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SOWNY » ABC Promising Live Solar Eclipse Special On April 8th » March 23, 2024 11:35 am

fybush
Replies: 8

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As far as glasses go, the key is to make sure they have ISO 12312-2 certification. It will be printed somewhere on the inside of the glasses. 

Rain? Yes, I assure you everyone who's been working on eclipse preps (I've been part of the Rochester planning task force since 2017) is well aware of what the weather can be like around here. There's nothing that can be done about it - if it rains, it rains, but if it doesn't (and it's been clear and sunny the last two years on April 8), it's one of the most amazing things you'll ever experience, IF you get inside the line of totality, which means getting to at least Hamilton from Toronto. 

As a planner, you have to prepare for the best-case scenario, which is half a million people coming here to Rochester from NYC and other locations outside the path of totality, while accepting the things that are out of your control, like the weather. We have a ton of events scheduled that will still be fun for visitors even if it's not sunny on the 8th. We'll make the most of it. 

I have a series running on WXXI talking about my experience with totality in 2017 and what it's going to be like here if the weather cooperates. 

Part 1 is here, with more coming this week:

https://www.wxxinews.org/local-news/2024-03-20/what-to-expect-when-youre-expecting-an-eclipse

SOWNY » Where The Hell Does He Live? » February 5, 2024 9:12 am

fybush
Replies: 10

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My understanding has always been that the change from PQ to QC came about because of objections from the Québecois to being called out as a mere "province," when every other province and territory used an abbreviation of its full name.

National pride and all that...

SOWNY » Tucker Carlson's speech in Alberta last night » January 25, 2024 8:28 pm

fybush
Replies: 19

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You're more than welcome to keep him up on your side of the border.

SOWNY » Next Gen TV » January 20, 2024 12:08 am

fybush
Replies: 10

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ATSC 3 may actually benefit Toronto OTA viewers - the WNYO signal that carries 2, 4, 7, 29 and 49 in 3.0 comes from Grand Island and should come in rather better in the GTA than the 1.0 2, 4 and 7 signals from down south of Buffalo.

ATSC 3 reception is also supposed to be more robust on weak signals. There are cheaper receivers coming out now, including a dongle that can work with a cheap tablet or phone for under $70 US.

SOWNY » CFOS Owen Sound Wants Off The AM Band » January 18, 2024 6:08 pm

fybush
Replies: 26

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RadioActive wrote:

But isn't WLKK at 107.7 in Buffalo/Wethersfield a bit too close for comfort?

It's probably workable. The WLKK signal isn't protected from interference on Canadian soil, so a hypothetical 107.5 in St. Catharines would have to use a directional antenna to keep its interfering signal off US soil.

It would be very much like the 92.1 that got squeezed into Buffalo - it's a very directional signal with a deep notch toward Brantford to protect CKPC-FM. As you drive up the 190 over Grand Island, you can clearly hear the Buffalo signal give way to CKPC and by the time you're in Niagara Falls NY it's all Brantford.

SOWNY » CFOS Owen Sound Wants Off The AM Band » January 18, 2024 1:01 pm

fybush
Replies: 26

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Saul wrote:

Aside from CFAJ, which barely made it onto AM, do you see the four AMs wanting to move to FM? Would this only come into play iof the CRTC allows three-fers on FM?

The CRTC does allow "three-fers" on FM, but only in small markets - so yes, 600 in North Bay and 800 in Belleville would fit that qualification, as would CKNX. Guelph and CFAJ could in theory apply at any time to go FM, since it's a 1-AM/1-FM situation in Guelph and CFAJ is a standalone. 

SOWNY » CING-FM 95.3 signal » December 31, 2023 3:53 pm

fybush
Replies: 2

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There's definitely nothing transmitting from the old CHCH tower. I was by there a couple of weeks ago and the antennas are all gone. The top of the tower was being removed with gin poles.

The CING signal on the US side of the border doesn't seem to have suffered any from the move. I was listening on the Thruway south of Buffalo recently and it still locks in nicely with HD.

SOWNY » A Tip for NordVPN Users » December 16, 2023 7:51 pm

fybush
Replies: 4

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RadioActive wrote:

Now if they could just get a fix for the BBC iPlayer. That rejects any VPN connections and of course, if you're not in Britain, you can't watch anything. I've written Nord about this several times, but so far, no solution.

That's weird, because from where I am in the US, I have had no problems at all using it to access iPlayer.

SOWNY » Ohio, Pennsylvania and some NY radio stations heard in SW Ontario » November 16, 2023 3:03 pm

fybush
Replies: 20

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RadioActive wrote:

I'm honestly not sure what happened, but there's more noise on the FM band than ever. I also remember hearing a long time ago that many of these Buffalo stations were moving their transmitters farther away to the south and that may have had an impact on reception here, as well. Although I was never able to 100% confirm that. Does anyone know if that's true?

A few signals have moved, but most haven't. Among the big ones:

92.9 actually moved north, leaving its longtime site near Boston NY to go to the tower behind the WIVB studios in North Buffalo. 

93.7, 96.1 and 106.5 are and have always been on the Rand Building downtown.

94.5 and 99.5 are and have always been next to each other in the hills south of Buffalo on Zimmerman Road.

96.9 moved (a long time ago now) from the WGRZ tower in the south hills to the North Buffalo tower behind WIVB.

98.5 is and has always been on Grand Island, though it's moved around a bit as its old tower was taken down and replaced, with temporary operation from one tower of WBEN 930. 

102.5 is and has always been on the WIVB transmitter tower in Colden, south of Buffalo.

103.3 is on a tower at the intersection of the 33 and 198 on the northeast side of Buffalo. 

104.1 is on the WBBF 1120 tower site on Ridge Road off the 90 and 219 on the south side of Buffalo.

But here's the interesting part - moving north doesn't automatically mean a better signal into Toronto! Those sites in the south hills may be more distant from Toronto but they're also much higher up, which means a better ability to see over the escarpment and across the lake. So the stations that did move north (92.9 and 96.9) probably don't have as good a Toronto signal as they did from the south hills. 

And of course all the additional signals on the dial, electrical noise and tall buildings downtown do a lot to block out what were once clear signals from across the border!
 

SOWNY » New CHCH Studios Impress TV Writer Bill Brioux » September 26, 2023 5:36 pm

fybush
Replies: 5

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That was correct - the allocations changed over the years, and moving CHCH from 13 to 11 cleared the way later on for CKCO (and later WOKR in Rochester) to use 13. 

SOWNY » How Does This Stuff Keep Happening On Air? » August 19, 2023 10:48 pm

fybush
Replies: 39

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I heard a CBC Radio 1 announcer tonight talking about Spokane, Washington, pronouncing it to rhyme with "cocaine."

(It's properly said as "spoe-CAN," of course.)

SOWNY » New CHCH tower... » August 19, 2023 9:34 pm

fybush
Replies: 151

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I took a ride across the border today. The new CHCH tower sure is easy to see now that it's more than 70 percent there. Looking forward to seeing it when it's done.

I also went into Brantford, where the Arise 1380 sign is already gone from the studio building, if it was ever there - it's just Lite, Country and the Evanov corporate logo.

The 1380 towers are still standing for now. I wonder if the neighbours will get the road renamed to something other than "CKPC Road" once they're gone?

Swung home the long way past the two Ohsweken stations. I forgot how well the "Jukasa Radio" 93.5 signal gets out over there.

There was also some unusual tropo ducting going on - while there aren't many open channels for DX, I got WMIT 106.9 from Mount Mitchell in North Carolina while sitting at the little park in "downtown" Ohsweken.

SOWNY » Where Were You When The Lights Went Out? » August 14, 2023 9:46 pm

fybush
Replies: 33

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I was between newsroom jobs for the only time so far in my career, at home doing freelance writing and waiting for my first child to be born (due at the beginning of September). Once the power went out in the early afternoon, I was jumping between trying to keep a very pregnant spouse cool in the absence of AC and fans (lots of cool baths!) and trying to see if I could help anyone in town with coverage... and tuning around to see who was and wasn't off the air. 

Very little from Rochester, Buffalo or Toronto stayed on (except for a few AMs such as WHAM and WXXI), but the power outage left my rooftop antenna frozen pointed toward Ottawa. Didn't have a battery-powered TV to use, but I had radio and the most useful signal here turned out to be CBO on 91.5. 

I did end up helping with some electrical stuff at WXXI AM to switch over to the generator, and ended up in a friend's driveway at 11 to watch the news on a battery-operated TV in his truck bed (from Albany, which was coming in on channel 10 with our local WHEC off). 

The power came back on sometime after midnight, thankfully, and it ended up being another month before our daughter arrived. I think I look back on the day more fondly than my wife does!!

(I also realized I missed being in a newsroom for a breaking story, and within a few months had signed on for part-time work at WXXI, which seems to have worked out pretty decently.)
 

SOWNY » Would A 500,000 AM Watt Signal From Ohio Come In Here During The Day? » July 16, 2023 9:11 pm

fybush
Replies: 6

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The inverse-square law still kicks in here. Increasing the power 10x doesn't increase the reach of the signal 10x. It increases the reach of the signal by the square root of 10, so about 3.3x. The ground conductivity across Ohio is mediocre, and the fresh water of Lake Erie isn't a great conductor either. 

So, no, a 500 kW WLW wouldn't have put a very usable daytime signal into Toronto. It would have been somewhat usable in Cleveland on radios of the era. 

The issue Rogers had with CFRB on 690 was during critical hours (just after sunrise/before sunset) and at at night, when skywave picked up that big WLW signal and slammed it into Toronto. That's why WLW had to install a parasitic antenna element north of the WLW site in Mason, Ohio to reduce the signal level along the axis toward Toronto. 

Now - 500kW at the bottom of the dial on the huge conductivity of the prairies? If CBK on 540 had existed and had been able to go to that power level, it would have covered many hundreds of miles by day, even more than its already substantial 50 kW signal covers now. 

SOWNY » What Is This Toronto "Radio" Station? Does It Still Exist? » July 16, 2023 9:06 pm

fybush
Replies: 9

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There used to be a lot of these across North America. They weren't broadcast stations as we think of them, and they didn't have callsigns as such. They transmitted a repeating loop of Morse code, and so the beacon on 516 simply sent the letters "YWA" over and over and over. The one down the road from me here in Rochester was on 400 kHz and was "RO" until it was decommissioned a few years ago. 

There are radio hobbyists who listen for these and other "utility" stations. I've never much seen the appeal, but if you like it, you like it. 

SOWNY » Scott Fybush With His Overview Of RadioDays North America » June 25, 2023 9:09 pm

fybush
Replies: 3

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I'm no Toronto Mike (though I do hope to be his guest sometime soon!), but I have a couple of podcast episodes from RadioDays up now, too. 

https://www.fybush.com/podcast-059/

https://www.fybush.com/podcast-058/

SOWNY » K-LOVE 102.5 Toronto coming soon... » June 25, 2023 9:06 pm

fybush
Replies: 147

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The HD is off right now on 102.5 because they don't have the transmitter site fully configured yet. Instead of receiving EMF programming via satellite (which would allow them to bring in the other networks that will run on HD subchannels), they're simply receiving 89.9 over the air until they can get the dish installed.

And 96.1 made the change from WMSX to WTSS at midnight on Wednesday. 

SOWNY » You'll Never Guess Which U.S. Market Has The Most AM Radio Listeners » June 3, 2023 12:49 pm

fybush
Replies: 9

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I haven't been able to dig really deeply into this data, but yes, on the face of it it seems tremendously flawed because it appears to count full-power FM simulcasts and translators as "AM listening," which it clearly isn't. That doesn't completely diminish Buffalo, where WGR and WBEN stand alone as AM-only (unless there's any significant listening on WKSE-HD2/3), but it definitely skews things in markets such as Chicago, NY, and Atlanta.

SOWNY » Bell's Chutzpah Is Breathtaking But Not Surprising » May 30, 2023 6:23 pm

fybush
Replies: 12

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For what it's worth, my unlimited Verizon plan in the US lets me roam in Canada for free. Unlimited calls and texts, 2 GB of 5G data per calendar day, then throttled back to 3G speeds after that (not that I've used that much in a day anyway.)

SOWNY » SOWNY Member Scott Fybush Becomes 1st Voice On New FM » May 26, 2023 11:41 pm

fybush
Replies: 5

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That was over 30 years ago now! It was first called Signals and later Spectrum... originated from NJ and transmitted from WWCR in Nashville.

SOWNY » Which Canadian Stations Are Available On U.S. Cable? » May 8, 2023 10:09 pm

fybush
Replies: 12

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I've noted this before, but we have never had CBC in English on Rochester cable, much to my dismay. For a few years in the early 1980s, we had CBLFT, of all things, I suppose for no better reason than because it was a decent signal at the cable headend. It was replaced by CFMT for a while and then went away. We also had CJOH for a few years, via the channel 6 transmitter at Deseronto, with picture quality that came and went with the weather. 

CKWS used to have carriage as far as Syracuse and Rome, fed by microwave from the Watertown system. I think that's mostly if not entirely gone now. I have never seen CHEX carried anywhere in the US. Channel 13 (WOKR/WHAM-TV) in Rochester would have made reception over the air very difficult.

CHCH was all over western New York in the 1970s and 80s, once you got west of Rochester. It even had carriage as far south and east as Corning. I'm not sure if it was being picked up over the air or microwaved from somewhere closer. The systems in Corning and Elmira carried WKBW from Buffalo in the 1960s and into the 70s before there was an ABC affiliate (WENY-TV) in the market. It's possible CHCH was brought in along with WKBW by microwave, but I'm not certain. In any event, I don't think CHCH is on any US systems these days. Not much interest in local Hamilton/Niagara news on this side of the border.

 

SOWNY » A Satellite TV Question » May 8, 2023 10:07 pm

fybush
Replies: 5

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These days, there are direct fiber connections from the US stations to the Canadian distributors. I have a friend who works for one of the Boston stations that's on cable in the Maritimes. He told me once that the fiber coming out of his rack room goes first to Seattle, then to Vancouver, then to wherever else it's going across Canada.

I believe that at certain times, the US stations on Canadian cable preempt some programming that's of no relevance to Canada (local public affairs shows on the weekends) for infomercials paid for by Canadian producers. 

SOWNY » Will FCC Allow Jon Pole To Be 1st-Ever Owner Of A U.S. Radio Station? » May 7, 2023 11:24 pm

fybush
Replies: 9

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It's not the first time a US station would be owned entirely by non-US citizens. Ricki Lee (UK citizen) and his wife (Polish) received FCC and State Department permission to buy several stations north of Albany in the last few years.

SOWNY » CHUM Vs. CFTR: When Rivals Attacked » April 11, 2023 7:50 pm

fybush
Replies: 14

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Doug Thompson wrote:

I believe a certain legendary CHUM AM/FM air personality has that sign.  I can say no more!  In the CHUM Archives, I have the sign that said "Through this doors passes the finest operators in the world."  That was posted over the door to the control room.  That came down (and was stored in the basement) when CHUM built a new AM control room and the jocks went announce-op. 

So what's the provenance of the current version of that sign hanging above the CHUM-FM studio door on Richmond Street? 

 (Apologies for the blurry picture!)

SOWNY » K-LOVE 102.5 Toronto coming soon... » April 11, 2023 7:48 pm

fybush
Replies: 147

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RadioActive wrote:

Unfortunately, the way they've set up the article, the Clear This Page app won't work. (I tried it before I posted this. And I'm not a big fan of Radio Insight, either!) But what I think are the salient points are there, which is why I linked to it. Sorry, wish it were possible to do more in this instance. But in case you want to see for yourself, here's the link:

https://clearthis.page/?u=https://radioinsight.com/headlines/netgnomes/250926/the-ramifications-of-audacys-buffalo-memphis-spins/

Just a note here on Insight - like my NorthEast Radio Watch, it's a one-man labor of love. Lance Venta has been THE man keeping track of format changes and other breaking radio news for more than a decade now, and it's only in the last few years that he's put any of his content at all behind a hard paywall. Most of it is available for free and is ad-supported, though online ads barely pay any bills at all these days. 

Lance routinely breaks stories that no other radio trade publication gets, and he's very, very good at reading beyond the press releases and getting details that other trades never notice (or copy from him without attribution, which happens more often than you'd want to know.) 

Unlike me, where there's other work that helps pay my bills, most of what Lance does is focused on the website and most of his income needs to be derived from it. If he didn't have a paywall at this point, Insight would have folded by now. 

Got a better way to sustain his one-man operation? He and I would both love to hear about it. (And yes, we're news and content partners and he hosts my site on his servers and did the web design for it, which is why ClearThis and 12ft don't work on my site, either. If I work hard on content, and I do, and I don't intend to give it away for free, why should you be able to bypass my paywall and take it from me?) 
 

SOWNY » How Many Toronto Stations Tried AM Stereo? » March 26, 2023 10:29 pm

fybush
Replies: 43

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CJBQ in Belleville was still in stereo until well into the 2010s, and kept the stereo pilot on for a while even after it ceased sending stereo audio to the transmitter. (There was a quirk with the way some sources were fed to the board that made them switch it back to mono.) 

I go up there most summers to spend an afternoon with Freddy Vette, or at least I did pre-pandemic, and I got him to turn the stereo back on for one of those visits so I could try out the AM stereo radio I brought up there with me. I think this would have been 2016-ish, and I do have the aircheck around here somewhere and should dig it up and post it. 

SOWNY » Four Major Rochester TV Stations Go "Next Gen 3.0" » March 25, 2023 2:38 pm

fybush
Replies: 6

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And we're hosting 31.4 on WXXI (RF 22)

Why no WHEC? You'd have to ask them... but their owner, Hubbard, is a much smaller player that often goes its own way technically, while Sinclair (WUHF and WHAM) and Nexstar (WROC) have made 3.0 a major corporate initiative.

SOWNY » NJ PBS OTA in North Burlington » March 23, 2023 12:39 pm

fybush
Replies: 2

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I asked around, and sure enough there was a router replacement going on that day at Centralcast, which resulted in the wrong transport streams being fed out to the wrong local stations - and that's how WNJT's transport stream, with the 52.1 and 52.2 IDs, going out over the WNED transmitter when you caught it!

SOWNY » NJ PBS OTA in North Burlington » March 17, 2023 7:58 pm

fybush
Replies: 2

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WNJT is on RF 23, not 31, and it's a channel-share with WNJS 23.1/23.2.

I think you still had WNED, but I think there was a glitch at the Centralcast master control hub in Syracuse that handles WNED, NJ PBS and all the other PBS stations in NY state. Sounds like the WNJT transport stream was routed to WNED by accident.

At least, that's my best guess.

SOWNY » Are There More Radio Stations That Switch Frequencies Twice A Day? » March 16, 2023 7:34 am

fybush
Replies: 7

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If you think CRTC rules can be arcane, this is an example of how the FCC could be even worse at times. 

When channel 10 became available in Rochester after the freeze on new TV licenses (1950-52) was lifted, four radio stations applied for it. In addition to WHEC (1460) and WVET (1280), WRNY (680) and WARC (950) got into the mix. 

Under the FCC's rules of the time, all four would have ended up spending years in comparative hearings in Washington, expending oodles of legal fees and time to try to prove that their application was just a smidge better than the others.

There was one easy off-ramp from those hearings, and that was joining forces with another applicant to propose a share-time. For whatever reason, those proposals were almost always granted immediately, as WHEC/WVET was. There were others in Phoenix, Kansas City and a handful of other markets. Most ended up with one partner selling out to the other within a year or two, so by 1955 it was only WHEC/WVET still sharing.

WHEC and WVET shared a transmitter and the CBS and ABC affiliations. They appear to have figured out a pretty good cooperative workflow - nearly all of their print promotions had a big "10" logo and only mentioned the individual call letters in small print. 

I interviewed a longtime WHEC news anchor in 1999 for the 50th anniversary of Rochester TV and asked him about the arrangement before Veterans split off. He said WVET had the 11 PM news daily, while WHEC only had the 6 PM newscast on three days out of the week, so there were days when there was no news on WHEC-TV, though the news department was still hard at work on WHEC radio. 

There was an interesting "what if" later in the 1950s, when there was another bit of FCC weirdness in which a challenge to the shared channel 10 license could actually have taken WHEC and WVET off the air. After the FCC had granted the share-time on channel 10, it threw a bone to the other rivals and gave WARC a permit for channel 15 and WRNY a permit for

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