What would you do with....The Non-Comms

[CAwasinNJ]

This is going to be another all-encompassing post, covering 88.1-91.9.

I wish there was more apparent involvement by students in the stations owned by colleges, mirroring what I was talking about last week.  I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, so if there's something I should know please tell me.

This seems like as good a time as any to pose a question that I have a vague recollection of having been talked about but don't remember the answer to.  Why is KUSU's 90kW on 91.5 also broadcast on KUSR's 820w on 89.5 that is well within what should be the solid coverage area of KUSU?  I'm hoping friendlee can shed some light on the thinking here.

[friendlee]

When we moved KUSU-FM out to the Clarkston site in the summer of 1980, we discovered a few things. KUSU-FM while on the USU campus at 18.5 kW could not be heard on the east side of the valley north of Smithfield (this was the case since we signed on in 1953). Crow Mountain does a very effective job of terrain shielding the campus signal from Richmond, parts of Lewiston, Cove, Franklin, and Preston. Moving added those communities into our coverage as well as picking up locales north and east of Preston. The move also allowed us to cover over into the Tremonton and Brigham City areas (as well as west of Ogden and Salt Lake and clear down to Delta!) and to bleed over sufficiently to Bear Lake for the beginnings of our state-wide translator network (Laketown and Randolph). However, it also cut off the entire area known as the "island" (a densely-populated residential area south of campus up to the mouth of Logan Canyon) and weakened our coverage in the southern end of Cache County due to distance low over terrain (the Clarkston site is 16.92 miles northwest of campus). Also, most of Wellsville could not pick us up due to terrain elevation issues (Wellsville is lower than the east slopes/east bench of the Wellsville Mountains). When we moved, with the HAAT at the Clarkston site being lower than the HAAT at the Quonset Hut, our ERP was lowered from 18.5 to 16.4 kW. Even with increasing KUSU-FM's power to 90 KW ERP, there were still receptions problems in southern Cache Valley. At first a ten-watt then a 100-watt translator was put in place on campus with directional cross-pol antennas pointed south and south west to effect a fill-in signal. We found that even though 10-watts took care of the "island" reception problem, distance and terrain still won out south of town. In the late 1990's KUSR (820 W ERP) was signed on to fill-in in the areas that could not hear KUSU-FM. There you have it.

[CAwasinNJ]

Fascinating reading. Thanks for sharing that.