MARKETS OUTGROWING SIGNALS

[Bob E. Nelson]

This topic starts from remarks in ``Failures with Great Signals'' and forks off into a different direction.

As David Eduardo wrote, both where he spent years in Cleveland and my hometown of Pittsburgh were shortchanged when AM was in its heydey and both markets were top 10 metros.

But as for Cleveland, didn't the population patterns work out fairly well for most of the AMs since they were sited to the south and directional to the north? Even WIXY/1260's narrow beam reached the burbs back in its heydey.

What markets were among the earliest for sprawling growth exceeding the signals? I'd have to nominate Washington, DC. Even before the boom in Virginia and Maryland suburbs, high dial positions and unfavorable directional patterns doomed AM there, probably before it happened in other markets.

On the other hand, when I used to drive up there, I recall Buffalo as being a rather compact market, which may have allowed its AM facilities to hang on a few years longer than elsewhere. What other metros were latecomers in suburban growth, allowing signals to still reach the population?

 

[trusty]

Throw in lousy ground conductivity in fast growing markets and you've got Atlanta taking the award with the North Carolina I-85 strip coming in second.

 

[Tom Wells]

I blame rotten modern radios and uncontrolled noise-creating technologies.

There's plenty of signal in-market. It's just buried in RF sewage.
The signals often go beyond the market. But "no one" is using a radio with real tuned RF amp section anymore.
Combine the noise with the insensitive radios, over time and of course you'd think the market outgrew the signal.
Even with the AM dial "overfull" at night, there would be a large increase in usuable signal areas if we just
stopped making so much wideband RF hash in darn-near every new technology.

Not to even mention the curse of HD AM.....

 

[michael hagerty]

This topic starts from remarks in ``Failures with Great Signals'' and forks off into a different direction.


What markets were among the earliest for sprawling growth exceeding the signals? I'd have to nominate Washington, DC. Even before the boom in Virginia and Maryland suburbs, high dial positions and unfavorable directional patterns doomed AM there, probably before it happened in other markets.

Phoenix, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta come to mind. And, of course, Los Angeles.

 

[fybush]

There's plenty of signal in-market. It's just buried in RF sewage.
The signals often go beyond the market. But "no one" is using a radio with real tuned RF amp section anymore.
Combine the noise with the insensitive radios, over time and of course you'd think the market outgrew the signal.
Even with the AM dial "overfull" at night, there would be a large increase in usuable signal areas if we just
stopped making so much wideband RF hash in darn-near every new technology.

This is true in some cases, but it's far from a universal truth. In the case of the station where I work, WXXI 1370 in Rochester NY, it's not true at all. When the 1370 array was built in 1944, it was placed about 8 miles south of downtown Rochester in what was then the rural town of Brighton. Even then, the channel had two much older regional signals that had to be protected, WFEA in Manchester NH to the ENE and WSPD Toledo to the WSW. The array's designers did the best they could at the time - they put up a 3-tower in-line array (later modified to a 4-tower parallelogram in the fifties, and subsequently tweaked again in the nineties) aiming most of the night power north, with a smaller lobe to the south, but with inevitable nulls toward WFEA and WSPD.

At the time, those nulls fell over rural areas far from the population centers. Unfortunately, the suburban growth of the 1950s followed the construction of what became I-490, which connects downtown Rochester with the Thruway exits southeast and southwest of the city...and much of that path runs right down 1370's deep nulls.

As it happened, three other regional AMs also erected DAs in the 1940s in the same area as the 1370 array, for much the same reason - 950 (now WROC) protects older stations on the channel in Utica (east) and Detroit (west); 1280 (now WHTK) protects New York City (southeast); 1460 (now WHIC) protects Albany (east) and Columbus OH (southwest).

You can take away all the manmade RFI you want - the fact remains that in what are now relatively close-in suburbs like Chili, southwest of Rochester, you're in deep nighttime DA nulls of all four of these stations (less so in the case of WHIC, which has moved to a new array further south after losing its 1947 transmitter site). Throw in the incoming skywave from the dominant stations on each channel, and it doesn't matter how good your receiver is...there's just no signal there to pick up.

 

[michael hagerty]

Or consider Phoenix, where from 1952 to 1978, the #1 station in the market was KRIZ (1230). Studios and transmitter located just 2 miles southwest of downtown.

Today, with the metro easily extending 45 miles or more in any direction you'd care to choose (except due south, where there's a mountain range), that 1kw daytime is struggling to cover the market. The night signal? Forget about it. And your night signal is half of your afternoon and morning drive several months out of the year.

 

[KeithE4]

Or consider Phoenix, where from 1952 to 1978, the #1 station in the market was KRIZ (1230). Studios and transmitter located just 2 miles southwest of downtown.

Today, with the metro easily extending 45 miles or more in any direction you'd care to choose (except due south, where there's a mountain range), that 1kw daytime is struggling to cover the market. The night signal? Forget about it. And your night signal is half of your afternoon and morning drive several months out of the year.

Back in the '60s heyday of KRIZ 1230 and KRUX 1360 as the major Phoenix rockers, the metro extended to about a 15 mile radius from downtown. Even the 250 watt nighttime signal on 1230 covered most of the market, except maybe for Mesa and points east and south (which was mostly farms in those days).

Now, nighttime coverage is all but irrelevant on AM, with probably only KTAR 620 getting night ratings when they have PBP sports. All the AMs except 1230 and 1400 now run 5 kW or greater during the day, and the ones at the high end of the dial have trouble covering the entire metro. Only KFYI 550 and KTAR 620 have full-market coverage at night (and KFYI is probably iffy to the far north and NW Valley, at 1 kW from southeast Phoenix). The rest are low powered and/or are so directional they can't cover more than half the market.

 

[DavidEduardo]

But as for Cleveland, didn't the population patterns work out fairly well for most of the AMs since they were sited to the south and directional to the north? Even WIXY/1260's narrow beam reached the burbs back in its heydey.

By the mid-60's, peripheral growth of Cleveland extended beyond Painesville to the east, right to the edge of the Akron market to the south and beyond Elyria to the west. 1220's nulls for Canada and Mexico limited it, and 850, 1260, 1300 and 1420 all had protection requirements that prohibited good day and night coverege of all the growth areas. FM did very well in Cleveland even in the early 70's because in many of the eastern and western suburbs there was no good AM to listen to except for the erratically programed WKYC/KYW/WTAM.

Of course, 1490 and 154o were limited to the inner parts of Cuyahoga County. Suburban stations likke WEOL, WELW and WPVL were no substitute for the "big city" formats. And we have to mention that CKLW showed rather well in the Cleveland Pulse and Hooper ratings becaue in many places, it had a better signal than the locals.

What markets were among the earliest for sprawling growth exceeding the signals?

I'd mention Miami. When Arbitron consolidated Dade (Miami) and Broward (Ft. Lauderdale) into one metro, it was pretty much over for AM. WIOD covered both, thanks to a long-running STA to run 10 kw due to Cuban interference. WQAM, from its tower in the bay behind the Herald in downtown Miami could not cover broward at night with 1 kw. And none of the other stations from either market could cover the other, including ones like WGBS and WINZ (althoug WINZ later got daytime non-d status). So FM, from towers right on the Dade-Broward border, took over.

A similar market colsolidation affected Dallas and Ft. Worth AMs, making most non-viable in the long run.

 

[michael hagerty]

Or consider Phoenix, where from 1952 to 1978, the #1 station in the market was KRIZ (1230). Studios and transmitter located just 2 miles southwest of downtown.

Today, with the metro easily extending 45 miles or more in any direction you'd care to choose (except due south, where there's a mountain range), that 1kw daytime is struggling to cover the market. The night signal? Forget about it. And your night signal is half of your afternoon and morning drive several months out of the year.

Back in the '60s heyday of KRIZ 1230 and KRUX 1360 as the major Phoenix rockers, the metro extended to about a 15 mile radius from downtown. Even the 250 watt nighttime signal on 1230 covered most of the market, except maybe for Mesa and points east and south (which was mostly farms in those days).

Now, nighttime coverage is all but irrelevant on AM, with probably only KTAR 620 getting night ratings when they have PBP sports. All the AMs except 1230 and 1400 now run 5 kW or greater during the day, and the ones at the high end of the dial have trouble covering the entire metro. Only KFYI 550 and KTAR 620 have full-market coverage at night (and KFYI is probably iffy to the far north and NW Valley, at 1 kW from southeast Phoenix). The rest are low powered and/or are so directional they can't cover more than half the market.

Keith: I live in Moon Valley (about 17 miles north of downtown Phoenix) and KFYI (550) at night is dicey at best...the power lines along 7th Street make it sound like I'm DXing in the car (I drive to work at 3:30 AM). 620 is the only strong AM night signal there (and there's 28 more miles worth of metro population to the north of that).

No question it's made worse by all the interference generated by backlit plastic flourescent signs and everything else, without which 550 would probably be a lot stronger, but Phoenix is so far-flung, with the density anywhere but the center of town, that you'd really need a monster signal to cover it all, interference-free day and night.

 

[Bob E. Nelson]

FM did very well in Cleveland even in the early 70's because in many of the eastern and western suburbs there was no good AM to listen to except for the erratically programed WKYC/KYW/WTAM.

Cleveland's 1100 from the ``Best Location in the Nation'' where no format wasn't worth trying out for a while. And the call letters were equally erratic: WTAM->KYW->WKYC->WWWE->WTAM.

Before the growth of the eastern and western suburbs, wasn't WERE/1300 a fairly good performer? IIRC, an SRDS from the mid-60's had a display ad touting sizable Pulse numbers and they were the home of the Cleveland Indians.

Another Cleveland oddity (and I hope I have my facts straight on this) is that 1260 (WDOK) had an FM on *before* the AM fired up. That was rather unusual in the late 40's and early 50's.

 

[KeithE4]

Keith: I live in Moon Valley (about 17 miles north of downtown Phoenix) and KFYI (550) at night is dicey at best...the power lines along 7th Street make it sound like I'm DXing in the car (I drive to work at 3:30 AM). 620 is the only strong AM night signal there (and there's 28 more miles worth of metro population to the north of that).

That's what I suspected, but I haven't been that far north in quite a long time, and never lived there.

Here in Ahwatukee, it's KFYI 550, KTAR 620, KSUN 1400, KMIK 1580 and not much else at night. XTRA 910 and KOY 1230 are listenable but a bit noisy, and forget about the rest. Even KDUS 1060, which is the closest station to me (4 miles) is almost inaudible since they completely null to the south. The IBOC noise from KNX overrides them on most nights.

No question it's made worse by all the interference generated by backlit plastic flourescent signs and everything else, without which 550 would probably be a lot stronger, but Phoenix is so far-flung, with the density anywhere but the center of town, that you'd really need a monster signal to cover it all, interference-free day and night.

I don't understand why KFYI can't increase their power to 5 kW at night and remain non-directional. KTAR should be able to upgrade to 50 kW day and 10 kW at night, but they'd probably have to move their tower elsewhere since it is in a shopping mall parking lot surrounded by a residential neighborhood.

 

[Bob E. Nelson]

Or consider Phoenix, where from 1952 to 1978, the #1 station in the market was KRIZ (1230). Studios and transmitter located just 2 miles southwest of downtown.

On the flipside, I'll put Memphis up for examination. Post WWII, it was blessed with four facilities at 560, 600, 680 and 790 (as well as a potent 50/5 kW on 1070). Along with fine ground conductivity and favorable directional patterns, it /may/ be among the handful of markets that haven't yet outgrown many of the AM signals.

 

[michael hagerty]

I don't understand why KFYI can't increase their power to 5 kW at night and remain non-directional. KTAR should be able to upgrade to 50 kW day and 10 kW at night, but they'd probably have to move their tower elsewhere since it is in a shopping mall parking lot surrounded by a residential neighborhood.

550 in Bakersfield may be an issue. For 620, the nearest is Portland...10k at night should be OK.

 

[Tom Wells]

I agree that in areas where geography has made a market stretch out in odd lines as in Rochester, that the market has outgrown the signal.

In areas such as Phoenix, with the horrible ground conductivity and the population density mostly at the edges, that's a problem.

I still maintain that more sensitive radios and a lower noise floor would be more effective than power increases.

Is anyone else here expressing an opinion using a radio with a tuned RF amp section and whip antenna (on a car)?
What about old tube radios with tuned RF sections?

If these types were your standard references for sensitivity, you'd understand exactly what I'm referring to.

And as a question, whose responsibility is it to un-pollute the AC distribution network?
The power company? The manufacturers of switching-mode power devices, or the manufacturers who design and assemble the
device without proper suppression of wideband rf byproducts?


Another good question would be why the FCC so utterly dropped the ball on this aspect of spectrum management.
I became alarmed in 1973 with the introduction of the first cheap lamp dimmers and was always waiting for the FCC to strike down the
manufacture or importation of such trash. But it never happened, and even worse atrocities occur in things like cable TV and LAN wiring in houses, where many intermodulation products are created making it near impossible to listen to any but the strongest signals.

 

[DavidEduardo]

I don't understand why KFYI can't increase their power to 5 kW at night and remain non-directional. KTAR should be able to upgrade to 50 kW day and 10 kW at night, but they'd probably have to move their tower elsewhere since it is in a shopping mall parking lot surrounded by a residential neighborhood.

550 in Bakersfield may be an issue. For 620, the nearest is Portland...10k at night should be OK.

Hanford on 620, as well as Tijuana. 550 is also due protection for any increase in CO, as well as the Chihuahua station.

 

[DavidEduardo]

I still maintain that more sensitive radios and a lower noise floor would be more effective than power increases.

It's not noise that is the night issue... it is co-channel interference.

 

[DavidEduardo]

Before the growth of the eastern and western suburbs, wasn't WERE/1300 a fairly good performer? IIRC, an SRDS from the mid-60's had a display ad touting sizable Pulse numbers and they were the home of the Cleveland Indians.

Both WERE and WHK had very marginal east side signals beyond Cleveland Heights... on bad nights, lots of co-channel chatter.

 

[BRNout]

This ties in nicely with the discussion about how most markets have only one or two truly successful AMs. And, often, those AMs are waaaaay more successful than the others on the band. One of the reasons for this is that most markets have outgrown most of the AM signals that are available. Urban sprawl has extended far beyond the useful signal limits of all but the strongest AM stations (the 50 kw day/night, class I-A or I-B type). And, this is borne out in the ratings.

The big signals can still pull in the listeners. The rest just don't. Look at one of the examples that's been most discussed here: Phoenix. Here is the perfect example of a city where the market outgrew the local AMs long ago. When AM allotments were handed out, Phoenix was not a big city and didn't get one of the 50 kw clears. Since then it's grown exponentially - but the local AM's have had their hands tied in trying to serve the entire market. It seems that a number of the large "newer" metros have had this issue of outgrowing pretty much all of their AM signals. Washington, DC is a good one to add to that list for a number of reasons that have been discussed elsewhere. I'd also say that Raleigh/Durham is another.

Where are the healthiest AMs located? Mostly in larger, older, more established markets which were allotted more big signal AMs. New York, Chicago, LA, Detroit, and Philly are some examples. Very healthy 50 kw "heritage" AMs can also be found serving smaller well-established markets such as St. Louis, Hartford, Cincinnati and Albany. But, the graveyarders in those markets are just as hard to sell as they are in a place like Phoenix. We are to the point where such stations can only serve the very smallest of markets.

 

[charlestondxman]

Charleston, SC is a market with AMs that definitely have been outgrown by the growth of the area. Thirty years ago, you had 1250 (WTMA, 5kw), 1340 (WOKE), 1390 (WCSC), 1450 (WQSN), and several others, none with more than 5 KW, but they all covered the entire Charleston area day and night, since if you went past Northwoods Mall or Goose Creek, you were in the country.

Night signals were good, even with 1kw or less, covering almost all of the market (that's why Charleston had three music AMs as late as the late 80s). Charleston, however, had half the population it does now.

Now, even during the daytime, the AMs have trouble covering their markets. Even the strongest AM daytime, 1390, had to start a translator FM to cover the immediate metro, as at night, it has a big null missing 1/3 of the market. WTMA is the only AM that covers the whole area in the daytime clear.

The graveyard AMs (we have two of them), have trouble getting out any more than 10 miles clearly at night.

 

[gr8oldies]

Indianapolis is an example where the former WIBC (now WFNI) had a strong 50,000 watt signal that covers most of Indiana. At night, its 10,000 watts aimed southeas which was fine for the Indianapolis of yesteryear. Now there are close in northern suburbs that can't get them. 60 miles north in Lafayette, they were covered by CHOK in Sarnia ONT. WNDE-1260 probably comes the closest to covering at least inside the I-465 beltway, maybe 1310 comes close.

Over here in Dayton, the three 5kW AMs all have issues in parts of the market. WHIO gets interference as close in as Xenia and Troy (doesn't help when other AMs are loose with their high power and low power/pattern changes. I've heard Nashvile under 980 WONE in the suburb of Bellbrook, and all WING is weak in Springfield.