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WRNI has started broadcasting on 102.7

W

webcastboy

Guest
According to the following press release, WRNI has taken over programming on 102.7 out of Wakefield-Peacedale. No word on call letter changes yet.

http://www.wrni.org/information/about/about.shtml

WELCOME TO WRNI 102.7 FM

I just wanted to send a short e-mail to all of our listeners that beginning tonight at one minute past midnight (12:01am May 17, 2007), WRNI will, at long last, broadcast on FM throughout Southern Rhode Island. (Click here to sign up for Joe's email newsletters.) This is truly an historic event for public radio in Rhode Island as tens of thousands of residents will now finally be able to hear their NPR News Station. I hope you'll tell all your friends from Warwick to Newport, from Westerly to Little Compton that they should tune their radio dials to 102.7 FM.

Sincerely,
Joe O'Connor
General Manager WRNI
 
Where's Kenny on this one? He hasn't been hanging out on North Main Street? I also see the old festivaljazz1027.com site is down.
 
Any money in the budget to improve the signal toward Providence? According to the FCC itself, WRNI-FM's tranmitter is awfully close to the water so half its signal goes out to sea where there are very few Public Radio contributors. What is the absolutely shortest space to WKLB-FM 102.5 to which they could move, go to 3KW at least and 328-feet?
 
Unfortunately not...102.7 is strictly a lower-Narragansett-bay/southern Rhode Island station.

FCC minimum distance between Class A (WAKX/WRNI) and Class B (WKLB) on 1st adjacent is 113km.

If you use Google Maps and the lat/long coordinates for both stations, they're roughly 70 miles apart as the crow flies...which is 112km. So there's no way 102.7 can move any closer to Providence or anywhere north.

Westbound is no better, WXKM 102.3, a Class A, must be at least 31km away and, again, guesstimating with Google Maps I'd say they're also right on the line...perhaps only 30-35km away. WAKX/WRNI is really shoehorned in...the only places they could move are Block Island or possibly (not likely) Newport. Neither of which has any way of giving a significant enough height advantage to make it worth it.

However it's not entirely a bad thing for WRNI...their 1290 signal covers Providence pretty well, even at night. The real hole in their coverage was the middle and southern area of the state...especially in Newport...which 102.7 will cover nicely. Granted it won't do anything for the lack of coverage in the northwestern corner but there's just not that much population there, and while it's "not the same thing", WBUR 90.9 reaches that area pretty well.

Actually, I wonder why WAKX's ERP is only 1950 watts? Presumably the HAAT is what it is just because that's the tallest tower they could find in that narrow sliver of space that it could be put in. But why not 3kW?
 
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