With WMVP's move out to Joliet it's now 27 miles from downtown Chicago. WLS, WGN, WSCR and WBBM are all around 21 miles from downtown Chicago. For WMVP, the Downers Grove site was ideal as it was centrally located. Only issue was the directional night signal that put the deep null towards Naperville, Bolingbrook and Joliet. The Naperville, Bolingbrook and Joliet problem is solved, the problem it created with the move was the weaker signal towards the IL, WI state line with probably some fading as well.
Read this:
Scott Clifton, currently senior engineer at Good Karma Broadcasting, which owns the 50 kW 1000 WMVP(AM), says its Joliet site has improved its signal.
www.radioworld.com
I believe WGN serves as the Emergency Alert Station for North East IL, not WBBM. I'm sure that Heartland Signal would snap up AM 780 to transmit WCPT 24/7 on 780 at 5,800 watts from their Milwaukee Ave location so they would not need to use the night site in Joliet assuming these frequencies are as worthless as many on here are claiming that they are. Also believe political (conservative talk) and religious groups would buy up these signals at a fire sale just for the need to get their message out.
Audacy's biggest problem is programing and not having anything to reach a desired demographic on the FM's of 104.3 and 105.9 where they need to resort to butchering the AM's for the sake of lack of programing and spending cash to program these signals properly. This is primarily a problem of mass consolidation of the major broadcasters in the mid to late 90s that caused the mess we have today.
Over-all, streaming is the future for these broadcast groups, not more FM signals, and not more translators as most on here believe. There has been some discussion of the TV broadcasters leasing portions of their ATSC 3.0 signals for traditional broadcasters to use to depopulate both the AM and FM bands with higher quality audio signals. Guess there would need to be ATSC radio tuners for this purpose but Nextstar and Sinclair would be charging big money for leasing of these band slots. So, streaming is probably the best option.