KCPW, a public radio station based in Salt Lake City and serving Northern Utah, has announced that it is bringing round the clock news from BBC World Service to Salt Lake City. A notice on the station’s website says “We’re turning our 1010 AM signal to 24-hour news and information from the BBC. You don’t even need to buy a new radio to hear this expansion of news and information from KCPW.” The station is asking for donations to help raise the $33,000 start-up costs, and is also inviting listeners to help choose a logo for the service.
Kim Andrew Elliott notes: “If my information is up to date, the station has 50,000 Watts during the day, but only 194 Watts at night. ”
(Source: KCPW via KimAndrewElliott.com)
on Nov 20th, 2007 at 14:42
Great news! But you forgot to mention the most important part - about a “fabulous trip” to London:
Help us raise the $33,000 in start-up costs for this new service, and you could win a trip to London to tour the BBC studios. One lucky KCPW listener and a guest will head to London next year for a fabulous trip to go behind the scenes of the BBC.
Make a pledge now or donate during our short, on-air drive December 6 and 7. Once we raise the amount we need, we’ll stop fundraising.
on Nov 20th, 2007 at 16:38
Kim is correct this station has no night time signal. It has to protect another 50KW in nearby Phoenix, Az.
on Nov 20th, 2007 at 17:49
But NRCAM Log 2007 says it has 44 kW during “critical hoiurs“, whatever that mean in this case.
on Nov 20th, 2007 at 19:27
critical hours are an hour before sunrise and an hour after sunset.
WFED on 1050 in Washington DC metro has critical hour authority and you cant here them at all 6 miles from the transmitter.
Not worth having.
on Nov 20th, 2007 at 19:36
$33,000! Is it really so expensive to relay the BBC news programs?
on Nov 20th, 2007 at 22:23
These are the Pre-Sunrise Authority and Post-Sunset Authority, respectively. Critical hours are another matter: These are “the two hours after local sunrise and the two hours before local sunset”, cf.
http://sujan.hallikainen.org/FCC/FccRules/2007/73/187/
This means that the transmitter in question is allowed to run 50 kW from two hours after sunrise until two hours before sunset only. After sunrise and before sunset they have to reduce their power to 44 kW (WRTH says 42 kW instead), and from sunset until sunset on the net morning all they can run are a whooping 0.2 kW. Presumably they were originally a daytime-only station and later asked at which power they could operate at night, with this outcome. In other cases the resulting night powers were as low as 0.004 kW, and Europeans will never cease to be amazed about such “transmissions” (although I read somewhere that they are not entirely useless if putting such a flee transmitter inmidst a housing estate).
on Nov 20th, 2007 at 22:59
IIRC - The BBC many years ago used to run half power at
night (Possibly the other way round), it was mainly to save
power, but a AM power saving method called DCC was
introduced to, and today everything is running full power 24/7.
I wonder how many European broadcasters run day and
night settings?
I remember Optimod used to provide day and night time
settings for the AM processors, so when the power changed
the setting on the processor changed to suite the change
in signal to noise.
on Nov 22nd, 2007 at 03:44
I believe that “critical hours“ can also depend on sunrise/sunset times at some other priority station on same frequency, which is why we need to have a timetable for KCPW to know exactly when the only slightly reduced power really be in effect. Also, it is not uncommon in the US for stations with reduced night power (or even no nighttime authorization at all) to “forget“ and operate with day power into the night. Not that KCPW would ever do that.
on Nov 22nd, 2007 at 17:31
The $33,000 price tag involves–in part at least–the fee charged by Public Radio International (PRI), which is the rights holder for BBC World Service broadcasts in the U.S. The fee is the same whether a station takes a few newscasts or the entire broadcast day. That fact has served to increase public radio stations’ reliance on BBCWS content, the attitude being (as put to me by a local public radio manager) “We’re already paying for it, so we might as well use it wherever we can!” Polling also has shown that it is quite popular with public radio listeners/contributors.
The PRI feed differs somewhat from both the Americas stream (carried by XM Satellite Radio) and the News stream (carried by Sirius Satellite Radio).
on Jan 17th, 2008 at 15:54
Regarding the PRI feed vs. the Sirius vs. the News stream — it was my (possibly incorrect) understanding that the PRI and Sirius feeds are the same — at least they used to be.
The News feed is similar to the PRI/Sirius feed but is different.