North East RadioWatch: November 11, 2002

by Scott Fybush

In this issue:

• New Jersey: WCVB, South Jersey Police Meet Tropospheric Ducting
• Massachusetts: Multicultural Adds ``Boston'' Signal
• Maine: CCU Dismisses Augusta, Bangor Managers
• New York: Four Times Square To Add TV Backups

• The atmosphere can be a tricky thing sometimes, especially near the coast and especially during the summer. Just ask Boston's WCVB-DT (Channel 20) and the Camden County, N.J., public safety department, which have been sharing the 506-512 MHz chunk of the UHF spectrum for the last few years.

  It was never a problem when WCVB-DT was operating a few hours a day, but earlier this year, when the tower work on the Needham tower WCVB shares with WBZ-TV/DT and WGBH/WGBX was completed and WCVB-DT was able to go full-time at full power, officers down in South Jersey started to notice interference to their two-way radio system, which they tracked down to the new DTV signal more than 250 miles to the northeast.

  Last week the dispute hit the media, with Ocean County (even closer to the coast than Camden County) joining in a complaint to the FCC about interference to their radio systems, which operate in the "T-Band," first allocated a couple of decades ago on what were then largely unused channels 14-20 in the UHF-TV spectrum. (How unused? So much so that several low UHF TV allocations, such as 14 in Worcester, 16 in Providence and 18 in New Brunswick, N.J., were deleted and reassigned for public safety use.)

  Northeast T-Band DTV Allotments

  Ch.	St.	Call	City
  14	NY	WPTZ	North Pole
  	ME	WVII	Bangor
  	NY	WUTV	Buffalo
  15	ME	WMED	Calais
  	PA	WPSX	Clearfield
  	NH		Berlin *
  16	ME	WAGM	Presque Isle
  	PA	WSEE	Erie
  	VT	WVNY	Burlington
  	NY	WXXI	Rochester
  17	ME	WCBB	Augusta
  	NY	WIXT	Syracuse
  	RI	WPXQ	Block Island **
  18	MA	WMFP	Lawrence
  	NJ	WMBC	Newton
  	VT	WVTB	St. Johnsbury
  19	ME	WABI	Bangor
  	MA	WGBH	Boston
  	NY	WSYT	Syracuse
  20	MA	WCVB	Boston
  	ME	WMEM	Presque Isle
  *	Vacant NCE allocation
  **	Seeks NTSC on DTV channel

  DTV, of course, changed all that, with every scrap of the UHF TV spectrum being pressed into use during the lengthy transition from analog to digital. In Boston, it's not just 20; channel 19 is in use by WGBH-DT and channel 18 is allocated for WMFP-DT; other T-Band DTVs in the Northeast are shown in the table at right.

  In other words, the spectrum that T-band users have had pretty much to themselves is about to get full, and it doesn't appear that the FCC did its homework when making the allocations there, or in other parts of the DTV spectrum. (Just ask WHRO-DT Norfolk VA and WBOC-TV Salisbury MD, which are battling over channel 16, or WOOD-TV Grand Rapids MI and WMVS-DT Milwaukee, which are fighting over channel 8.)

  The culprit appears to be the FCC's modeling mechanism, which does not fully account for the effects of unusual propagation, especially over water. (Notice a common thread in all these DTV disputes?)

  Any DXer knows that there's nothing completely predictable about propagation at almost any frequency below 800 MHz (as we type this, we're watching an E-skip pileup on channel 3 that's bringing in stations from Memphis, Springfield MO, Harrisburg IL and Eufaula OK, perfectly normal behavior in mid-July but quite unusual in early November), and every reason to think that a 500 MHz signal with a megawatt of power from Boston will often ride the tropospheric ducts down to New Jersey in the summertime. But those are the sort of questions that should have been asked before a license was issued, not after millions of dollars were spent to put up a licensed signal on channel 20 in Boston.

  How will this all get resolved now that the damage has been done? The good news is that there's no reason to expect WCVB-DT to remain on channel 20 forever; when the DTV transition is complete, the digital signal will likely replace WCVB's analog on channel 5. You can read more thoughts on digital transitioning down at the bottom of this week's column. In the meantime, we'll be following this closely to see how the FCC gets itself out of the hole it's dug.

• Elsewhere in MASSACHUSETTS, Arthur Liu is adding to his Multicultural Broadcasting holdings with a $1.8 million purchase of WSRO (1470 Marlborough) from Alexander Langer. WSRO isn't much of a signal at the moment, operating under a long-running Special Temporary Authority since the city of Marlborough took its old transmitter site, but Liu isn't buying WSRO for its current signal. The purchase price includes $150,000 to build out WSRO's construction permit to change city of license to Watertown and transmitter site to the Lexington facility of WAMG (1150), which you can see on the October page of the 2002 Tower Site Calendar. When it's moved and the purchase has closed, WSRO will join WLYN (1360 Lynn) in Liu's Boston cluster.

  Congratulations to Mistress Carrie of WAAF (107.3 Worcester), who adds "music director" to her midday jock duties at the hard rocker.

  And congratulations to WJUL (91.5 Lowell), which marked its 50th anniversary (it started as carrier-current WLTI in January 1953 and has been on FM since 1968) with a reunion this past Saturday. We'll try to bring you some pictures and stories in our next issue....

  We've been remiss in mentioning the latest addition to the schedule at Sporting News Radio's WWZN (1510 Boston); Mike Adams has joined the station to do mornings, which means that 1510 is now running local all day long before joining Sporting News in the evenings (when there's not a Celtics game, anyway.)

  More TV news: WCEA-LP, displaced from channel 19 by WGBH-DT, has lost its bid to move to channel 3, with the FCC dismissing its application for that low frequency after receiving petitions to deny (we'd guess from WBZ, WGBH and WFSB, perhaps?) WCEA-LP now has a new application in to move to channel 58 with 5 kW visual, but that channel will also have to change in a few years when the FCC removes channels 52-69 from TV service.

  Out west, W51AE (Channel 51) atop Mount Greylock has applied to move to channel 38; the translator for Albany's WNYT is being displaced by the new full-power CP for Pittsfield on channel 51.

  And Springfield's WSPR (1270) has been granted a move to the site of co-owned WACM (1490 West Springfield); it'll run 5 kW day, 1 kW night from the existing WACM tower and a new second tower to be built nearby.

• It could just as easily fall under the Bay State heading -- but the "new" station serving Fall River and New Bedford is still licensed to RHODE ISLAND, as WKKB (100.3 Middletown). The Citadel rocker, formerly Providence-based 80s outlet WZRI ("Z100") made its debut last Friday (Nov. 1), with a schedule that includes Patriots football and voicetracking (initally overnight and now middays) from "Brian the Pharmacist," late of the FNX network.

  Speaking of sports in Rhode Island, the Celtics are back on the Providence dial, with WSKO (790) and WSKO-FM (99.7 Wakefield-Peace Dale) picking them up after a season's absence down there.

• On the Rhode Island-CONNECTICUT line, WKCD (107.7 Pawcatuck) has changed calls to WHJM to match its "Jammin 107.7" identity.

  Down the coast, Scott Weimer will take over as PD of Cox classic rocker WEFX (95.9 Norwalk) Nov. 18; he comes to the market after stints at the Worldspace and XM satellite radio services.

• Just one NEW HAMPSHIRE note: the FCC has approved the transfer of WPXB (Channel 60) in Merrimack from Pax to NBC, which will use it as its Telemundo outlet for the Boston market, thanks to the miracle of cable must-carry.

• The FCC approved a minor change to one VERMONT TV station: WNNE (Channel 31) in White River Junction gets to put up a new antenna at 684 meters above average terrain, with 1820 kW directional. (Their old antenna, on the same Mount Ascutney tower, does 2240 kW at 677 meters.)

• NERW hears a few of the top brass at Clear Channel's MAINE clusters received their walking papers last week; in Augusta, GM Tim Gatz and GSM Brian Strack were dismissed, as was Bangor GM Keryn Smith. We hear Clear Channel regional exec Jim Herron will be running things up there for now...

• On to NEW YORK, then: there will be a new addition to the skyline soon that should help the city's beleaguered TV broadcasters restore a better signal to over-the-air viewers even in the event of problems at their primary Empire State Building site.

  Four Times Square, the "Condé Nast Building" on Broadway between 41st and 42nd streets, is already home to auxiliary FM transmitters for New York's Clear Channel and Spanish Broadcasting System clusters, as well as public radio WNYC-FM (93.9).

  Now the building's owner, The Durst Organization, plans to add another 200 or so feet to the mast atop 4 Times Square to provide auxiliary transmitter space for New York's TV stations.

  (By the way, Durst has hired one of the city's top broadcast engineers to supervise its own broadcast-leasing operations: John Lyons, the former chief engineer for Clear Channel's WAXQ in New York, now calls Four Times Square home, which is only fitting, considering he had a huge hand in designing the broadcast facility there!)

  Meanwhile, the Metropolitan TV Alliance, the industry group formed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to restore full TV service, is still pressing ahead on its own plans for a 2000-foot tower somewhere on the Jersey side of the Hudson for TV transmission; if both that plan and the Durst plan at 4 Times Square work out, New York's TV stations will have much more redundancy in their transmission systems than they've ever had before, which is a good thing.

  More New York aux news: the Emmis stations, WQHT (97.1), WRKS (98.7) and WQCD (101.9), have been granted auxiliary facilities up on First Mountain in West Orange, N.J., running 29.5 kW from one of the towers at the WFME (94.7) site.