Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeffhs
The other 50kW station in my area, WGAR 1220 (now WHKW) was not a clear channel operation. It had to, then as now, decrease its power and change its signal pattern at night to protect a station in southwestern Ontario on the same frequency. A 50kW sportstalk station on 850kHz in Cleveland must decrease power to 4.7kW (4700 watts) with a different pattern at night for roughly the same reasons, the only difference being that the stations being protected from skywave interference are in Denver and Boston.
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1220 is a Mexican Clear channel, but since Cleveland is far enough away from the border, they are allowed to operate 50kw DA-1, meaning they run the same pattern & power both day & night. Used to listen to then-WGAR back in the late 70's here in eastern NY with relative ease since there were no other signals on the channel back then. Can still hear WHKW, but there's one or two other signals on 1220 at night now.
KOA Denver was the Class 1-A station on 850 until Boston was shoehorned in with a directional pattern that puts most of their signal out over the fishes. After Boston came on, rendering KOA a defacto Class 1-B station, other stations were allowed to operate on the channel, including Cleveland and the old CKVL Montreal (long silent now). Ironically, there was a 10kw station in Albany NY on 850 from 1947-1954, WXKW, using a directional pattern away from Denver. KOA was operated by General Electric, which also owned WGY in the Albany area. Since WGY didn't want competition that close to them on the dial (esp. with a great signal like WXKW had), and because KOA had Class 1-A status back then, the folks at GE filed an interference claim against WXKW. That meant that WXKW was never actually fully licensed, but operated under STA status, and having to cut down to exciter power (15w) several times a day to take signal/pattern readings. Because of this and other factors, WXKW went silent in the 50's, and the channel was never reallocated to Albany. The Boston deal was worked out on the corporate end, therefore KOA voluntarily 'gave up' its Clear 1-A status, which then opened the door to allow other stations to fill in the gaps outside their 700 mile protected skywave contour. Boston can run 50kw round the clock, Montreal had to reduce to 35kw at night, and Cleveland down to 4.7kw due to their closer proximity to that contour. Initially, WJW/850 was only running 10kw days, the upgrade to 50kw only happened in the 90's if memory serves me correct, with a good null toward the east to protect Johnstown PA.