An archived story from The Engineer’s Corner – an occasional column at Rhode Island Public Radio by Aaron Read.

It’s been a long time coming, and there’s still quite a bit of work to be done, but our new 89.3FM signal is ON THE AIR from Tiverton!  WOOOOT!! 🙂  You should now be able to hear 89.3 over most of Rhode Island and the South Coast of Massachusetts.  Read on for some details and a handy guide to any questions you might’ve had!

Actually it’s been on since late in the day on Saturday September 1, 2018, but we wanted to give it some time to make sure things were working fine.  Broadly speaking, the signal is about as good as we expected it to be. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying things:

• Providence: 89.3 covers the various urban parts of Providence pretty well. There’s some areas where the fact that it’s coming in from Tiverton means it doesn’t cover things quite as well as, say, 92PRO-FM does from Neutaconakut Hill in Providence. But it’s still pretty good overall.
• Cranston, Warwick & West Bay: all quite good. I found a few staticky spots near URI, but otherwise no problems.
• East Bay, Aquidneck Island, Little Compton & Tiverton: with the tower being in Tiverton, the signal BOOMS into your radio around most places here.  
• South Coast of Mass: generally great. All the way out to the Cape Cod canal and a ways beyond was solid. I even noticed a few places, like Norton MA, where there was marked improvement. I would expect if you’re vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard it’ll be pretty good, too.
• Northern RI: I’d judge 89.3 is performing a little better than expected northward. I’ve had reports that you can easily hear it along, and past, I-495. Almost up to Sharon, MA. It’s listenable along 146 well past Douglas, MA, and pretty audible across most of Burriville, Cumberland, Pascoag, Chepachet, etc. There’s some places where the towns are located down in river valleys and that makes reception tough, but that was to be expected, and most of those locations are well outside our “service contour” (seen in green in the map above) too.  Interestingly, I found 89.3, while not perfect, comes in better than 88.1 does in a lot of Woonsocket.
• Southwestern RI: here I’d say 89.3 underperformed a bit to expectations. We have a very tight null in the antenna pattern to protect WPKT 89.1 in Norwich CT so we put a lot less signal that way. Once you get west of Carolina, Kenyon or Charlestown, 89.3 gets pretty spotty; our 102.7FM signal might still be your best bet. Although it’s surprisingly “not bad” along I-95 from Exit 5 in West Greenwich almost to the RI/CT border.  Unfortunately, Westerly, Hope Valley and the Pawcatuck River Valley are still mostly in a dead zone thanks to the hills the river forms. We’re still working on trying to find an FM outlet for listeners in that region.
• Block Island: haven’t been out there myself yet, but had three or four reports from residents who all say it comes in quite good in home and in their car.

If you haven’t already seen them, here’s some cool pics of the installation of the antenna and transmitter at Tiverton.  

Here are some handy answers to questions you may have:

What’s left to do? One big thing is our studio/transmitter link, or STL. This is what conveys audio, remote control, and telemetry from the studios in Providence to the transmitter in Tiverton.  We currently are using what’s meant to be our backup STL until we can get the primary installed; it’s an FCC-licensed 11 GHz wireless microwave link and we anticipate that happening in October/November, weather permitting. We’ve also got the basics of our Remote Control set up, but it needs a lot more stuff programmed in. Some temporary audio & control wiring will have to be replaced by more permanent stuff. The earth-grounding setup for the electricial wiring needs some firming up (we’ve got some temporary stuff in place to make sure a lightning strike doesn’t fry anything, but to do it properly needs some TLC). And cleanup, of course. There’s still looooots of cleanup ahead. Probably need a dumpster to handle it all.

What happened to your transmitter in Dartmouth? It’s still there. We’re in the process of licensing it as an official FCC-approved “auxiliary site” so that whenever we have a problem or need to do work at Tiverton, we can shut it down and fire up Dartmouth to stay on the air.  We also have plans to modify the facility with a directional antenna so we can broadcast with a higher power but still remain legal. At the risk of getting too technical (who, me?!?) the Dartmouth site’s normal broadcast contour at 9600 watts/93m HAAT reaches further east than the Tiverton site’s broadcast contour goes at its licensed 7000 watts/254m HAAT. That’s not allowed for aux sites, so we have to reduce the power at Dartmouth to stay legal. But if we employ a directional antenna instead, we can maintain our higher power & greater reach to the north and west.

What’s going to happen to 88.1FM, 91.5FM and 102.7FM? At the moment, nothing. Our existing network of FM stations remains as-is. We have lease agrements with the owners of 88.1 (The Wheeler School) and 91.5 (Coventry Public Schools) that run through the fall of 2021, so nothing’s changing with them until at least that time. 102.7 is staying in place for the moment as well. We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to expand our signal coverage but for the moment there’s no firm plans beyond the status quo for 88.1, 91.5 and 102.7FM.

What’s this WNPN business? As part of this process, we’ve changed our call letters from WRNI/WXNI to WNPE/WNPN, respectively. Yep, we’re turning over a new leaf and no longer have anything to do with “WRNI.”

You keep saying “Tiverton”, isn’t WNPN broadcasting from Newport? You say “Newport” on the air…? The tower WNPN broadcasts from is in Tiverton, it’s the old WLNE-TV6 tower (they moved to Rehoboth in 2009). But the community of license (COL) for WNPN is indeed Newport. Why’d we do that? Well, for starters, as Rhode Island Public Radio, it seemed a little odd to keep “North Dartmouth”, a Massachusetts town, as our COL. But why Newport? Why not Tiverton? Or Providence, for that matter?  Mostly it’s because of the “Rural Radio Initiative”. The FCC has specific rules in place to ensure that stations licensed to rural areas are not simply moved into urban areas and thus abandoning the rural area they were supposed to serve. With WNPN it was complicated as heck because there’s the Providence Urban Area and the New Bedford Urban Area (see pages 9 & 10 of this PDF) and exactly how much the old 89.3 signal covered of each and how much the new one covered had to be carefully calculated, and it mitigated against choosing Providence as the new COL. So Providence was out – what about Tiverton? Well, the FCC does not allow a station to “leave” a COL if there is no other station licensed to that COL. Now, we could leave North Dartmouth because WTKL 91.1 is still licensed to it. But there is no station licensed to Tiverton. So if we picked Tiverton, we’d never, ever be able to pick another COL ever again. At the time, this had ramifications regarding where we could physically locate our Main Studio (the FCC has since eliminated the Main Studio requirement), and since there is already WADK 1540AM in Newport, we chose Newport instead.

I can’t hear 89.3 – what can I do? If you haven’t already tried listening to one of our other signals (88.1 in Providence, 91.5 in Coventry or 102.7 in Narragansett/South County) then may I suggest downloading our iPhone or Android app or picking up an Echo Dot and installing our free Alexa Skill? You can also try improving your radio and antenna.

I’m hearing 89.3 great in X location, how can I tell you about it? Let us know at our Facebook page or send a tweet @tprengineer. We’d love to hear from you!