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WMEL 1300

Q

quadman102

Anyone have any idea why the Talk to Me station WMEL 1300 has not been talking today? Sounds like there
is no carrier on ...and they've been off most of the day.
 
i was down in palm bay for the holidays and i found out that there signal barely comes in during the day down there. and at night? you can forget it. i hope they upgrade the signal. then again, they were on like 10 percent of the time anyway.... interesting. i hope they get their problems sorted.
 
Signal has been a problem since Harper moved WMEL to 1300 from 920 ...Rama communications, the owner
of the station appears to not have fixed a tower problem that keeps them at low power. This now is more
than signal problem, they are off the air ... they've had a ton of automation and starguide problems that
have knocked them off almost every day since they moved to Cocoa in march, but now they have been
off since yesterday morning,unless they come back or have come back on in the last couple of hours...they
are going to miss being the only station in Brevard that could have carried the Gators BCS game tonight.
Right now it sounds like transmitter is off ...I am wondering if A. Xmitter down, B. Rama took station
back as it was leased to Harper C. Rama was shut down .... anyone have any idea?
 
quadman102 said:
Signal has been a problem since Harper moved WMEL to 1300 from 920 ...Rama communications, the owner
of the station appears to not have fixed a tower problem that keeps them at low power. This now is more
than signal problem, they are off the air ... they've had a ton of automation and starguide problems that
have knocked them off almost every day since they moved to Cocoa in march, but now they have been
off since yesterday morning,unless they come back or have come back on in the last couple of hours...they
are going to miss being the only station in Brevard that could have carried the Gators BCS game tonight.
Right now it sounds like transmitter is off ...I am wondering if A. Xmitter down, B. Rama took station
back as it was leased to Harper C. Rama was shut down .... anyone have any idea?
Click to expand...

i vote A ...that transmitter has not worked properly for at least 3 years...

and C..The FCC has been coming down hard on Rama the past couple of months (finally)...could be that they shut it down due to non payment of fines, total disregard for the law....

Persaud and Harper...birds of a feather flock together...they should both be in jail
 
Heard yesterday from a source that tends to have inside information at WMEL, that the station blew a
transformer, which is why they were off the air. You must be close to the towers to get them loud and
clear, but, I also heard them around the same time today.
 
AM 1300 has a rather unigue antenna pattern using a directional (DA-2) pattern. Although it is authorized and licensed to operate with 5kw-Day and 1kw-Night, the array resticts most of the signal day and night towards the ocean. With the antenna array and transmitter tuned correctly, WMEL will have a reasonably strong daytime signal all the way into Melbourne. The night signal does pretty well in Maitland, Cocoa Beach, Cape Canaveral, Rockledge and the immediate Cocoa area.

Mark Tillery
General Manager
WELE-AM 1380
Ormond Beach - Daytona Beach, Florida
[email protected]
 
Mark, 1300 is only operating on 1 of the 3 towers, some problem with the tower cables and ground
system. You can get them in places like Malabar, but they have no signal in downtown Melbourne..
and in and out in many places in Melbourne and the Beaches ... however they still do weather for the
Space and Treasure coast, just like when they were at 920 in Melbourne and actually had a signal
into the Treasure coast.
 
Heard a rumor that Brevard high school football is going to 1300, dumping WIXC. Lots of local sponsorship for that, so that's a nice feather in John Harper's hat.
 
Would be nice if WMEL was still around come football season ...think that is highly unlikely based on the
current amount of business they are doing, versus the amount of money they are paying Rama to lease the
station.
With no signal in most of the county at night, think the advertisers would have to be in the Cocoa-Rockledge
area, period.
 
i read somewhere they were working on 1300's signal. i hope they fix it soon. they need to do something. not too many people can hear wmel now. i just hope they fix their problems. just my oppinion... 1300 has had problems for years. you can thank rama for that...
 
austingrace said:
i read somewhere they were working on 1300's signal. i hope they fix it soon. they need to do something. not too many people can hear wmel now. i just hope they fix their problems. just my oppinion... 1300 has had problems for years. you can thank rama for that...
Click to expand...

I'm curious as to what happened to the signal? Myself and Don Fleming were engineers in the 60's when we moved WRKT 1300 and WRKT FM from Cocoa beach to Pluckebaum Road and put the three antennas in the middle of the cow pasture beside Moody Ranch. At one time we had a ground fault problem but we fixed that. Has this ground system detererated that much over the years? At the time I did nights we had a great signal even on 1000 watts nighttime in Melbourne. The signal in Cocoa Beach was great even up at Port Canaveral. What has happened in the meantime?
 
WMEL is only operating on 1 of the 3 towers ...tower closest to the building, others are not connected...
Harper had a lot of land clearing done when he first leased the station in the early spring, but, nothing has
been done to connect the other 2 towers, so they are operating at reduced power, with a really crappy
transmitter, and just one tower ... signal is up and down all over the area..until Rama, the owner of the
station, decides to fix the towers, 1300 will never cover more than most of central Brevard.
 
I'm told they're now on two towers. Their signal in the north part of Brevard is as strong as WIXC's and they've captured local high school sports away from WIXC. So they're improving and building. In the south part of the county, only WMMB can provide news talk that anybody would listen to. They don't reach Titusville. So little Brevard county is becoming a segmented market that no one news talk station is fully serving. Odd, really.
 
Does anyone know what brand of transmitter, processor, and phasor they are running? They sound like they need a little change in processing because the sound is way too bassy. They have no highs whatsoever! That is, the last time I listened to them, they did not. However, you could tell they had more punch in their signal.
 
When we put it on the air, we had all state of the art Collins stuff, but that's been a hellava long time ago and surely someone has bought some new stuff...Well, on 2nd thought NOT?
 
Rama has a very small, very cheap Transmitter, the collins stuff is still there, but not in use...can't
remember the make of the transmitter, but it is the smallest I've ever seen, and I'm told very poor quality.
There have been a lot of processing problems with 1300, ever since Harper leased it last March. Board
also has a lot of issues...
 
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