ContinuousWave
Star Participant
KRBE is the only Cumulus station making a profit right now...you think they want to spin the only cash cow they have??
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KRBE not going to Entercom...yet
- Thread starter Mediafrog+
- Start date
KRBE is the only Cumulus station making a profit right now...you think they want to spin the only cash cow they have??
The ONLY one? That seems unlikely.
It seems far more likely that KRBE would be hindered by being a standalone in a largely transactional market, when every serious competitor can combo things to get the buy and they can't.
The Cumulus stations, as a group, are profitable. The hard part is the interest payment issue, as the interest exceeds the broadcast cash flow.
miketheradioguy
Leading Participant
That's why there are rumors about Entercom picking up KRBE if they trade their spinoffs to Cumulus.
I sense that Cumulus has already done the math on this, and the potential of having additional stations in other major markets won't replace the loss of having a station in a huge major market, home to a lot of important national advertisers. Cumulus would lose a competitive position with both Entercom and iHeart. When you're selling a national platform, and that's what all three are doing, it requires having owned stations in all major markets.
Mrtejano
Star Participant
I agree, just like ENTREVISION hasn’t sold their 1180 am station. I’m pretty sure many Church and organizations would love to put their hands on 1180 am.
Same thing goes with 104.1, this station has been on air for the longest. I was in High school in 2001 and would hear about 104 KRBE. And I’m sure they’re making $$$$
KRBE has been the top 40 powerhouse it is today since I was in high school back in the mid 80s
R
rbrucecarter5
Guest
Not a powerhouse at all. If you aren't in the narrow ring of their beam tilt, you get dropouts of the signal. I remember when they actually WERE a powerhouse and you had good reception over ALL of Houston.
ContinuousWave
Star Participant
Beam tilt merely pushes the signal toward the horizon down a couple of degrees instead of wasting it on out lying areas that don't count in the ratings...it does not affect local reception one bit...
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
Yeah - tell that to my friends in the Woodlands, Conroe, Huntsville, and Cypress that use to get a clear signal and now have dropouts all over the place. I even get dropouts now, and I can see the dang towers at night! This bean tilt stuff is garbage. So what if you fly over the listners in Sugarland and Stafford? The signal there is strong enough anyway that I never had any trouble when I lived there. By the time you get to downtown, you are definitely in the power beam no matter what. All aiming that the horizon did was to make sure as much of the metro area was covered as possible, with the exception of folks right underneath the tower.
I've not had an issue picking up 104 in any of those areas, in HD even... Try pointing your antenna toward Senior Road, rather than Austin...
The beam angle is a function of the number of bays and the inter-bay spacing, not beam tilt. Beam tilt just avoids sending too much of the signal over the horizon for stations with very high antenna height.
Think of flashlights. The width of the beam is the effect of the lens; in this case the antenna is the lens. The coverage of the beam is affected by how you hold the flashlight... beam tilt. If you want to look both at the floor and the wall, you tilt the flashlight down ever so much so as not to waste light on the ceiling. That is beam tilt; you do not wast signal heating up the clouds.
miketheradioguy
Leading Participant
I'm now thinking that the Meruelo Group could acquire Entercom's spinoffs in San Francisco and possibly Sacramento.
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rbrucecarter5
Guest
10 miles away from 2000 foot towers you are only subtending an angle of 2.4 degrees, that hardly gets you to the Southwest Freeway. 20 miles away you are subtending an angle of 1.2 degrees. That gets you to I-10, but you come up short of downtown. So the difference between aiming at the horizon and aiming down is almost non-existent. If the beam width is really that narrow, you are going to have to pick a very narrow ring of people you want to serve. But - that ring gets wider and wider rapidly as you aim closer to the horizon. You might as well just have a string of translators or LPFMS in an arc over the area. It seems to make much more sense to aim it straight - you aren't going to lose people close in to the tower, signal strength is inverse square law so the people closer in have plenty of signal. The ONLY time I have seen a situation with no signal at all was some friends who lived right under a TV tower. They were literally at the base. I have no idea how they rented that trailer, it seems to me the station wouldn't want people living there. But they did, and couldn't get the TV channel. But their neighbors a quarter mile away had it fine. Seems to me that one low power bay aimed downward would cover that small group of people who live right in the shadow of the tower, and let everybody else have their signal back.
I wouldn't be harping on this if I got good reception of local stations. Good car radio - Pioneer Supertuner 3D, with a 31 inch whip - dropouts on all Houston FM's all over town. I lived here for a time in the 80's, I never had issues like this! And not just in my car. It is so bad in my daughter's car with the shark fin antenna that she gave up and went to satellite. Dropouts under overpasses happen much less often. My wife got tired of dropouts on her favorite station, and uses bluetooth to play music from her phone. My sister in law tolerates dropouts but is annoyed as heck. She remembers how the same station used to have a good signal and is convinced they powered way down to save money on electric bills. I used to think this all started when HD did - but now I think it is all due to beam tilt - an idea that sounds good but really isn't. We are talking Cypress - we can see the darn towers 20 miles away and I remember having stronger signals from Detroit when I lived 70 miles away in Jackson. This beam tilt stuff is crap!
ContinuousWave
Star Participant
Beam tilt has been in use for the last 30 years..it's not new....and FM antennas also use null fill to make sure close in rcvrs get adequate signal with out it beaming over those close in...the current ERI is different than the Harris CBR originally used but is one of the best in the business...my IFR shows no difference in signal strength.... sorry Bruce but you are talking about things you do not know about or understand..I have no issues with KRBE reception though I do not listen to it as the music is not my type...
Beam tilt and null fill have been standard on FM broadcast antennas since the 90s...it actually enhances local reception and reduces power wasted at the horizon...FM stations are not designed to be DX stations...they are designed to provide service to their DMA where the largest amount of population lives ..the lack of drop of ratings shows it works.. otherwise listenership would be down, resulting in lower ratings...that's not the case here
I used beam tilt in a facility I built in 1967 on Pichincha Mountain about 2500 feet above Quito. The site was so high that even with just a 4 bay antenna we had to tilt it considerably to keep it from totally overshooting the market. So that would be be 50 years ago.
The math to calculate the radiation beam and its angular depth is pretty standard. We fine tuned the tilt by hand, primitively adding washers to the u-bolt bracket for the top of the antenna assembly and that was designed to adjust the beam and to try to minimize reflection from any other nearby peak that was over 10,000 feet over sea level.
It's a tried and true technology, used world wide.
You are forgetting that the beam itself is quite wide... wider still with antenna systems with fewer bays.
The idea is to tilt the beam enough to cover the close-in areas under the tower, without sacrificing radiation to the horizon. Only radiation significantly above the horizon is reduced slightly.
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