ggn information systems - WHAT WQXQ NEW YORK IS DOING:

To return to previous page
use your browser BACK button

WQXQ is the FM affiliate of standard broadcasting station WQXR, in New York. Like WQXR, it is licensed to Interstate Broadcasting Company, owned by The New York Times and managed by Elliott Sanger and myself. The transmitter is located on the 54th floor of the Chanin Building, at 42nd street and Lexington Avenue, with the antenna more than 600 ft. above sea level. With a high-gain antenna at this height, the power of the new Western Electric transmitter now being installed will permit WQXQ to give outstanding service on its new frequency of 97.7 mc.

This upper-frequency service could begin tomorrow, since the driver unit of the new high-power transmitter is already delivered, except for the fact that there is not yet enough 60-cycle power available at the Chanin roof to permit simultaneous operation of the new 97.7mc. unit and the old 45.9mc. REL 1-kw transmitter.

We have our choice of operating one or the other, but not both. In this area, it is more important to serve the listeners who have FM receivers that will tune to 45.9 mc. than to radiate our programs on the new frequency alone, since there are still relatively few receiving sets here that will bring in FM programs on the 88 to 108 mc band. Consequently, WQXQ continues to send out its programs on 45.9 mc. from five o’clock in the afternoon to after midnight weekdays and Sundays. FM listeners within something like a 50-mile radius can continue to hear the news and good music on programs that are characteristic of WQXR.

For the most part, WQXQ transmits simultaneously the programs that originate in our WQXR studios. Whether this practice will be continued after a substantial audience has been developed on the new FM frequencies, or whether WQXQ will be programmed separately from WQXR, has not yet been decided. Our studio facilities are adequate to permit completely independent program operation of the two stations, but under today’s conditions it appears best to run the same program on both WQXR and WQXQ. In the future, it may well become more desirable to appeal to two completely different sets of listeners by using different programs on the two stations.

Whatever the program policy may be from year to year, Interstate and The New York Times intend to push the service possibilities of FM to the limit. We all feel that FM has great potentialities, as I myself have believed from the days of Major Armstrong’s first developments, and we propose to provide public services that will make use of the new facility as fully as possible. In the foreseeable future, we believe that FM will be found able to provide a better service than can be had from AM stations on any regional, or local channel. We think that this should, result in an abandonment by AM stations of local and regional positions, and a shift to FM. This cannot happen, however, as we see it, until there are enough new band FM receivevs in use to provide a potential audience as large as today’s potential or actual audiene for the local and regional AM stations.

Since AM station WQXR on the 1560-kc cleared channel, sharing only with KPMC in Bakersfield, California, is not subject to a nighttime interference limitation by co-channel stations, we expect to continue its development for serving listeners within WQXR’s primary or daytime area and also those within the Eastern third of the USA, where WQXR now has thousands of night-time sky-wave listeners. The 1,500 to 1,600-kc skywave develops useful intensities at considerable distances almost immediately after sunset, and offers great opprotunity to deliver programs to suburban and rural listeners who do not get FM service at this time. Thus, we feel that with a cleared channel station we are committed to continue its expansion, but this does not in any way restrict our enthusiasm for carrying fonvard the most intensive development of our FM broadcasting to supply high-fidelity programs to still more families in the metropolitan New York area.

Another FM service that WQXQ plans to provide is facsimile broadcasting directly to the home. WQXQ was one of the pioneer participants in the Broadcasters’ Facsimile Analysis, organized by WOR and Radio Inventions, Inc. We are now awaiting delivery of standard facsimile equipment from the General Electric Company. As soon as it is available, which we anticipate will be early in 1947, we plan to use WQXQ for the scheduled transmission of facsimile news and magazine features. We have not yet made final plans for this initial facsimile programming, for much will depend upon the division of time on WQXQ between aural programs and visual facsimile.

As of today, it looks to us as though we would put out several four-page, 15-minute editions of a facsimile magazine every day, perhaps at 4-hour intervals, beginning at 8 A.M. and ending at midnight. Later, of course, the 97.7 mc. channel will have to carry at least 17 hours of sound programs every day, as WQXR does now on its 1,560 kc AM channel. Our facsimile magazine will either go out over a second FM transmitter on a different frequency or else on 97.7 mc. by means of multiplex.

It seems reasonable to believe that, by that time, someone will have solved the facsimile-sound multiplex problem to the satisfaction of the Federal Communications Commission. In our view, the FCC is very reasonable in requiring that facsimile-sound multiplex 1) shall not de grade the high-fidelity transmission sound on FM, and 2) shall not require the users of FM sound receivers to pay for or install special filters to exclude the facsimile signals. But when these requirements are met, we foresee a tremendous expansion of FM by reason of the possibility of coordinating facsimile and sound programs on a single FM channel.

In a word, we at WQXQ-WQXR are optimists as to the future of FM, both for sound and for facsimile programs. We are no less optimistic as to the service that cleared channel AM can deliver for many years to come. We intend to press forward on all three fronts, and to continue, on FM, the forward-looking policy that is a natural outgrowth of our having initiated the first regular FM program service in New York.

WQXQ, under the experimental call letters W2XQR, began its operations on November 8, 1939. Except for a close down of about a week in order to move the transmitter from my Long Island City laboratory to the Chanin Building, the FM station has been on the air with WQXR programs every day since its opening. We don’t know much about the size of WQXQ’s audience today, but we do know that two surveys made in 1942 showed that by June of that year it had more listeners than any other FM station in New York. We intend to do all that we can to establish and maintain a similar position on the new channel, both as to our sound and our facsimile programs. The timetable for our progress in putting new plans into effect will be determined, to a large extent, by production of FM receivers.