[BC] 770 daytimers (and a unique station that's not on 770)

[Dan Strassberg]

Frank Gottlieb noted that there is now a 770 daytimer near Pittsburgh

It's WKFB currently licensed to Jeannette PA with an application to change
COL to N Huntingdon but with no change in facilities. WKFB runs 750W-D.
There is also now a 660 station near Pittsburgh, WPYT Wilkinsburg, running
260W-D. So New York City's ex-IA channels are becoming popular for daytimers
near Pittsburgh. However, it's unlikely that 880 will be put to such a use
because there's a fulltimer on 860 in those parts, WAMO Millvale, 1
kW-D/830W-N DA-2. Both patterns protect CJBC. Talk about a BIG skywave to
contend with--WAMO is only 213 miles from CJBC. Maybe too close to get the
most CJBC has to offer (French at what sounded like approximately 25% peak
modulation when I picked it up). It has been joked that CJBC is North
America's least-listened-to 50 kW-ND-U Class A AM.

However, the most interesting 770 daytimer has to be WTOR Youngstown NY.
Youngstown is a small hamlet in the farthest northwestern corner of New York
State--north of Niagara Falls and right on the shores of Lake Ontario. WTOR
runs 9 kW-D/5 kW-CH into a three-tower array strongly nulled to protect
WABC. WTOR serves almost no land area or population within the US--the
target market is Toronto about 50 miles to the northwest across the lake;
the pattern places a 5 mV/m signal in the city's downtown area. The call
sign is based on the first three letters of Toronto. The format is brokered
multi-ethnic, and I understand that WTOR maintains a sales office in
Toronto.

The licensee is Birach Broadcasting, which seems to have a penchant for
major-market AMs on low frequencies with brokered-multi-ethnic formats and
unique facilities. Another of the company's properties is WNZK Dearborn
Heights MI (Detroit), which is the only US AM that operates on different
frequencies day and night. (Canada used to have several such
stations--although their day and night operations were assigned different
calls--CHIR/CHYR and CFGR/CFRG--so technically, they were different
stations.) WNZK runs 2.5 kW DA-2, but is on 690 days and 680 nights. The day
and night patterns are quite similar and most of the towers in the station's
array appear to be shared between the day and night operations. A clever bit
of engineering but one that the FCC apparently allowed in a moment of
weakness; applications for new dual-frequency AMs reportedly no longer
conform to FCC rules and would be returned. Rumor has it that WNZK also used
(or uses) another bit of clever engineering that, back in the days of
analog-tuned receivers, made its sunrise and sunset frequency shifts
imperceptable to most listeners--a Kahn PowerSide that emphaiszed the lower
sideband of 690 by day and the upper sideband of 680 by night.

--
Dan Strassberg, dan.strassberg at att.net
eFax 707-215-6367