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WDYC Douglasville has a CP for 50,000 watts

B

BarryATL

http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/info?call=WDCY&service=AM

800 watts ND critical hours
50,000 watts DA 4 towers daytime

During the dead of winter here is the schedule:

7:45 AM Sign On with 800 watts
9:45 AM Raise power to 50,000 watts
3:30 PM Lower power to 800 watts
5:30 PM sign off

How does it make any financial sense to install a 50,000 watt transmitter and build out a 4 tower array for a daytime station that has 800 watts critical hours?

By the way... the times above are the ones WDPC uses... Douglasville is so close I assume they are the same or within 15 minutes.
 
Well, you can tell those in a position to buy airtime that you're a 50,000 watt blowtorch....and then hope that nobody's paying attention to "details"
 
You get the station on the air by accepting the lower power at the ends of the day, and then you get a creative consulting engineer to apply every which way from Sunday to eventually get a power increase for the edges of daylight.
 
Well...actually...this 50,000 watt signal will put almost 150,000 watts into it's main lobe....which goes right over Atlanta. The 1 milivolt contour covers most of Atlanta city limits.
I understand Neil Millman is up for PD.
 
That's just the point! Who's gonna listen and how can you sell something that nobody listens too. If it were 10 to 15 yrs. ago maybe it would have mattered but in today's time the AM Band is a non issue with listeners. Look at what AM-750 is doing, cutting back. Less money coming in for lack of listener support. I grew up listening and loved the AM Band but sadly it's days are numbered.
 
What happened to the proposed AM at 830 that had a CP for Sandy Springs? Hasn't the CP been given up?

WDCY will never be an Arbitron-rated station. It's to be owned by a religious company so maybe they plan to broker it to preachers. But several stations do that already. How much of this programming is there to go around?

I'll be surprised if the signal, despite preliminary coverage maps, will be good over the market. Look at 1160. On paper, 1160 looked great with its 50,000 watts aimed over Atlanta. In reality, its signal is really bad.

In addition to a shrinking AM audience, AM signals in general don't seem to have the punch or coverage that they used to. I'm guessing this is due to a combination of going from tubes to solid state transmitters and the poor quality of AM radios manufactured these days.
 
Uh, I'm not aware of any study which differentiates 'tube watts' from 'transistor watts' and consequently, I submit it doesn't make a tinkers dam what the transmitter uses to generate RF as far as poower goes.

You >can< sell me on scurcvy AM receivers. Also on a dry soil around here. Also on the idea that many latecomers to the 50KW club are, like this one, marginal economically at best. Consequently, they tend to skimp on both installation and maintrenance, both of which can do serious dirt to coverage.
 
The 830 site is impossible( well....almost) to build!
The night site is something like 6 towers between Sandy Springs and Ga 400. Can you imagine the cost of the real estate for that many towers? Many, many acres of land at that frequency....and all it gets is 2 or 3 hundred watts.
To build 830 will require deep pockets and lots of prayer/luck.
WDCY is owned by a church and is non profit. These folks are sincere and consider the station a ministry.
 
Littlejohn is right but a solid state transmitter will usually modulate positives better than a tube type and usually has far less distortion. (Improving positve modulation helps AM coverage. The details are beyond the scope of this discussion but engineers spent much time trying to figure out how to get them higher)
OK....the Brennen designed transmitters at WAPE/WVOK/The Big Bam would modulate 200% positive modulation.....but most tube type transmitters had aged tubes which were lucky to modulate 70% postive. Even with good tubes, few would modulate better than 110%.
Coverage is worse today because of all the additional interference. The FCC has opened the flood gates on power increases/new allocations on the AM band. I did some measurements for a local station recently.....you could only measure to the 1 milivolt contour because of cochannel interference.....it limited the effective coverage of this 5000 watt station in the winter daylight hours to about 12 miles! I think this is what you are experiencing Roddy....the interference does effectively limit coverage
 
I know Billy spent a ton of money to upgrade am 1160 from 10,000 watts to 50,000 watts directional even having to buy the original am 1170 WMLB in Cumming so he could take it dark to make am 1160 a 50 kilowatt station and even changing the patttern twice. He still could not get it very well in Conyers where he lives and was very dissapointed and decided to sell rather sink anymore money in it. He also put a lot of money into IBOC and never got that investment back eventually just turning it off as it did not perform well with a directional antenna. AM-1160 is what it is.
 
amlover said:
A 50,000 watt 4 tower directional is NOT a blowtorch. Personally I think it's a huge waste of money.
Click to expand...

I agree. Especially at 1520, and more especially where the ground conductivity is awful. I didn't say it WAS a blowtorch....I just said you could TELL buyers of advertising or brokered time slots that you had a 50KW blowtorch.
 
Littlejohn is right but a solid state transmitter will usually modulate positives better than a tube type and usually has far less distortion. (Improving positve modulation helps AM coverage. The details are beyond the scope of this discussion but engineers spent much time trying to figure out how to get them higher)
Click to expand...

Thanks, Tom, and I understand what you're saying. To me, stations with solid state transmitters just sound quieter...and cleaner. Maybe in the old days before AM had to sound good to compete with FM, some AM's, especially top-40 stations, might have tended to overmodulate. Perhaps I'm incorrectly associating being loud from the overmodulation with better signals.
 
You probably are.
There are a couple of things to consider...
When a statin buys a new radio, they tend to clean up everything else at the same time, thus the change is often greater than just the transmission equipment alone. Second, plate modulated AM systems tend towards a lot of intermodulation distortion... very few of them exhibit much linearity actross the audio passbnad. With a couple of notabkle exceptions, none are really capapble of less than maybe 4% or so of IM (SMPTE method) at high modulation levels. This problem was actually solved with tube transmitters - the switchmod systems did away with tthe modulation transformer and reactor. The Collins produst was capable of half a percent or less of intermod at pretty much any modulation level. (The tradeoff was some fierce internal voltage peaks, but they can be handled by one means or another)
 
To show how useless AM is now.

I live in Douglasville (a little outside the city limits, near Winston, and on the way to Carrol County and Villa Rica), and never knew of this station. Also, with HD radio, AM is quickly on the way out. Also, the Microsoft Zune only picks up FM, and most car radios, when listening to AM, receive interference from the car's engine itself.

But if it's a church station, I wish them the best of luck in their ministry.
 
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