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Will WMAL AM be downgraded?

Unregistered said:
David - while 105.9 is licensed to Woodbridge, the stick literally sits on the beltway in Annandale Virginia, and the monaural signal of WMAL-FM covers the metro area without issue.

Roth
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The FM covers 3.8 million out of 5.6 million people in the MSA with a 65 dbu. We learned back when the diary segregated at home, at work and in car listening that outside of in-car listening, there is very little reported listening outside the 65 dbu contour.

So for the 2/3 of listening that occurs in places other than in the car, the FM misses about a third of the market.

My point being that they do have to "rescue" the AM in some manner that will supplement the FM in those parts of the market that the FM does not reach well.
 
WTEM's transmitter site is not in the Anacostia neighborhood of DC; it's in Hyattsville, MD. It's a 3-tower array. Two towers are used in the daytime, 3 at night.
 
TheBigA said:
That's what I get for believing Radio-Locator.
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There is nothing wrong with Radio-Locator. It just uses contours that are more based in engineering for co and adjacent channel reception than what works for actual listening.

I worked on a project in the early 00's where we took several Top 10 markets, several 10 to 20 markets and an assortment of markets from 40th to around 80th. Using Arbitron's Map Maker software, ZIP Code diary data for in-home and at-work, and coverage maps from a recognized source, we plotted "viable" stations to find out where the listening was coming from. We used data from roughly a 3-year period to avoid any transient influences.

The conclusion was that for mainstream format, FM got a consistent 95% of listening "mentions" in the 65 dbu contour, and 80% in the 70 dbu.

For AMs with decent full close to full market signal, in metro areas where there is lots of noise, about 90% of listening was inside the 10 mV/m signal contour.

The exceptions were for very exclusive niche formats... listeners to classical, NPR and a few other formats would do whatever it took to get listening "indoors" in more fringe areas.

The observation I can make here is that if you take the innermost AM or FM contour of radio-locator and scale it mentally to reduce it by 20%, you have the area where almost all fixed location listening will be listening.

We did not look at in-car listening, as there is no way to plot the data. However, the other two locations are responsible for 2/3 of all listening.
 
That's an excellent article from a technical standpoint. The one thing I think he has wrong is that WMAL-AM does not show up in the ratings. Nielsen shows a combined number that includes AM and FM. The station of course can get the breakout of AM versus FM if they pay for it, and they might have. But I doubt the article's writer knows what the numbers are.
 
What we do know is what the AM numbers were before the simulcast, and they were not as good as they are now.

Of course the station has also improved it's morning show.
 
DavidEduardo said:
There is nothing wrong with Radio-Locator. It just uses contours that are more based in engineering for co and adjacent channel reception than what works for actual listening.
Click to expand...

What it gave me was latitude & longitude for the transmitter site, which was in Anacostia. And when you go to that site on Google Maps, you can see a transmitter building and two towers. So someone has a tower there. Just not WTEM.
 
No. Radio-Locator has it correct. Click on the transmitter coordinates and you'll see the map. Maybe the confusion is it's near the Anacostia River. But if you zoom out you'll see it's northeast of DC in Hyattsville. I used to live within sight of the towers, one of which has a top-loading hat. The Anacostia neighborhood is in southeast DC.
 
Wouldn't it be advantageous for the daytime transmitter to be moved to central PG county where a directional antenna may not be needed?
 
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