Why WNNW Was Off-the-air Last Week

[Laurence Glavin]

WNNW-AM 800 in Lawrence was off-the-air from mid-morning until the afternoon on Monday, 2/16 (a holiday; the riggers must have received double pay!), Tuesday 2/17, and Wednesday, 2/18. Pourquoi? To install an antenna at the tippity-top of the tower. At the same time, Costa-Eagle has requested authorization to move W221CH (92.1 mhz, or is mHz, orMhz or mhZ?) from Newton, NH to Lawrence. The entry at fcc.gov gives the antenna as directional. The pattern data show 1.000 as being along the zero-degree radial, ie due north, but the pattern display shows it oriented southeasterly.

 

[DanStrassberg]

Costa-Eagle has requested authorization to move W221CH (92.1 mhz, or is mHz, orMhz or mhZ?) from Newton, NH to Lawrence.

Of all of the possilities you listed, none is correct. The proper abbreviation is MHz. The M and the H are capitalized. The z is not. Capital M is the abbreviation for Mega, the prefix for 10^6. Lower-case m is the abbreviation for milli, the abbreviation for 10^-3. The difference between M and m is thus nine decimal orders of magnitude or a billion times.

The unit for frequency is Hz, or Hertz, named for German scientist Heinrich Hertz. As with most, albeit not all, proper names (at least in Western countries) the first letter is capitalized; the other letters are not, hence Hz. The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) adopted the Hz as the name for the unit of frequency in the early 1960s, I believe. Before that, what is now known as the Hz was called the cycle per second.