Hudson Tower (Building Under Construction) & Initial FM Collocation Analysis

[SolidGoldDancers]

The Hudson Tower, by any other name, but not to be confused with the Hudson Lookout Tower, an antenna farm area some 240 miles North, has been proposed to be 912 feet AGL to the roof near the corner of Woodward and Gratiot. No doubt that there will also be a ~100 foot communications tower or two on top of it. Between all the convoluted FCC requirements, it may be not be able to be used for all FM and TV transmitters in the area. But what stations might diplex up there? Will it be beneficial?

Seems to me it would be an awful place for a broadcast antenna when large swaths of the signal go into Canada.

[SolidGoldDancers]

WCSX has the highest HAAT currently at 951 feet at One Radio Plaza.

WDVD and WYCD are both at 787 feet HAAT on the One Radio Plaza tower. Do they dIplex into a single antenna now?

That facility is from a Section 73.213 short spacing agreement with WHNN and WUGN. WDVD is 20 kW, WYCD is 17.5 kW. Cumulus should do a revised forward looking agreement if they can with themselves, WDVD and WHNN, to both be full Class B and full Class C0. The intervening terrain shield should take care of any interference. The Hudson Tower location would lessen both short spacing situations, WDVD and WHNN, and WYCD and WUGN.

They have used the same antenna since 1995. WYCD no longer has short spacing issues to the north, moving to downtown Detroit would create problems with a co-channel in Cleveland. While it would clean up inversion problems from Cleveland, the owners there would be in a big rush to stop that CP.

As I said earlier, bad idea to move to a place where so much of your signal goes into no-man's land.

[Ben Zonia]

Consider though that in Chicago, large swaths of signal also go into Lake Michigan.

I just checked using the FCC.gov software utility, difficult to use, and WYCD is indeed still short spaced under 73.207 and even under 73.215 contour based overlap. I was surprised to see that WUGN is closer, 101.4 miles, than WGAR-FM, 105.52 miles. The distance perception is different partly because of the inversion potential and terrain "flatness" of Lake Erie, and the vast expanses of rural driving necessary to get to the WUGN tower between Midland and Mt. Pleasant, and across the much higher terrain, 500-600 feet higher, than either side of the terrain shield between Detroit and Flint, until it flattens out northward. Cochannel WGAR-FM is of course a bigger problem, all things considered. That terrain shield was much less of a problem on analog Channels 2 and 4, and when the FM band wasn't so jammed up in so many ways. Low VHFs were easily seen well over 100 miles with a modest antenna. Now, TV is mostly on UHF. Class B FMs could often be heard over much of Michigan.

The required distance for full spacing is 213.5 km under 73.207, and rounding under 73.208. The actual distance is 163.19 km from WYCD to WUGN. When WABX and WQDC were authorized under pre 1964 rules, there was no contour overlap with those lesser facilities. Class Bs were only protected to the 1 mV/m, 60 dBu contour, now 0.5 mV/m, 54 dBu.

When WUGN and WYCD agreed to mutually move and upgrade, WYCD got 17.5 kW nondirectional. Similar for WJR-FM and WBCM-FM, WDVD was authorized 20 kW nondirectional under the agreement between WDVD and WHNN. Of course, there is no 96.3 near Cleveland. WDVD moved from the Fisher Building to ROT on Radio Plaza, WHNN to Quanicassee. But it was their agreement, not full spacing, that allowed this, even though WUGN was downgraded to Class C0 because it didn't put up a ~1500 foot HAAT facility.

The fact that WDVD and WYCD now have enviable near full Class B facilities for their HAAT at their location, despite being quite short spaced under present rules, and unlikely to move, was addressed much earlier in this thread.

[Ben Zonia]

The maximum ERP for 240 meters for a Class B is 20 kW, from the FCC.gov FM Power utility. So WDVD IS at maximum Class B facilities. WYCD, at 17.5 kW, though better than it ever was in its history, is not quite a full Class B facility.

It should also be pointed out that when this thread was started, the proposed height of the new Hudson's building was 912 feet vs. the 680 feet which was built. This would mean that it would take a much higher tower on top to get to the 305 meter HAAT analyzed earlier to get interference contours to pull in significantly. I don't know if that would sit well with people. If something like that was done at WLS-TV on Marina City, it's certainly within structural engineering possibility.

[SolidGoldDancers]

When WUGN and WYCD agreed to mutually move and upgrade, WYCD got 17.5 kW nondirectional.

I don't recall WUGN moving at that time. But the agreement (and what Alliance paid for) is that WYCD could be non-DA and neither would object to future CPs. The impetus for the move is that Alliance wanted the hell away from the Yeshiva operating at Gotham, and they wanted out of there immediately.

We looked at the top of the RenCen and that site was in my opinion, worse than Gotham. There was no security on the floor, there was bad security around the antennas, it was a joke. I made no small issue about throwing RF into Canada for little pay. Nationwide had made some informal contact about the possibility of this move and made it clear that they were not interested in a co-channel moving closer. Seeing friction, the CEO and CFO of Alliance were not going to stay at Gotham any longer than they had to, so off we went looking for a new site -- while we were building new studios.

No TV station wanted a tenant, being on top of a building wasn't viewed favorably in light of OET Bulletin 65. The only real option was to move to Royal Oak Township and mux with WHYT, and to do that required being non-DA.

The fact that WDVD and WYCD now have enviable near full Class B facilities for their HAAT at their location, despite being quite short spaced under present rules, and unlikely to move, was addressed much earlier in this thread.

That antenna is probably the best in the market. I spent a fair amount of time in New Hampshire for the build and proof of the combiner. One of the issues is that they had not expected that WHYT would be denied direct access to the combiner, so they had to provide a separate monitoring method for them. The installation there isn't ideal unfortunately, the lack of shared access was among a gritty list of odd things enforced by the site owners.

[Ben Zonia]

Is there any way to access these agreements online or otherwise?

The FCC used to have an essentially 25 dB per log unit of height taper of ERP above reference height, 500 feet, then 150 meters. There's a loophole that allows the old 500 feet, 152 meters, by allowing mounting the antenna COR 2 meters above the licensed HAAT. From 150 meters, the taper is now essentially 20 dB per log unit of antenna height. It's not exact for present purposes, but very close, up to 800-1000 feet HAAT.

Changing the taper allowed many stations to increase ERP. One example is WWJ-FM/WXYT-FM, which went from 12000 to 15000 watts ERP. Also many on Hancock and Willis increased.

Plug in 240 metters HAAT, Class B, Michigan in the following FCC utility.

https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/fmpower

17.5/20=0.875.

0.875 X 50000 = 43750 watts ERP equivalent at 150 meters HAAT.

Like I said, it's close, and the best 99.5 has ever had, but not maximum Class B. However they calculated it and when.

WQDC was on the Dow Chemical property just East of Midland. WSVC was at the SVC/SVSU site, before they completed their full 4 year complex about four miles away from Delta College, where WUCM had it's tower, and now WSGW-FM and WTRK.

99.5 History Card

https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/prod/ ... r_id=79613

Looking at all the ERP/HAAT changes after leaving the David Stott Building, it was indeed a complex path to near full Class B facilities.

99.7 History Card

https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/prod/ ... r_id=83433

Back before they moved, I had a Sony Portable that received both WABX, and WSVC/WUGN just fine in Genesee County. My friend couldn't hear WABX, and was always on the phone complaining to the WABX engineers and asking for recommendations. Should have put up an Outdoor Archer Antennacraft FM-10 pointed their way. Would have worked fine. Probably still would.

[SolidGoldDancers]

Is there any way to access these agreements online or otherwise?

The agreement used to be in the public file. It was some real vague language that gave the impression that these two friendly companies from different markets deciding that it would be best if both just not worry about directional short spacing blah blah. Not a word was mentioned about how that agreement actually ended up being consumated.

It may stil be there, or it may be in the Bay City station's public file.

The 17.5kW value has been bothering me all day. Prior to the move, I think the transmitter output was 18kW. Are you sure the licensed ERP is 17.5kW and not 18kW? Not that 500 watts matters.

I seriously doubt the station has any documentation on this. I received a call many years later asking if I knew where to find schematics of the automation and stand-by antenna system. I left prints in a tube at the transmitter site, a copy at the studio plus a disk with the Autocad drawings. The site owners also had a copy as per the lease agreement. Apparently, they were all gone. And so are the calculations that brought us to 17.5.

[Ben Zonia]

I've heard about some of the nastiness of certain stations when asked for an agreement. The cochannels and first adjacents worked together for near or near maximum power, even the US Canada Agreements allowed full power. It was often the second adjacent owners that wouldn't play ball. They were all concerned about the "horrible second adjacent channel interference" that would occur if they allowed it. This was after the FCC increased the A to B and B to B separation requirements from 40 to 43 and 46 miles in the 1980s. When the FCC relaxed the second adjacent ratio under a modified 73.215, the stations affected had already spent the money on DAs and such they wouldn't have had to have when the rule changed. It was often large versus small companies who weren't in a position to take advantage of the change.

It's great that David Gleason has all the old rules and everything else online, plus the History Cards on other sites that show the forgotten truth they might rather you not be able to reference, at worldradiohistory.com.

[Art Van Damme]

It’s going to affect WDTW

Air America has been off the air for about 15 years, so it shouldn't matter.

Skippy:
At the time I wrote this 106.7 hadn’t changed calls to WLLZ.
I assumed too much of you to know we were talking about the FM and not the AM.