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Joylovepulse967
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Heads Up: 50kW WOR at 710 kHz in NYC is scheduled to go dark for a tower/transmitter maintenance event late Wednesday evening / Thursday early morning. 73! Good luck and good DX!
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Senor Citizen here went for a short nap around 9PM and wound up awakening at 3AM and missing the occasion completely. WOR was back on the air by then, of course. Even on my budget Radio Shack 'Tune It' radio they were loud here in NE PA, Perhaps they were working on their * own * equipment, lol. There was a station under them in the null playing music, but nothing ID-able.
This recent fervor regarding a 50,000 Northeast station shutting down for a few hours was nowhere near like it was 10-15 years ago when WQEW 1560 went silent, and when WTIC 1080 twice was off.
As I mentioned, I missed the Great 710 Opening entirely. I'm surprised, though, that no one appears to've heard anything.
Not just anything out of the ordinary, but * anything *.
This recent fervor regarding a 50,000 Northeast station shutting down for a few hours was nowhere near like it was 10-15 years ago when WQEW 1560 went silent, and when WTIC 1080 twice was off.
As I mentioned, I missed the Great 710 Opening entirely. I'm surprised, though, that no one appears to've heard anything.
Not just anything out of the ordinary, but * anything *.
Thanks for letting me know about this event.
Between 12:30 and 1:00 am, I used my Sony ICF-SW7600G receiver to listen WLW Cincinnati on 700 and WGN Chicago on 720, two stations that I am normally unable to receive due to WOR's strong local signal. There was nothing audible on 710. The signal strengths of WLW and WGN fluctuated, but I was able to hear much of what was said on both stations. WLW had the stronger signal due to its relative proximity to New York City, where I am based.
When I was a teenager, long before I had heard of the Internet, I wanted to listen to WGN on the radio. This morning, I got my wish from back in the day. Sure, I can listen to WGN and WLW online through the iHeartRadio app, but listening both stations on the radio was an amazing experience.
Listened to 710 in Maryland during the outage, heard many Radio Rebelde's at once with kind of an echo effect.
Those 710s were set up about a quarter century or so ago expressly to block Mambi due to its virulent anti-Castro stance.
WAQI had the equivalent of about a 300 kw lobe over central Cuba.
The FCC application for WAQI's construction permit to move their transmitter site (diplexing with WQBA) and reduce their nighttime power to 6.3 kHz shows seven co-channel and adjacent-channel Cuban stations they're up against, including call signs and pattern maps: CMDC, CMEC, CMGC, CMJC, CMLC, CMMC, and CMOC.
https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/cdbs/pubacc/prod/app_list.pl?Arn=20140627ABA
https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/cdbs/pubacc/prod/app_list.pl?Arn=20140627ABA
David this kind of stuff always intrigues me. Growing up in central NJ I DXd quite a bit ... I remember in the 60s a strong Cuban station would always be heard on 640. WAQI has 6 towers employed at night to aim that signal. My question is if Cuba, as always, has stations all over the island to block the US signals, why bother? Who is going to be able to hear WAQI? Is there any evidence of how the signal is received competing with other Cubans on 710?
WAQI, when it had the 50 kw day and night signal from the site just off the "big bend" in the FL Turnpike had a single lobe over Dade County and then the equivalent of about 300 kw in a rather narrow arc that opened up headed over Cuba to Venezuela and Colombia and points south.
When the station was managed by Armando Perez Roura, it was a far better anit-Castro voice than the government run Radio Mart?*, and the reports at the station from Cuba and from refugees who had left Cuba was that it was widely heard in the areas where Cuba had less signal just by turning the radio to an angle to the local stations.
Seeing this, Cuba built even more stations on 710, gradually reducing the coverage of WAQI. It didn't really matter, since WAQI had no interest in having listeners in Cuba other than as a matter of pride.
It has been that way for over 30 years.
Not meaning to get that 'ethnic' here -- David G knows me and will understand, plus perhaps will shed some light
on an idea :
About 4 miles north of me is Shenandoah PA. The total population is nowhere near what it was -- maybe near 30,000 -- in the days of the Dorsey Brothers. I was just up there today -- Truth -- on other errands.
And although the 'racial' gentry, if that's a better adjective, hasn't evolved in Shenandoah the way it has in Hazleton 15 miles further northeast, there are still many folks there who speak the Hispanic tongues. I know five of these folks. Two are here from Puerto Rico, two from Mexico and one from Cuba.
And I recently looked for (and made up) some stats:
Shenandoah 2019 population: 5071
Number of boom-boxes : 7
Number of smart phones : 5071
* * * * * * *
In other words, aren't these 'foreign' folks disposed now to more modern devices for entertainment and diversion -- especially the younger ones -- than that offered to folks by anything on the AM dial?
So what's stopping Uncle Sam from placing a new, more modern, one-tower 100,000 south- directional FM station near ..... oh, let's say ..... Marathon Florida, and ditching that huge and ineffective 710 signal and all those extra towers?
I gotta love SuperRadioFan's observations.
on an idea :
About 4 miles north of me is Shenandoah PA. The total population is nowhere near what it was -- maybe near 30,000 -- in the days of the Dorsey Brothers. I was just up there today -- Truth -- on other errands.
And although the 'racial' gentry, if that's a better adjective, hasn't evolved in Shenandoah the way it has in Hazleton 15 miles further northeast, there are still many folks there who speak the Hispanic tongues. I know five of these folks. Two are here from Puerto Rico, two from Mexico and one from Cuba.
And I recently looked for (and made up) some stats:
Shenandoah 2019 population: 5071
Number of boom-boxes : 7
Number of smart phones : 5071
* * * * * * *
In other words, aren't these 'foreign' folks disposed now to more modern devices for entertainment and diversion -- especially the younger ones -- than that offered to folks by anything on the AM dial?
So what's stopping Uncle Sam from placing a new, more modern, one-tower 100,000 south- directional FM station near ..... oh, let's say ..... Marathon Florida, and ditching that huge and ineffective 710 signal and all those extra towers?
I gotta love SuperRadioFan's observations.
The FCC lists for Cuba have been ultra-inaccurate since about 1961.
Cuba abrogated its NARBA agreement and does not respect any international spectrum usage agreements.
The use of call letters is suspicious as only a couple of stations make traditional use of calls,
The 2019 World Radio Handbook, which has Cuban correspondents regarding Cuban radio, shows 7 stations on the frequency, all with arbitrary calls of CMBA, which is shared with about 40 other stations.
A list from China detailing the recently completed rebuilding of the Cuban nation's radio infrastructure shows 11 stations on 710, none with the high (200 kw) power of the WRTVH listing. The rebuilding focused on "transmission centres" with 3, 4 and even 5 stations using the same tower for different network transmitters and local or regional stations. The Cuban ICRT list at http://www.radiocubana.icrt.cu/faqs...as-de-transmision-agrupadas-por-provincias-am contradicts all the other sources and has 9 stations on 710, and has been shown by DXers to be inaccurate as well.
The FCC list is at least 20 years out of date, going back to the previous rebuild of radio infrastructure in the mid to late 90's when all the Czech high power transmitters started self destructing with the fall of the Soviet Union and Svetlana's discontinuation of many unique (no replacement equivalent) high power RF tubes.
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Most of the Spanish speaking Hispanic population, as you noticed, is from the Caribbean. The major Puerto Rican migration ended in the late 60's, and the widely dispersed Cubans came in the 60's and 70's, mostly ending after the Mariel boatlift. So they are likely in thier 60's and older. The second generation in areas with small Hispanic populations tends to be English dominant. So they don't use Spanish language media.
And you are right. Hispanics overindex in ownership and use of smartphones and get much of their entertainment that way. No way that they listen to AM for music.
WAQI is not a government station. It is a Miami station targeting the older Cuban refugee population. It has no interest in being anything except a Miami station; it is owned by Univision.
And you can't be severely directional with one tower (you can get a bit of a null with tuned guy wires, but not to the degree that a three or four tower inline array would produce). 1180, which is owned by the government, has that type of setup on Marathon. It is relatively ineffective.
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I forgot to add... the 50 kw directional was built decades before WGBS was sold to Amancio Suárez and reformatted to Spanish language talk. The pattern was designed to push all the power over the market (at that time Ft. Lauderdale was not in the Miami radio metro) and to protect stations in many locations on 710, starting with WOR but apparently including Shreveport, Kansas City and allocations in Mexico, too. So the only way to cover Miami was to build to the north of the market and shoot the power south.
There was no intent in the design to cover Cuba and points south... it was all built to saturate Miami.
Looking at the geography of Cuba, it is easy to see how they get away with these blaster signals. A type of a loophole since, if they wanted to cover the entire island with minimal interference from the anti-Castro US and other island signals, cry power increase and they got it.
I'm sure there were other ways to accomplish the same result, but why bother when you can do both?
Jeff in Sa-ra-so-ta!
I'm sure there were other ways to accomplish the same result, but why bother when you can do both?
Jeff in Sa-ra-so-ta!
When Castro came to power, he was as concerned about signals from the south, particularly Venezuela, as he was about ones from the north. So an early project in conjunction with the Russians was to put high power Czech transmitters in the 30 kw to 120 kw range all across the lower and middle part of the band, leaving nearly no channel vacant.
During the 60's, Venezuela had just shaken off a rather vile dictatorship and its news media were rather stridently against the dictatorial Castro regime, and many of the AM stations there easily crossed the Caribbean at good levels and, unlike most US stations, were in Spanish and understandable to the population of Cuba.
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