General – Page 23 – Engineering Radio

Somewhere, a community has lost its radio station

I am sure that this has happened in more places than one. WZAD 97.3 MHz was licensed around 1990 as part of the 80-90 drop-ins. The 80-90s were the beginning of the end for viable douopoly operations is smaller markets and triggered the huge wave of consolidation that began a few years later. WZAD started out as a community-oriented station, with a free-form format. DJs often brought their own records to the studio and spun anything from classic rock to jazz to disco or whatever. As such, the station never really caught on. Listeners would tune in to hear their favorite Led Zeppelin song but here “Ernie’s Classic Polka Show” instead.

A few years later, the station was sold to somebody that changed formats to a satellite oldies format.

The station was sold again and again and again before finally ending up with a major consolidator.

There is a lesson there for all the would-be LPFM applicants: Nail down your programming ideas now, float ideas out among the community, and see what will work and what people are interested in.

This is the WZAD studio now:

When was the last time anyone from the station was here or set foot anywhere near the community of license? The front lobby of the studio is full of garbage and an old dot matrix printer. It looks like there has been a leak and all the ceiling tiles have fallen down.

The station is being programmed out of the Poughkeepsie studio cluster with an automated country format called “The Wolf.” There is a live morning show, or at least there used to be, I don’t know anymore. How is this station serving as a public trustee?

Time to consult the transmitter wall

I saw this at the WIZN transmitter site in Charlotte, VT:

Somebody went through quite a bit of trouble to chart the transmitter readings from April of 1987 through about February of 1992.

A closer view:

I have not seen this at any other transmitter site, so I thought it was an interesting way to keep a transmitter log. It also seems to be time-consuming and a bit obsessive. Over the years, I have found my fellow broadcast engineers to be a somewhat strange group sometimes.

This is interesting

Another trove of surveillance documents reveals some interesting technical aspects of spying in the modern age:

What we have here is a copper wiretap. This allows some telco or ISP to split an ethernet feed, and send one output on its merry way, while the other output goes to? If not interception and collection, I don’t rightly know what else this device is designed for.

There are many many more like this on the WikiLeaks website. Have any doubts about how deep the internet surveillance goes? Spend a few minutes poking around, it is an eye-opening experience.

WKNY, Kingston, NY

This is another one of those, ahem, AM success stories. WKNY is on 1490 KHz, 1,000 Watts day and night from a transmitter site that is located very close to its target audience of Kingston. It signed on on December 16, 1939, broadcasting 100 watts on 1500 kHz according to the Broadcasting Yearbook 1940 edition.

The transmitter location is the key to this station’s good signal over Kingston. Even though it is a class C AM station when driving around the Kingston city limits there is no electrical interference or nighttime co-channel interference. The reason for this is that most of the city limits are within 2.5 to 3 miles (4 to 4.8 km) from the tower.

This is the original transmitter building and tower. Like many old AM transmitter sites, this one is located in a low, swampy area. The tower is electrically tall for 1490 KHz, at 92 meters (305 feet) it is 163 electrical degrees. Something else that may contribute to the station’s performance.

WKNY tower, a typical design of a uniform cross-section guyed tower from the late 1930s to late 1950s.

WKNY transmitter. Another Nautel ND-1 series transmitter. Nothing ever breaks or goes wrong.

The air studio has an AudioArts R-60 console. For an inexpensive audio console, these things sure seem to last for a long time. I think this one was put in in 1997.

A small talk studio is used to originate local programming of interest. This morning, I was listening to “Speak Out With Jody McTague,” a local interest program that was discussing the impacts being felt in the Kingston area due to the “Affordable Health Care Act.”

The production studio has a rather old Harris rotary pot console from the 1980’s.

Of course, all of this equipment makes radio transmission possible, but what makes radio itself is the local people working at the station and bringing relevant information to the area. I know a lot of very smart people are working on the “solution” to the AM problem. It really has to do with the programming.