Sorry that I'm late to the party here . . .
Checked the FCC's WEB site about this last night (not on-line today due to the ineptness of our Federal gov'ment, thank GOD we don't get all the government we pay for though!) and they still appear to be silent. Last action back in January was the Authorization to go silent for 180-days due to technical issues. But that 180-days has passed. The same Authorization stated that if they weren't back on the air by the 7th of this month then the license would be permanently forfeited. I think that's easy to get around though; that they only need to come back on the air for a short period of time (varies, depending on the "opinion" of the station's legal council, but 24-hours is generally accepted) and then they can go silent again. They can even run at reduced power for that time if an STA is granted by the Commish.
Interesting facility though. If I remember correctly the array was designed by Silliman, Moffitt and Kowalski back in AM's salad days. (The Silliman in SMK was the father of Tom Silliman of ERI fame, by the way.) Having more power than the other guy was more important then than actual coverage, at least in managements' minds then. So to get 10-kW they (apparently) needed 9 towers! That was their "shoehorn and KY jelly". (Don't forget that this was in the days of slipstick and ledger/engineering pad array design; the few computers available then were still being used for more important stuff, like designing "weapons of mass deterrent" for the cold war. And there were specific power levels then; couldn't pick something in between like you can now.) Anyhow, even then it was (and may still be) considered a "critical" array. (Normal DA's have a +/- 5%, 3-degree tolerance requirement and this one was apparently much tighter.) It reportedly had air conditioned "doghouses" and one of the very first digital antenna monitors, reading out to something like four places to the right of the decimal, or so I heard! Initial tune-up took many, many weeks. And the story goes that one morning the engineers from SMK thought they had finally achieved nirvana. They went to have a leisurely lunch before packing their gear to head back to DC. But when they got back to the site things had turned to organic fertilizer! Seems that PennDOT had erected a snow fence across one end of the array while they were out breaking bread! Snow fences in those days (and probably still) were just a bunch of wooden slats tied together at the tops and bottoms with twisted steel wire. Not much to affect a DA so this one was as touchy as the devil !
All that to be able to cover the Hudson Bay; station couldn't be heard reliably in nearby Windber though (all right, maybe it wasn't that bad, but that's not much of an exaggeration). And the Tribune Democrat got their 10-kW on WJAC-AM, even if the tower lights used more power than the transmitter. In those days there were few months when the Trib billed less than the Treasury department printed so I guess they didn't care about the costs.
As to audio quality . . . well, in those days with that kind of array they were happy to "make" the pattern "on carrier". If the antenna has sideband performance that could pass at least telephone quality audio it was a bonus! With today's computer modeling techniques it could probably be noticeably improved. And with the changes on the band in the past few years it might be worth taking at least a cursory look at relaxing the pattern, reducing the number of towers; reducing power a bit; assuming it were to remain operational at the present site.
Checked the FCC's WEB site about this last night (not on-line today due to the ineptness of our Federal gov'ment, thank GOD we don't get all the government we pay for though!) and they still appear to be silent. Last action back in January was the Authorization to go silent for 180-days due to technical issues. But that 180-days has passed. The same Authorization stated that if they weren't back on the air by the 7th of this month then the license would be permanently forfeited. I think that's easy to get around though; that they only need to come back on the air for a short period of time (varies, depending on the "opinion" of the station's legal council, but 24-hours is generally accepted) and then they can go silent again. They can even run at reduced power for that time if an STA is granted by the Commish.
Interesting facility though. If I remember correctly the array was designed by Silliman, Moffitt and Kowalski back in AM's salad days. (The Silliman in SMK was the father of Tom Silliman of ERI fame, by the way.) Having more power than the other guy was more important then than actual coverage, at least in managements' minds then. So to get 10-kW they (apparently) needed 9 towers! That was their "shoehorn and KY jelly". (Don't forget that this was in the days of slipstick and ledger/engineering pad array design; the few computers available then were still being used for more important stuff, like designing "weapons of mass deterrent" for the cold war. And there were specific power levels then; couldn't pick something in between like you can now.) Anyhow, even then it was (and may still be) considered a "critical" array. (Normal DA's have a +/- 5%, 3-degree tolerance requirement and this one was apparently much tighter.) It reportedly had air conditioned "doghouses" and one of the very first digital antenna monitors, reading out to something like four places to the right of the decimal, or so I heard! Initial tune-up took many, many weeks. And the story goes that one morning the engineers from SMK thought they had finally achieved nirvana. They went to have a leisurely lunch before packing their gear to head back to DC. But when they got back to the site things had turned to organic fertilizer! Seems that PennDOT had erected a snow fence across one end of the array while they were out breaking bread! Snow fences in those days (and probably still) were just a bunch of wooden slats tied together at the tops and bottoms with twisted steel wire. Not much to affect a DA so this one was as touchy as the devil !
All that to be able to cover the Hudson Bay; station couldn't be heard reliably in nearby Windber though (all right, maybe it wasn't that bad, but that's not much of an exaggeration). And the Tribune Democrat got their 10-kW on WJAC-AM, even if the tower lights used more power than the transmitter. In those days there were few months when the Trib billed less than the Treasury department printed so I guess they didn't care about the costs.
As to audio quality . . . well, in those days with that kind of array they were happy to "make" the pattern "on carrier". If the antenna has sideband performance that could pass at least telephone quality audio it was a bonus! With today's computer modeling techniques it could probably be noticeably improved. And with the changes on the band in the past few years it might be worth taking at least a cursory look at relaxing the pattern, reducing the number of towers; reducing power a bit; assuming it were to remain operational at the present site.
