Gregg said:
Well, let's look at Allentown PA. They have five full power FM stations (including Bethlehem and Easton). They're in a dense neighborhood, only about 75 miles from New York and 50 miles from Philadelphia, with the Harrisburg and Wilkes Barre-Scranton markets also within about 75 miles.
And even small nearby communties such as Reading, Pottsville, Boyerstown and Ephrata PA have full power Class B FM stations, all surrounding Allentown.
There was just enough of a critical mass of FM receivers in that area in the 1940s-1950s to allow for the development and (barely) survival of a bunch of those signals. It was also a crowded enough AM dial in eastern PA back then that there was a demand for more local signals than could be easily accommodated on AM, which is part of the reason that signals like WAVT and WRFY were able to hang on. Many of those stations would be considered severely short-spaced under today's spacing rules, but were grandfathered in because they were on the air before the current rules went into place in 1964.
Fort Wayne had some early FM as well - WOWO-FM was one of the nation's first FMs, on the air in the early 1940s on the old low-band FM, and WKJG had an early FM presence on 106.1. But Fort Wayne had enough full-market AM signals to meet market demand, and Westinghouse's very negative attitude toward FM in the early 1950s doomed the first incarnation of WOWO-FM. The market, then as now, took much of its lead from WOWO, and the end of WOWO-FM pretty much spelled the demise of FM's first wave in Fort Wayne altogether.
By the time FM started to rise again in the 1960s and 1970s, the dial was just crowded enough in the region that there wasn't much room left for a dial full of Bs in Fort Wayne. 97.3, as you've noted, was the lone survivor from the first wave of FM (as WKJG-FM, then WMEF, then WMEE), and Sarkes Tarzian had room for a full B on 95.1 when it put WPTA-FM (later WPTH/WFWQ/WAJI) on the air in the 60s. Fort Wayne was unusual in having just those two FM stations as late as the early 1970s, when the dial started to fill up with more entrants - but by the time those entrants came along, there wasn't spacing available for full Bs.
I can understand Fort Wayne having a few low-powered stations on frequencies originally reserved for Class A stations, such as 92.7, 101.7 and 103.9. But Fort Wayne has numerous low-powered stations on frequencies that should be full-powered: 92.3, 93.3, 94.1, 96.3, 101.1, 102.9, 105.1, 106.7 and 107.9. In other markets, those would be Class B frequencies.
They would be, yes,
if they'd been on the air since the early days of FM or if they'd been in areas remote enough to still have room for new full Bs. The whole idea behind Docket 80-90 was to remove the old "A channel vs. B/C channel" distinction. In so doing, it allowed some stations on former "A channels" to upgrade if space was available - you've got full Cs on frequencies like 96.7 and 103.1 out west - or for class A or B1 signals to be built on former "B/C channels" if there wasn't spacing available for the full class B or class C allocation. So in Fort Wayne, you can't have a B on 92.3 because of short-spacing to Indy, Hammond and Chicago. You can't quite do a full B on 93.3 because of short-spacing to 93.5 Hartford City and Bowling Green and a few others. 94.1? Jackson, Michigan. 96.3? Chicago, Indy, Detroit. 101.1? Very tightly spaced to Chicago. 102.9? Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids...and so on.
Again, it's all a question of timing. If someone had put a 96.3B on the air in Fort Wayne in 1948 and had kept it there, despite the short-spacing to Chicago and Detroit, it would have been grandfathered in and could still be a B today. But they didn't, and that channel wasn't allocated to Churubusco until about 1989, at which point the current spacing rules restricted it to a B1.
I'm not sure how familiar the original poster actually is with the Fort Wayne market, but it's hardly fair to call some of those less-than-full-B signals "low-power." The market is geographically compact and flat as a pancake, and the B1s that are close in to town (93.3, 96.3, 105.1 at a minimum) have no signal deficiencies anywhere that you'd find an Arbitron diary. 105.1 has been at the very top of the ratings even before it moved its B1 signal to the Hillegas Road tower farm earlier this year. And even the As with centrally-located towers (92.3, 103.9, 107.9) do just fine pretty much anywhere. It's not until you start hitting the rimshots - 94.1, 101.1, 102.9, 106.7 - that you start having signal problems, and that's not at all unique to Fort Wayne. Every market in the midwest (and most others around the country, for that matter) has several of these drop-in, rimshot As struggling to be noticed, mostly on "B/C channels."
