Hopefully, Rich will check in on this. As I have heard, WJR still has two tube 50 kW transmitters out there in Riverview, and they sound better than the solid state ones. ... Well, better most likely is the subjective conclusion of listeners based on what their ears tell them, and which for them, t...

Another approach to showing nighttime contours is to revert to the groundwave contour of that station at locations where its skywave is weaker than its groundwave. Of course that doesn't mean that such signals will not have serious interference from co- and adjacent-channel stations. The plot of the...

Thanks for update about FCCData.org.

Surprising that the 0.5 mV/m nighttime skywave contour for WWJ and I suppose other nighttime DAs appears on the map for very short distances from the transmit site where a returning skywave is virtually zero, though.

Ed Joseph wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 07, 2019 3:04 pm

I guess since the people bankrolling the operation are flat-earthers, ... how do they explain global skywave???

Maybe they believe that a flat Earth gives them line-of-sight propagation paths to all "global" locations ?

Additional: The mounting environment of an FM transmit antenna has a very significant effect on its radiation patterns, as the tower structure and other re-radiators near the antenna aperture become part of the antenna system. The image below shows these effects for one case by comparing the radiati...

The radiation pattern on the left side of the image below shows an extreme example of the pattern distortion than can result from mounting a stock, "omnidirectional" FM antenna on the side of a large-faced tower.

Remember that there are only one or two azimuths of a DA that have the full measured maximum field ratio. All other directions are less than maximum, regardless of the licensed pattern envelope field ratios. That is true. Directional FMs are licensed for the maximum ERP they may radiate in the hori...

FM stations with antenna heights greater than the HAAT permitted for their Class of station must reduce their ERP to provide a radius to their 1 mV/m field contours equal to that of a station exactly meeting the maximum ERP and HAAT authorized for that Class. As an illustration of this, below is a c...

Proper orientation of a directional TV receiving antenna will ensure optimal reliability... True, and sometimes the most useful orientation is not in the direction one expects. For example, when I lived at the north end of Lincoln Park along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Chicago (late 1960s) and a...

... Preamps are noisy, and don't give you gain like noise free gain from antenna placement and gain Another benefit can result from using a directional outdoor antenna. It can reduce interfering signals arriving from co- and adjacent-channel stations with compass bearings well away from the directi...

Here is a study using NEC4.2 set for an Earth conductivity of 8 mS/m: The WWJ 186° radiator at 8 Mile Rd used alone, and driven with 5 kW would generate about a 20.6 mV/m field in Grosse Pointe, MI (a 14 mile path at N107°E). The 186° radiator used alone and driven with 1 kW would generate a field o...

CK-722 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 14, 2019 3:58 pm

As far as I can see, the pattern can be reconstructed from the data on fccinfo, ...

Below is an easy way out by taking the pattern from the fccinfo page and adding some text labels to it.

... I think it shows what the FI would be along points of a circle equidistant from the old WWJ tower, about 14 miles away. Correct. I don't know why the first circle is 0 and not the center of the graph. I set the lower limit of the scale to less than zero field to give more resolution to the lowe...

(Corrected for 5 kW at common point) Below is a NEC4.2 study showing the nighttime groundwave fields at a radius of 14 miles from WWJ using their tx site on 8 Mile Road (if I did it right). The array parameters were taken from the links provided earlier in this thread by CK-722. I didn't bother rot...

CK-722 wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 12, 2019 1:36 pm

...Can you find enough data to reconstruct the WWJ site near 8 Mile and Meyers with a 186 degree antenna at the Hall and Van Dyke RL? ...

A quick look at that for the 5 kW, non-D case shows about 20 mV/m at Van Dyke and Hall Rds, Utica (14 mile path at N30°E).