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Will WPHE 690 get nighttime now?
- Thread starter amfmsw
- Start date
amfmsw said:
It's probably who WPHE was protecting, yes.
At the very least, the protection will continue to be required for as long as the Canadian government "notifies" the Department of State of their use of 690. That notification is not likely to go away for years, if ever.
But 690 is assigned under the NARBA treaty as a Canadian Clear channel. *I believe* that means any 690 stations in the U.S. will need to protect the Canadian border indefinitely.
I think there is a good chance (at least 50/50) that another Montreal station will apply to take over the 690 facility.
It wasn't even that dry. I liked it.
MarcB said:
As already noted, Canada does not remove the international notification of its silent AM allocations, hence there is definitely a possibility that 690 Montreal may be revived--albeit not necessarily with 50 kW and not necessarily in Montreal itself. CFAV (licensed, I believe, to the Montreal suburb of LaValle and operating with 10 kW-U on 1570) is one of several stations that might apply.
But, regardless, WPHE could already have applied for night service if it felt that the facilities it would be granted would be of any use. There was no need to wait for the Montreal station to go dark. Before the Rio treaty of (I think) 1986, what became Class A AMs (690 and 940 in Montreal are two such allocations) had to be protected from interference within their 0.5 mV/m 50% skywave contours wherever those contours lay--even outside the national borders of the country in which the Class A (then Class I) station was located. Since southeastern PA lies within that contour, WPHE was limited to operating only during daylight hours. But the Rio treaty changed that. The treaty changed the protection requirements; the protection provided to Class A AMs now applies only within the national borders of the Class A's country of license. Hence you have WVCH operating at night with 6W. WWDB and WPHE could also operate at night at very low power if station management felt that the low power could overcome the co-channel interference and provide useful service to enough population to be worth the effort of getting it on the air. Remember, even though the Montreal allocation is dark, the power that WPHE would be granted would be based on where CINF's 0.5 mV/m 50% skywave intersected the US-Canada border AND WPHE's NIF contour would be calculated under the assumption that whatever station replaced CINF would deliver the same skywave to Phoenixville as CINF did. If WPHE were granted 4W at night, would there be enough people living within the station's 60 mV/m contour (my guess at what WPHE's NIF would be) to make the effort of establishing such a night signal worth the effort? My guess is no.
MarcB said:
I'm told even an AM 1190 in Canada signed off many decades ago, yet is still "notified" by the CRTC to this day. Could you imagine what WLIB/New York and/or WOWO/Fort Wayne's power would be if 1190 in Canada's space was freed up? (Even before WLIB neutered WOWO some 15 years ago...)
DToTheJ said:
Before WOWO went Class B for WLIB, it was limited only by the other Class A station on 1190, KEX in Portland. The Canadian station (on Prince Edward Island, if I recall properly) had to protect WOWO.
Best I can tell, the PEI station is NOT notified anymore. ISTR it moved to 720, and then to 100.3 FM where it is now. There is another 1190 in Canada, in Saskatchewan, and it's still operating.
w9wi said:
The Canadian station on 1190 in PEI was CHTN and it did indeed move to 720, the frequency on which it was still operating just before it went dark maybe four or five years ago. I think CHTN was was on 720 for a lot more than 15 years before it went dark, but I could be wrong. However, AFAIK, CHTN remains notified on BOTH 1190 and 720. Canadian custom is not to de-notify the abandoned facilities of an AM that has changed frequencies unless the new and old frequencies are so close to each other that it would not be possible to build stations on both of them. In such cases, the old frequency is usually de-notified when the new frequency signs on because the old frequency has become unusable in its former location and the new frequency is presumed to have the superior facilities.
WLIB's night pattern is nulled over the south Bronx and northern Queens to protect CHTN's original operation on 1190, which had gone dark when CHTN moved to 720 maybe five years before WLIB started building its nighttime facilities. Had the ghost of the old CHTN not been living on 1190, I strongly doubt whether WLiB could have gotten any more night power than the 30 kW that it got. But WLIB might have gotten away with one fewer towers than it had to add in order to construct a night array with a null more or less right in the middle if the main lobe.
DanStrassberg said:
I don't know where to see the notifications themselves, but 1190 PEI is not in FCC-CDBS, and it isn't in Industry Canada's Broadcasting Database. Why not I have no idea -- as you say, it's generally Canadian practice to not delete old facilities. 1150 CKX in Manitoba, for example, has been gone from AM longer than CHTN, but it's still in both databases.
(the other three PEI full-power frequencies - 630, 720, and 1240 - *are* still in both databases. Of course, all three have been silent for years.)
Don't know when it was removed though. It's very possible it was still notified when the WLIB changes were filed for.
Just to be a bit pedantic about it... CHTN didn't go silent, they changed frequency from 720 to 100.3. You can't do that in the U.S. -- can't get an AM license changed to specify an FM frequency -- but you can in Canada.
w9wi said:
This is a guess. Maybe someone in the US was able to pull some strings with Industrie Canada, the outfit that does the technical work for the CRTC. I know of one case where a US consulting engineer found a new frequency for an unbuilt Canadian AM allocation that was never going to be built anyhow. I think it was in western ON and it was moved to 770, but I can't recall the frequency it was moved from (might have been 820--to improve the proposed night facilities of WCPT, which now holds a CP for 1.5 kW-N six towers).
This is a pure guess, but the deletion of the PEI 1190 might have had something to do with a large number of US applications that hung around for years to upgrade stations on 1190 in the wake of the WOWO downgrade. WOWO itself was to be upgraded--not back to a Class A, but it was going to put up some more towers and increase night power. WOWO's new night pattern would have totally protected Salem's 1190 in Atlanta (currently a daytimer), which was going to add night service with 10 kW from a separate five- or six-tower site. WLIB was going to add the third tower of its day array to the four towers it uses to produce its current night pattern and would have reduced the protection to PEI. As far as I can tell, the whole deal collapsed; I can't find any traces of the various applications, but I have no idea why it fell through. Anyhow, it seems plausible to me that Canada was prevailed upon to kill off 1190 on PEI to make these other changes possible. After all, Salem talks to a higher power;>)
Great stuff Dan. What does PEI stand for?
Sam Lit said:
Bill_W is right, Prince Edward Island. Here in New England, we don't think PEI needs explanation. What a difference 300 miles seems to make!
Scott Fybush said:
But can anyone explain why, on 720, CHTN was able to run (IIRC) 7.5 kW at night with a very simple cardioid pattern aimed east--nulled to the west to protect WGN (with a pretty darned big signal to the northeast), but WQTH (had it ever been built), had the night power in one of its several applications knocked back by the FCC from (IIRC) 2.5 kW to 640W because it would have been co-channel with an already dark 720 in (of all places) Iceland (or was it Greenland?). IOW, CHTN could send this huge signal toward Iceland (or Greenland), but WQTH had to reduce its planned lower power even further to protect a dark station that was well off to one side of its pattern. I NEVER understood that!
DanStrassberg said:
Certainly not in my family. My stepfather's brother (now deceased) moved from PA to that part of the world (Nova Scotia) in the '50s, so "PEI" gets mentioned more often among us than the "long form". PEI was a beautiful place when I visited it in 1983 when it was only accessible by ferry, dunno how its gotten since the Confederation Bridge to New Brunswick (NOT the NJ town
) opened.But be careful to spell "PEI" as that (all caps), otherwise you'll conjure up images of architects (as in I.M. Pei).
ixnay
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