MarcB said:
It seems WRCA 1330 will be going ESPN DePortes in the near future. In this small write-up about Beasley flipping WWDB 860 in Philly to ESPN DePortes it mentions Beasley is doing the same to stations in Atlanta and Boston. WRCA 1330 is Beasley's only Boston station.
An increase in night power from 17 kW to 25 kW for WRCA might or might not be a simple matter. My initial reaction was, if they could have done it easily, they certainly would have, but that is not necessarily so. Remember, the site (though probably no longer the towers or the buildings) is owned by Champion Broadcasting, licensee of WUNR. As a condition for allowing WRCA to diplex from its site, WUNR imposed a condition of "signal parity" between it and WRCA. Now, based on your reception reports for WRCA and WUNR (mine too, for that matter), I know you would say, if signal parity _really_ was a condition, it was not met. But if you look at the RMS values of the three standard patterns (two for WRCA, one for WUNR), it appears that the parity criterion was, in fact, satisfied. Because the towers are electrically taller and thus slightly more efficient at WUNR's higher frequency than at WRCA's 16.8% lower frequency, WUNR's 1538.80 mV/m RMS inverse-distance field at 1 km ever so slightly exceeds WRCA's average inverse-distance RMS field of 1494.8 mV/m @ 1 km. (1578.1 mV/m by day--using 25 kW and 1411.5 mV/m by night--using 17 kW).
There are several reasons why WUNR might have elected to run DA-1, whereas WRCA elected the more expensive (because of the requirement for separate day and night phasors) DA-2. At night, WRCA uses four of the towers at 750 Sawmill Brook Parkway. During the day, WRCA uses all five towers. WUNR's DA-1 pattern uses all five towers all the time. WUNR may be more hemmed in by first adjacents than WRCA is. WUNR has to protect WSMN to the north and WARV to the south. WRCA has to protect WDER to the north and WARL to the southwest. Based solely on the station-to-station distances, WRCA's protection requirements might seem to be more stringent than WUNR's, but that may not really be the case. Or maybe WUNR just didn't want to spend the extra money for a DA-2 setup. Remember that for the 60+ years that WUNR ran 5 kW from that site, it operated DA-1. Or maybe there was no room for one more phasor inside the building, whose footprint the City of Newton restricted to that of the original building. Crowding inside the building forced WXKS (AM)'s natural-gas-powered backup AC generator, which serves all three stations, onto a concrete pad outside the building.
In any event, WRCA's four-tower night pattern is a lot broader than the station's five-tower day pattern, even after you account for the higher day power. Both of the five-tower patterns (that is, WRCA's day pattern and WUNR's DA-1 pattern) are considerably narrower than the four-tower pattern. Thus, WRCA comes much closer to providing a full-market nighttime signal than WUNR does. There can be little doubt that, notwithstanding its lower night power, WRCA's facility is technically superior to WUNR's.
