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WQAM's signal

C

CapeFish



Looking at the WQAM signal, it reaches most of the Floridian peninsula during the day except Tampa Bay. I know the signal is 5kw/day undirectional.....but you can listen to 560 in Orlando usually both day and night in your car, also with a good AM home/boombox radio, and it sounds almost as clear as Orlando's own 1kw AM stations like 660 WORL-AM.

At night WQAM goes down to 1kw, but the signal still gets up to Orlando, but it suffers out here on the west coast near Cape Coral.

Why does WQAM travel so well day & night up the peninsula to Orlando, but at night not to the Gulf Coast?

Why is it so difficult to get 560 in Tampa....is it 570?

Which Cuban station tries to jam 560?

Before Cuba started attacking the 560 frequency for jamming, how far up the coast did people listen to WQAM day & night?
 
CapeFish said:
Looking at the WQAM signal, it reaches most of the Floridian peninsula during the day except Tampa Bay. I know the signal is 5kw/day undirectional.....but you can listen to 560 in Orlando usually both day and night in your car, also with a good AM home/boombox radio, and it sounds almost as clear as Orlando's own 1kw AM stations like 660 WORL-AM.

At night WQAM goes down to 1kw, but the signal still gets up to Orlando, but it suffers out here on the west coast near Cape Coral.

Why does WQAM travel so well day & night up the peninsula to Orlando, but at night not to the Gulf Coast?

Why is it so difficult to get 560 in Tampa....is it 570?

Which Cuban station tries to jam 560?

Before Cuba started attacking the 560 frequency for jamming, how far up the coast did people listen to WQAM day & night?
Click to expand...

First, Cuba is not jamming 560. They have no reason to jam an English sports station in a purely Spanish speaking market. TCuba just has their own station or stations on the same channel... just as Venezuela and Colombia and Guatemala and other Caribbean nations have, also on 560.

When one looks at ratings, you find that there is listening only in the areas with a very strong signal. While you may hear a station like WQAM far from Miami, nobody listens because it is weak, noisy in the Summer months, and is not, as often or not, local. Radio stations generally (5400 times out of 5450 times) get their revenue in the local market, in this case Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, and really don't care if you can hear them outside the metro.

The reason WQAM does have avery good signal is that it is on a low dial position. 5 kw on 560 covers much more than 50 kw on 1550, for example. And then, WQAM is not directional... nearly all the bigger Miami stations are directional, and send less signal to the North and West.

Hope this helps understand both the coverage and the economics of radio.
 
That leads me to another question: why isn't WQAM directional? Is it because of rules at the time they were licensed. or something else?
 
DavidEduardo said:
First, Cuba is not jamming 560. They have no reason to jam an English sports station in a purely Spanish speaking market. TCuba just has their own station or stations on the same channel... just as Venezuela and Colombia and Guatemala and other Caribbean nations have, also on 560.

When one looks at ratings, you find that there is listening only in the areas with a very strong signal. While you may hear a station like WQAM far from Miami, nobody listens because it is weak, noisy in the Summer months, and is not, as often or not, local. Radio stations generally (5400 times out of 5450 times) get their revenue in the local market, in this case Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, and really don't care if you can hear them outside the metro.

The reason WQAM does have avery good signal is that it is on a low dial position. 5 kw on 560 covers much more than 50 kw on 1550, for example. And then, WQAM is not directional... nearly all the bigger Miami stations are directional, and send less signal to the North and West.

Hope this helps understand both the coverage and the economics of radio.
Click to expand...
David,

Thank you for the response about the signal and dial position being beneficial to WQAM.

If you think that there aren't Cubans in Cuba that listen and understand some English sports like baseball then your point of Cuba not jamming would make sense. But the past few years has seen WQAM being jammed like never before to the point it was featured in the Palm Beach Post with WQAM responding "write your Congressman."

As for the signal economics, I don't know when that came into the equation, but I understand WQAM wouldn't want an ad from Fort Myers to play on 560 in Miami. I guess this is why WQAM has WWCN here in Fort Myers running sports.

I think WQAM is one of those unique stations that covers much more distance than it should based on power. 690 WTIX in New Orleans is another that comes to mind. Considering Miami has no Class A blowtorches, WQAM is the closest to this.
 
CapeFish said:


Looking at the WQAM signal, it reaches most of the Floridian peninsula during the day except Tampa Bay. I know the signal is 5kw/day undirectional.....but you can listen to 560 in Orlando usually both day and night in your car, also with a good AM home/boombox radio, and it sounds almost as clear as Orlando's own 1kw AM stations like 660 WORL-AM.

At night WQAM goes down to 1kw, but the signal still gets up to Orlando, but it suffers out here on the west coast near Cape Coral.

Why does WQAM travel so well day & night up the peninsula to Orlando, but at night not to the Gulf Coast?

Why is it so difficult to get 560 in Tampa....is it 570?

Which Cuban station tries to jam 560?

Before Cuba started attacking the 560 frequency for jamming, how far up the coast did people listen to WQAM day & night?
Click to expand...

I can usually hear 560 in Port Canaveral and sometimes as far north as Daytona Beach during daytime. One time I heard WIOD in Lake City.
 
The lower dial position helps because of two things: 1) there are fewer stations spaced farther apart (in terms of both geography and dial position) on that end, and 2) the lower frequencies require less power to cover a given area.

Just as an offhand example of principle #2 elsewhere, the current power limit for analogue television broadcasts on the VHF band (channels 2 through 13) is 316,000 watts, whereas the limit for UHF (upwards from channel 14) is 500,000 watts. That basically means that a UHF channel and VHF channel, given the same tower height and location with zero interference on either frequency, could throw out the exact same coverage area, yet the UHF channel would require more power than it's VHF counterpart to do so.

The AM band works the same way... although today's difference is more a result of the current crowding of both the dial and the physical landscape on the upper frequencies than any other factor.
 
To put it in its simplest terms, it's the wavelength. The wavelength of WQAM is approx 3x that of WJCC (1700). (Wavelength x Freq = C, the speed of light. They are inversely related. But I'm sure you knew that, as a radio geek.)

I never studied the physics of propogation, so I couldn't explain why.... but I know this is so.

Longwave (below 500 kHz) propogates even better, but there's nothing on!

Of course how many stations are assigned on a frequency and how far apart helps, too.

73s
 
First, Cuba is not jamming 560. They have no reason to jam an English sports station in a purely Spanish speaking market. Cuba just has their own station or stations on the same channel... just as Venezuela and Colombia and Guatemala and other Caribbean nations have, also on 560.
Click to expand...

But those stations in VZ and CO and GT aren't sending enough signal to damage WQAM within its protected contour. For some reason, the Cuban authorities can't seem to "figure out" ??? the right power levels and directional patterns to avoid bumping into WQAM? Directional antenna technology is even older than those 1958 Chevys puttering around Havana. One has to assume either incompetence or malicious intent, if not both.

Cuban interference, along with summer thunderstorms, lack of Class A flamethrowers and FM-friendly terrain, mortally wounded AM music radio in South Florida about five or ten years sooner than it happened in other places, and it's probably sending AM talk to an early demise as well.

Speaking of Class A's, since they aren't creating any more of them, I favor reallocating these every few years like congressional seats. No reason to keep blowtorches in Rochester, Shreveport, Schenectady, and other contracting metropolises of the Rust Belt past. No reason a station like WHO or even WCCO couldn't go directional at night. Miami should have gotten one years ago and one of those cities should have gone the Fort Wayne route.
 
smedge2006 said:
But those stations in VZ and CO and GT aren't sending enough signal to damage WQAM within its protected contour. For some reason, the Cuban authorities can't seem to "figure out" ??? the right power levels and directional patterns to avoid bumping into WQAM? Directional antenna technology is even older than those 1958 Chevys puttering around Havana. One has to assume either incompetence or malicious intent, if not both.

Cuban interference, along with summer thunderstorms, lack of Class A flamethrowers and FM-friendly terrain, mortally wounded AM music radio in South Florida about five or ten years sooner than it happened in other places, and it's probably sending AM talk to an early demise as well.

Speaking of Class A's, since they aren't creating any more of them, I favor reallocating these every few years like congressional seats. No reason to keep blowtorches in Rochester, Shreveport, Schenectady, and other contracting metropolises of the Rust Belt past. No reason a station like WHO or even WCCO couldn't go directional at night. Miami should have gotten one years ago and one of those cities should have gone the Fort Wayne route.
Click to expand...

Some of the Venezuelan and Colombians, right on the coast, with 50 to 100 kw, are very capable of adding to the interference towards WQAM and the entire MW band in the US.

Cuba is hostile to the US. It has no directionals and does not care. A biproduct of this is that it is hard for Cubans to listen to US stations, a secondary goal in serving the local audinece with state-run radio stations. There is no commercial radio in Cuba, and all programming is centralized. On many frequencies, they increase power to block US staitons like WAQI, WQBA and others form making landfall. All the treaty compliant allocations of pre-Castro Cuba are gone. All the directionals are gone. And this is on purpose.

Miami is not going to get a 1 A ( whatever they are now) because it is too late. Miami was too small then, and the bands are too congested now. Imagine trying to fit a new 50 kw into Miami. It took 10 years to licence and build WQBA's highly directional upgrade to 50 kw... 20 years ago. Today, there is not a frequency you could put a new and big fulltimer on and meet the treaty protection requirements.

Miami moved to FM fast in the early 70's with WMYQ, one of the first 3 FM CHRs of its type. then came the Amazing FM, Y-100, one of the best CHRs ever in the USA. The CHR format had broad cross-ethnic appeal, and brought Miami to a point of having more FM than AM listeners a full two years ahead of the national average... 1975 vs. 1978 for the nation as a whole.
 
I noticed WKAT is leaving its shared tower with WQAM (same power 5kw day/1kw night non-directional) for the WINZ tower at 50kw day/5kw night. This should let them cover more of the Metro Area much more easily, but it ends yet another non-directional Miami AM station.
 
CapeFish said:
I noticed WKAT is leaving its shared tower with WQAM (same power 5kw day/1kw night non-directional) for the WINZ tower at 50kw day/5kw night. This should let them cover more of the Metro Area much more easily, but it ends yet another non-directional Miami AM station.
Click to expand...

When will this happen?

Will they have a better signal in Broward?

Speaking of WKAT....
http://radiopages.net/radio/talkwkat.html

73s
 
CapeFish said:
Looking at the WQAM signal, it reaches most of the Floridian peninsula during the day except Tampa Bay. I know the signal is 5kw/day undirectional.....At night WQAM goes down to 1kw, but the signal still gets up to Orlando, but it suffers out here on the west coast near Cape Coral.
Why does WQAM travel so well day & night up the peninsula to Orlando, but at night not to the Gulf Coast?
Why is it so difficult to get 560 in Tampa....is it 570?
Click to expand...

I think WQAM's main problem with reception all along the Gulf Coast (especially Tampa) is because there is another sports-talk station at 560 AM that's located in Dothan Alabama (which is basically part of the Florida panhandle region). It too is non-directional at 5,000 watts by day (only 118 watts by night). Its daytime signal has no problems at times traversing over the Gulf Of Mexico and straight into the Tampa Bay area.

Oh yeah - and 570 AM in the Tampa Bay area is a rather strong station in itself (also 5,000 watts - day and night).

THE MAJOR
 
DavidEduardo said:
Miami is not going to get a 1 A ( whatever they are now) because it is too late. Miami was too small then, and the bands are too congested now. Imagine trying to fit a new 50 kw into Miami. It took 10 years to licence and build WQBA's highly directional upgrade to 50 kw... 20 years ago. Today, there is not a frequency you could put a new and big fulltimer on and meet the treaty protection requirements.
Click to expand...

Let's try this... suppose that in a post-Katrina New Orleans, Entercom decides WWL isn't covering the nut and offers
a deal. Someone buys 870, knocks down the New Orleans station or moves it to another frequency, and petitions to shift the Class A status to Miami. (Forget for the moment about the CP for 880, or assume that the buyer of 870 also owns that CP.) Protections would be to the west, south and east for San Juan and non - U.S. stations on 870. What would stop the buyer from building an antenna farm around Homestead and beaming everything due north or north-northwest toward WWL's current skywave protected zone? The tiny amount of power south, east and west would be equal to or greater than current protections. Assume that the 5 mv/m would stop just around the Broward - Palm Beach line, just out of 850's contour. What would stop this from happening? Almost all the juice would be going back into the U.S. heartland.
Is there some rule that a Class A cannot have six towers?
 
The-Major said:
I think WQAM's main problem with reception all along the Gulf Coast (especially Tampa) is because there is another sports-talk station at 560 AM that's located in Dothan Alabama (which is basically part of the Florida panhandle region). It too is non-directional at 5,000 watts by day (only 118 watts by night). Its daytime signal has no problems at times traversing over the Gulf Of Mexico and straight into the Tampa Bay area.

Oh yeah - and 570 AM in the Tampa Bay area is a rather strong station in itself (also 5,000 watts - day and night).

THE MAJOR
Click to expand...
I notice that I get Rays baseball on 1250 WHNZ Tampa all the way in Tallahassee in my home there at night.

As for 570, the amazing thing is that 560 and 570 don't interfere too badly in Cape Coral where I am during the day, but at night it is apparent that the Cuban station tries to buzzkill them both.
 
CapeFish said:
Check out this construction permit: http://www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/amq?list=0&facid=27713

Radio Locator says it will cover almost all of Dade County & Broward County with a City Grade signal.

No clue when it will happen, just that they have a CP.
Click to expand...

Daytime, that may be pretty good. Remeber, the red circle in radio-locator is a very approximate 5 mv/m, drawn on the big side. Useful coverage is about 25% less than that. City grade is 25 mv/m, which would be less than a quarter of that curve. Nights, it will only cover from abot Ft. Lauderdale down to South Miami well. Still, probabloy an improvement.
 
As long as we're on the subject.....

I was visiting family along the North Carolina coast just north of Wilmington around Thanksgiving 1989. While there I purchased a GE Superadio II at a local catalog store. Once back at my aunt and uncle's home within sight of the ocean I fired up the Superadio. The first place on the dial that caught my ear was a decent signal at 560 playing a Beatles song. It was WQAM (they had an oldies format around this time). WIOD was also listenable on the Superadio.

For contrast, I fired up my Radio Shack (Sangean) DX-440 and all I heard on 560 and 610 was a very faint signal. Needless to say The Superadio became my favorite and still is.
 
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