What would you do if you bought WBAI

[luperm]

Bob makes some great observations.

105.9's woes, particularly on LI, can be attributed to the first adjacent WBLI/106.1 in Patchogue and co-channel WHCN/105.9 in Hartford. This only compounds the issues presented by their less potent 610 watt signal.

 

[w9wi]

Univision knew from back in 1999 that the 105.9 facility was inadequate. They realized that projections based on a 60 dbu signal were unrealistic in a market with a huge percentage of the population living in apartments that the base 600 watts could just not penetrate... sometimes even in direct line of sight with the ESB.

I can tell many stories of having to put my very high end Sony portable right next to a hotel room window in midtown to listen to the former WCAA... because deeper inside the room it would not come in. And every staff member had similar anecdotal experiences.

Here are some Longley-Rice maps (using Doug Lung's original Perl code modified for FM) covering a variety of markets of interest to me and some colleagues. At the top of the list are WQXR and WXNY for the New York market.

The difference in the darker green coverage between 96.3 and 105.9 is notable.

http://www.onairusa.com/fm/

VERY interesting. (is that Perl code available?)

History question: why is 105.9 WQXR a B1 & not a short-spaced full B?

 

[Bob E. Nelson]

VERY interesting. (is that Perl code available?)

I'll contact you privately on this. It's a fairly complex suite of apps that have to be orchestrated via a shell script. There are some Linux-centric bits and pieces that have been added making it unportable to other environments.

To keep this on topic for New York, I'm also going to add WNYE, WNSH and WBGO to the L-R maps. Since most of the Empire facilities are similar to the existing WXNY entry, I opted to focus on just those three since they have "interesting" facilities. Generating the maps is computationally expensive, chewing up a lot of CPU cycles and time. Even with an i7-avx and 32 GB of real core, it's a lengthy process.

 

[jmtillery]

History question: why is 105.9 WQXR a B1 & not a short-spaced full B?

I believe it may be for the same reason that 94.7 cannot move to ESB as a full B. If 105.9 were to transmit from New Jersey, it may be able to get its full B status back, or at least this was the case when 105.9 was first assigned to Newark. Since that time, other stations have gone on the air preventing 105.9 from moving to ESB as a full B, so it was downgraded to a B1 when it moved to ESB. Had it moved years ago, it may have been able to preserve its B status same as 100.3 when it moved to New York around 1983.

 

[reelyreal]

Technically, the original 105.9 license was deleted in the early 80's. Multicultural Broadcasting eventually won the CP to build 105.9 Newark in the late 80's/early 90's, and were limited by all of the other signals on the air... The largest impediment being co-channel WHCN Hartford.

 

[fybush]

105.9 Newark was never a full B, at least not in our post-1964 understanding (50 kW/150 m) of a full B. The original WHBI-FM from 1962 was authorized on what amounted to a contour-protection basis against several other stations, first-adjacent 106.1s in Philadelphia and Long Island and co-channel 105.9 in Hartford.

Those stations all became grandfathered against each other when the new rules took effect in 1964. WHBI-FM was able to move several times within Manhattan afterward - IIRC, it went from the Chanin Building to the Chrysler Building to Empire - but always with the requirement that it not increase interference to or from those other pre-1964 stations.

(The loss of the original WHBI-FM license and the "new" license that replaced it didn't affect anything technically; 105.9 was allowed to continue as though it were still the original grandfathered 1962 license.)

Not only is 105.9 limited today by those other pre-1964 signals, it's also wedged in by newer signals that have appeared since under current spacing rules, including 105.7 in Manahawkin NJ and 105.5 in Paterson NY. If memory serves, those stations have to protect 105.9 as though it's a full B1, but the pre-1964 protections actually limit 105.9 to rather less than full B1 status.

Bottom line: not only was 105.9 never a "full B" from New Jersey, unlike 94.7, it can't become a full B, or even a full B1, by moving from Manhattan to NJ.

As for WNYC's level of satisfaction with the 105.9 signal, that might be gauged by WNYC's plan to purchase a small noncomm signal (WDFH 90.3 Ossining) to increase the reach of the WQXR programming into Westchester. I suspect that if a better signal than WDFH were available, WNYC would go after it quickly. 105.9 isn't cutting it up there.

 

[luperm]

If Family Radio ever sells 106.3 in Mt. Kisco, NY it would be an excellent compliment to WQXR.

 

[XCountry285]

No issues with 105.9 in West Milford