From WHYN, we made a quick stop by the base of the road that leads to inaccessible WLHZ-LP (107.9 Springfield), before heading down to Root Road and the three-tower array of WNNZ (640 Westfield). WNNZ is perhaps the textbook example of a “letterhead 50 kW”—yes, it does have 50 kilowatts nominal power during the day, but all of that power is directed to the northwest, a sparsely-populated, mountainous rural area with poor ground conductivity. The 1-kW night signal is, by necessity, directed in the opposite direction, towards the inhabited part of Westfield. Still, it's probably an improvement over the 1-kW ND-D signal the station had from on 1570 kHz from a different site as WLDM—but a fairly expensive one considering what the power bill must be. The station has been owned by Clear Channel for some time; it spent a few years running a sports-talk format (with Yankees play-by-play) before being LMA'ed to WFCR (88.5B Amherst) as an NPR news-talk outlet to complement the FM's music-heavy format.
Copyright 2008, Garrett Wollman. All rights reserved. Photograph taken 2008-07-12.