mace wrote:

I wonder if other PBS border, or near the border stations in Burlington, Rochester, Erie, Detroit, Spokane and Seattle that have signal penetration north of the border have as many donations from Canadian viewers as WNED has.

WXXI in Rochester hasn't had significant Canadian viewership in a long time. Most of the cable systems across the lake that used to carry it (especially Belleville) replaced it with either WNED or WTVS a couple of decades ago.

WQLN in Erie and WPBS in Watertown paid for their own private fiber links in order to remain on cable in London and Ottawa, respectively, since those viewer bases are somewhat larger than their own US-based small communities. WCFE in Plattsburgh (Mountain Lake PBS) and Vermont Public both draw heavily on Montreal and are seen in the rest of Quebec as well, and Prairie Public in North Dakota likewise draws very heavily on Manitoba audiences.

Beyond that, it's all just satellite and fiber delivering whatever US PBS outlets are both cleared for Canadian distribution and most readily available to each cable system. In the west, that's KCTS Seattle (into Vancouver/BC) and KSPS Spokane (Alberta, Saskatchewan). In the east, that's WTVS Detroit (parts of Manitoba, most of Ontario, etc), WNED (the GTA) and WGBH Boston (the Maritimes). 

If I had to guess which stations among those draw the largest percentage of membership dollars from Canada, I would think it's Prairie Public, WPBS, WQLN and WCFE/Mountain Lakes among smaller stations and WNED, KSPS and WTVS among the larger ones. 

I don't think WGBH even actively solicits Canadian memberships, and I'm not sure KCTS does either.
 

Only the 550 AM signal was down. Streaming, WGR-FM 107.7 and the Rochester simulcast were all unaffected.

Binson Echorec wrote:

RadioActive wrote:

Jeff Probst, of "Survivor" fame.

He and Tom Bergeron are two hosts I just can't figure out how they keep getting work.

Re: the show itself, it was fun but IIRC the max payout was $5K and you didn't return to defend your title.

There's nobody in the industry who has the work ethic of Bergeron.

Back in the early 90s, I had just arrived at WBZ as a newsroom peon. Tom was hosting radio talk from 10 till noon, running down the hall to get into makeup and suit to host "People Are Talking," a live audience talk show on WBZ-TV, then zooming back across the building to be back on radio right after the 1:00 news until 3.

That's an insane amount of live broadcasting to do five days a week, but he never broke a visible sweat.

He also has a very well deserved reputation as one of the kindest guys in the industry. He's constantly helping to raise money for WHAV-LP, the little community station in his hometown of Haverhill, Mass.

Same antenna, yes, but each station has its own separate transmitter.

Credit where due - although I was right there in the Jeep with him, these pictures were taken by my engineering friend Mike Fitzpatrick.

That's a very outdated graphic. There's no more Time Warner, Comcast has spun off MSNBC, CNBC and most of the rest of its cable networks, CW now belongs to Nexstar, etc...

It's AI-generated clickbait spammy bullshit from a page that does nothing but.

International treaties retain protection for silent AM stations, so 560 in Detroit will still have to protect the former CFOS facility even after it goes off the air.

I have only been keeping track of FCC enforcement actions for about 33 years, so take this with a grain of salt, but -

In my experience, the only times the FCC starts to make an issue of the small stuff like the legal ID, it's setting the stage for enforcement issues on more serious violations. (In this case, I expect there's something coming about a very long history of using translators to originate programming that's not coming from any full-power parent station.)

djwildbill wrote:

I remember Wease when he worked at Kiss 98.5 Buffalo (WKSE) on the morning show.

Wease was never on Kiss. His Rochester morning show was simulcast at one point on WBUF. 

Saul wrote:

Fitz wrote:

Another strong central NY orientation tropo right now. Getting Hot 107.9 Syracuse in HD right now Plus the mysterious FOX sports radio, very distorted  at 87.7. There is a Fox Sports radio at 1490 AM in Syracuse but how does this distorted ghost image appear at 87.7 ? Normally I get a distorted signal for CHFI on the same frequency 87.7.

CHFI is likely putting an image on 87.7. But 87.75 (to be precise, and thus explaining the distortion) is WQSE-LD Syracuse, which relays 1490. I have no idea why it ends with -LD. There's also a low power translator on 92.5.
You can look it - and all other FM stations - up here, courtesy of WTFDA: https://db.wtfda.org
 

WQSE-LD ends in -LD because it's a low-power digital TV station on channel 6.

After waffling for years on whether to allow "Franken-FM" channel 6 operation with a DTV signal and analog audio on 87.75, the FCC decided it would grandfather in a dozen or so existing low-power 6 stations, including allowing Syracuse to come back on the air after having gone off for a bit.

There are other notable ones in NYC, LA, Chicago, DC and Cleveland.

The condition the FCC imposed was that the "Franken-FM" signals with analog audio have to use ATSC 3.0 for their DTV signal, supposedly because it can coexist better with the analog FM audio.

Anyway, since it returned to the air, WQSE has indeed carried the same Fox Sports programming as WOLF 1490, WOSW 1300 and a handful of analog FM translators around Syracuse.

The * is part of the number. If you don't include it when you're punching in *877 on your cellphone, it won't connect to TPS.

mace wrote:

A few stations I plan to check out reception wise. CFOS, WUFO, WECK, WJR, CKLW/CJBQ and the Weak Buffalo stations on 1120 and 1400. They seem to change call letters often so it is difficult to remember them.

1400 has been WWWS since 1993, actually. I believe that's now longer than it spent as WYSL.

And 1120 last changed calls 20 years ago, when it took the WBBF calls that used to be in Rochester.

I think there are a couple of ways to look at the cross-border situation. 

For those of us who are radio junkies, yes, we lost some interesting listening. I spent a lot of time tuned into CHUM-FM in the 80s from Rochester, back when the dials were much more open. I still hit Canadian radio once I'm west of Batavia and can hear it better. 

But we're a very, very tiny minority of all radio listeners, and I think there's also a very good argument to be made that a much larger number of listeners benefit from at least some of the new stations. Look at Kitchener/Waterloo - if the rules didn't change, CKKW wouldn't have been able to migrate to FM from AM, since 99.5 wouldn't have been an option for them. CHKX is arguably the only local Hamilton station that's left, and it wouldn't have been able to use 94.7, nor would CHTG be able to use 92.9. 

Can you really argue that there's more value to distant WNED-FM or WBUF reception in those areas instead of a local station serving local Canadian audiences? 

As for what comes in, it depends a little these days on what part of Buffalo you're in. There's some speculation that the new CN Tower master FM antenna is sending a little less RF to the southeast over Buffalo and western NY than the old one did, but I haven't noticed much difference yet in signal levels. 

The problem these days with a lot of the Canadian signals in Buffalo is that there are co-channel and first-adjacent translators that have popped up on the US side. WDCZ 970 has a useless little 94.1 translator up at its site in the Boston hills that provides just enough interference to CBL to make reception a little annoying in Buffalo proper. WECK has a translator at 100.1 east of Buffalo (as well as another 100.1 translator in Batavia for WBTA) that nips into Virgin's coverage on 99.9. WLKK has a 104.7 translator in Buffalo that can make CHUM a little tricky, and there are translators on 106.9 on Grand Island and 107.3 in Buffalo that make Q107 less than ideal nearby. 

That leaves CJRT, Boom and CHFI as the "best" Toronto signals into Buffalo these days. Because of CJRT's unique format, it definitely has listeners in Buffalo, which lost jazz radio when WBFO went to all news and talk. The CJRT signal is listenable all along the lakeshore toward Rochester, too. I can get it in the car in Greece without much trouble. It's worse down in my part of Rochester - I'm in Brighton, southeast of the city and with Pinnacle Hill blocking me from Toronto signals. 

That said, on a good car radio you can usually get enough adjacent-channel separation to be able to hear Toronto anyway, if you're up for trying.

It gets a lot better once you're in Niagara County, obviously.