its age and parts problems.
Harris is no longer rebuilding these boards and the cost of replacing what was needed started to approach half the cost of a new transmitter. Once repaired it would still be 22 years old with a bleak parts future.

WLLH Lawerence took a very bad lightning hit in early December. I had Al Warmus
send Derrik Gorman up from Cleveland and we updated the old guy wire feed to the
roof top antenna with hard line copper tubing from the output of the Harris ATU to the takeoff point of the shunt feed. The ATU was repaired and retuned.
The SX-1 was severly damaged but I was able to buy a few months running it 250 watts.
Just before the vandalism in Lowell the Lawrence transmitter expired.
An order has been placed for an identical Harris Dax-1.
WLLH Lawrence will return to the air in the next 3-4 weeks

Chris Hall
Chief Engineer

 

[Laurence Glavin]

A writer to the Boston Board reports that he heard WAMG in Lynn the other night and it seemed to come in stronger than in the past. Maybe there was diminished skywave that particular night.

 

[raccoonradio]

Yes that was me; I don't know if there was diminished skywave. It was last night...I was driving on
Rt 1-A in Lynn and Swampscott, then up to Beverly. It faded for a short while but generally was stronger than I expected though WLS was heard in the background (about 2 am)

 

[DanStrassberg]

WAMG is as must be done proofing the new nightime pattern during daylight hours,
it is going quite well and will be completed soon.

Chris Hall CE

This means that WAMG-890 will have a MAJOR signal due north. Oh...by the way, I note that the WLLH-AM Lawrence transmitter has been off-the-air for two weeks at least. It has revealed how p*ss-poor the Lowell signal is even during the daytime (at night? fuggedaboudit).

The "major" signal to the north looks major in the "coverage maps" at radio-locator.com but if you look at the polar-plot of the pattern (which you can see in the application in the FCC's CDBS system), the lobe to the north in the new night pattern is a minor one. The effect of the finite soil conductivity is to reduce the ratio of the local maxima in the major lobe to the local maxima in the minor lobes. (That is, the effect of the finite conductivity is to make the minor lobes appear larger.) Nevertheless, the change in the shape of WAMG's night pattern should result in bringing the signal to several affluent communities in MetroWest that are north and south of the transmitter site in Ashland and currently get very little signal at night.

For all practical purposes, there will be no change in the day pattern. Actually, slight tweaks are supposed to produce deeper minima to the north to improve protection to the Nashua station, but the minima are already very deep. (By pattern symmetry, there will be a similar reduction in the daytime signal to the south.) After the upgrade, the night signal to the north and south of Ashland should be quite a bit stronger than the day signal in those locations. Of course, by day (except maybe during critical hours), WAMG does not get much interference from WLS.