[IRCA] How local IS WBZ?

["Dan Strassberg" <dan.strassberg@xxxxxxx>]

Craig Healy wrote:

David Gleason (whose comments I miss) said that they simply don't care about
coverage outside their core market.  For WBZ, that's within the Rt 128
circle, maybe a 15 or so mile radius of Boston.

--------

I beg to differ. WBZ/CBS management care only about areas to which WBZ's
sales force and reps sell time. That surely includes A LOT less than those
fabled 38 states, but it includes A LOT more than the area inside Route 128!
WBZ competes with the Boston FM's as well as the major Boston AMs. All of
the full B FMs that transmit from Newton towers plus WGBH-FM put city-grade
signals into Marlborough, which is just inside of Route 495 and probably a
dozen miles outside of 128. The full B FMs that transmit from the Pru
deliver to Marlborough signals about 6 dBu less, that is, around 67 dBu.
According to the V-Soft Web site, WBZ's signal in Marlborough is about 3.5
mV/m, which is less than WRKO's and WEEI's signal strength by day but a lot
more by night because WRKO and WEEI send very little signal to the west at
night. Marlborough and even Worcester, where WBZ delivers only about 1 mV/m,
are part of the Boston radio market and WBZ's sales force has to care about
those areas.

WBZ is considered the only full-market AM signal in Boston--and at night at
least, it comes the closest to being the only such. But even WBZ doesn't
deliver 2.5 mV/m to Worcester and 2.5 mV/m is the lower limit of what FCC
regs define as a usable signal in communities with a population of (I think)
25,000 or more. If analog AM is ever put to death and IBOC is allowed to use
what is now the AM-channel's analog bandwidth to transmit digitally encoded
program material, WBZ's signal may again meet the signal-strength
requirements for serving Worcester and Providence at night. If the signal is
nevertheless unusable that far out, IBOC will have proven to be the
disappointment that so many of us believe it will be. Unfortunately, a lot
of time and money will have been wasted long before we reach that
point--assuming that this nonsense continues that long.

--
Dan Strassberg, dan.strassberg@xxxxxxx
eFax 707-215-6367





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