At least two island radio stations are familiar to our readers, those are End 80 Radio in Tybee Island, Georgia and Friday Harbor Tiny Radio at Friday Harbor, Washington. This morning I chanced upon another island station, this one from Whidbey Island, Washington.
KWPA is off the air because its operators were dissatisfied with the spotty 6-mile coverage of their 30 Watt LPFM signal, and the programmers are now serving the world by means of Whidbey AIR, a streaming internet station. The creative spark behind Whidbey AIR is very inspiring.
Perhaps they would sale their license?
Good Idea MRAM , Perhaps it could be an ALPB Network station in the northwest for us.
I never thought of buying LPFM's before , but that could be a way to go perhaps.
Also bumping the power up to 200 watts would help 🙂
i would be thrilled with 6 mile range unless it is just all farmland but here in the urban setting i live in 6 miles is a lot of real estate.
I suppose the Non-Profit or Gov Agency ownership restriction would bar selling the license.
But, you could probably work a deal to be the operator in control of programming.
Hi Guys I'll put my 2 cents in on KWPA 6 mile range with a 30 watt transmitter very bad range who every set that up, didn't do a very good job.
Where i used to live there was an high school FM station of 10 watt stereo and they did 20 miles + and ran by remote.
KWPA going off the air is not good, after a station is not heard on the air about 1 year the FCC would assume there defunked or what ever happen and now any information on the station and it's call sign would go in historical storage but you will not be able to use the call sign anymore.
After 1 year FCC deletes call sign from data base.
I used to work for an educational fm station that went defunked and after about 1 year it wasn't heard on the air anymore the FCC took all it's information and call sign put into historical storage and the call sign can not be reissued out or be used at all !!!
I have no clue if KWPA did anything to help improve it's range in anyway but they should give it a try.
Not knowing KWPA station equipment and gear and setup and location i would not know if improvement can be made to get out farther but you should always try to improve it before giving up and you might be surprise of the results.
In the stations FCC correspondence this excerpt was found:
Special Temporary Authority is granted to permit Station KWPA-LP to remain silent not to exceed 180 days from the date of this letter.
Notwithstanding the grant of this Special Temporary Authority, the broadcast license for Station KWPA-LP will automatically expire as a matter of law if broadcast operations do not commence by 12:01 a.m., September 29, 2012
It would seem the license is history.
KWPA is off the air because its operators were dissatisfied with the spotty 6-mile coverage of their 30 Watt LPFM signal...
This is an interesting situation. As it is a cold and gloomy day here and I had the time, I decided to have a look at it in some detail.
From FCC data for KWPA-LP, the height of their transmit antenna is about 50 meters above average terrain, which means that they could be licensed for an ERP of just 30 watts. But that added height means that in general, their 1 mV/m contour location would be the same as if their antenna was 30 meters above average terrain, and they radiated 100 watts ERP -- which is the class maximum for 100 W LPFM stations.
The study below shows the 1 mV/m contour for KWPA based on the FCC F(50,50) curves for FM propagation. This is the field calculated for a receive antenna elevation of about 30 feet above local ground level. It would be lower than that closer to the earth there.
The 1 mV/m F(50,50) contour falls short of most of the city of Oak Harbor, WA (pop. 22,000) -- which presumably they hoped to serve. Most of the land area within the 1 mV/m contour is sparsely populated.
The graphic at the bottom of this study shows the terrain profile from their transmit antenna to about the center of Oak Harbor, including the path loss for it based on a Longley-Rice analysis. Longley-Rice accounts for obstruction and diffraction losses over specific terrain paths and antenna heights, rather than the averaging method of the FCC F(50,50) curves.
The Longley-Rice results do not predict very good service to listeners in Oak Harbor; worse even than predicted by the FCC F(50,50) curves.
(When using Firefox an enlarged view of this graphic is available by right-clicking on it, and selecting "View Image" on the popup list that appears.)
Gloomy downriver also today, and the review of KWPA's situation arrives with welcome.
The folks there on Whidbey Island are to be credited with having gone the full distance to give it a try, and I'm sure they didn't quit without exhausting all hope.
Based on the nibbly stingy strait-jacket LPFM rules, there will probably be a lot of people ridding themselves of the useless effort of "pretending" to serve a geographic area. As it is, far fewer than expected bothered to file during the arbitrary deadline period.
LPFM is a luxary high-priced version of Part 15 radio, with a tad more power, but not enough to provide realistic conditions.
Fun for for a few wealthy people to play "scale-model radio."
The folks there on Whidbey Island are to be credited with having gone the full distance to give it a try, and I'm sure they didn't quit without exhausting all hope.
Maybe so, but could it be true that their coverage hopes were not based on good science?
Understood that it can be expensive to hire a broadcast consulting engineer to analyze coverage contours for specific terrain conditions. This cost may not be affordable/desirable by some LPFM applicants.
But applicants who skip this step might be disappointed in the useful coverage provided by their licensed LPFM stations, for some directions and distances.
We don't know the underlying story about what happened on Whidbey, leaving the question about whether they bypassed good science at the expense of their hopes.
It's a good question.