I usually listen to WFNK if I am driving somewhere far because it has the longest range of any station in my area. I live in Maine, and have been able to hear this station in parts of NH, Mass , and Vermont as well. That’s 4 states. WHOM claims they can be heard in all 6 new england states, but I don’t really like their music so I can’t vouch for that. What is the FM station that can be heard in the most US states?
Before anyone mentions it, streaming and simulcasts don’t count. I am only asking about the actual FM broadcast.
it’s hard to say, since radio stations can tune their transmitting antenna or antenna arrays for directionality. Also things like HAAT (height above average terrain) affect coverage. You can look up a radio station’s transmitting info (including coverage maps) here:
you can have a more-or-less non-directional pattern like this station’s:
http://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/patg?id=WJLB-FM
or, if you want the bulk of your transmission over a certain area (or keep it out of another one) you can transmit directionally like this station which seems to hate Canada:
States differ vastly in size, also, which will affect the answer.
For example, all 4 states that you mention would fit into my state (MN), with room left over for Connecticut, Delaware, & Rhode Island.
WAMC out of Albany NY has or had as their tag line “serving listeners in five states”: a large chunk of central and eastern NY, much of Vermont, a small piece of southwestern NH, western MA, and a chunk of northwestern CT. The listening area, as they put it, certainly comes very, very close to both PA and NJ around the community of Port Jervis, NY, though I’m not sure I’ve ever picked it up there. So that could be seven states, but I’m not sure how many are reached through the main transmitter.
Kids these days with their fancy “FM” radios. Back in my day we listened to “AM” radio and liked it. We could drive from New York to Los Angeles and never lose the signal of XERF radio out of Mexico. Now THAT was a powerful station!
I think a New England radio station is likely to be the answer since you have smaller sized states with comparatively fewer people and a less crowded radio dial. I can hear WAMC and I’m pretty far away from Albany. I rarely listen to it though, since I don’t have any interest in Alan Chartock’s musings on Albany politics.
Four or five states is fairly easy to achieve on the East Coast and six is only a little harder. I can personally confirm that many of the major Boston area FM stations like 100.7 can easily reach northern Rhode Island, northeastern Connecticut, southern New Hampshire and southern Maine as well eastern Massachusetts. They may also reach southeastern Vermont as well depending on conditions. That is just barely outside of normal FM range but certainly not unheard of.
It is going to be much harder to find one that can reach 7+ states. The only other area I can think of that may happen is somewhere around the greater Washington D.C. area possibly near Baltimore. A powerful station there could easily reach Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. NYC itself may not be out of the question either to bring the potential up to 7.
Yes, I remember XERF. It boasted of 50,000 watts. And 24 hours. When our local stations signed off we had XERF.
Yeah, but that’s cheating.
WHOM 94.9 FM in New Hampshire can be heard in six states, if you count Quebec as a “state” (NH, ME, VT, MA, NY, Quebec). WHOM - Wikipedia
WVKR 91.3 FM in New York claims to have been heard in five states (NY, MA, CT, NJ, PA) WVKR.org – Independent Radio
Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga TN, makes the dubious claim that you can “see seven states” from there. Lookout Mountain - Wikipedia This suggests to me that there may be some other radio stations in that part of the country that could cover quite a few states. For example, looking at upper east Tennessee, there could be a radio station there which might be heard in KY, VA, TN, NC, SC, and GA. But I don’t know of any such station.
yeah, that was by law. XERF would have been a Class A or “clear channel” station, permitted to operate at full power 24/7. medium-wave AM radio has a neat tendency to “bounce” off of the ionosphere at night, which means it can carry much, much farther than its daytime broadcast area. lower-class stations have to reduce power or shut down to prevent interference.
There’s a station in Duluth, Minnesota, that rattles on about how it broadcasts to the North Shore and Lower Canada, but that’s 'cause there’s no truth in advertising.
In fact, it only covers less than a quarter of the North Shore, it does not cover any of Lower Canada at all (Lower Canada is Quebec, which is between 700 and 1,600 miles from Duluth), and only a few Canadian moose with tinfoil on their antlers pick up its signal down by the border.
WBCT still broadcasts to Indiana.
It uses the USA’s strongest transmission, effectively 320,000 watts of a simple dipole antenna. (Its not actually putting 320,000 watts in any more because of beam shaping technology… its saving on power by not sending it up to space or straight down to the ground.)
A west coast radio station claims the largest area (radius), because its transmitter is up high on a mountain but there’s clear paths, the coastal plains, down along California’s coast…
Not Chattanooga, but Knoxville. WUOT, WIVK and probably a couple more hit Tennesse, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, North and South Carolina.
WIYY in Baltimore reaches into Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, DC and just into West Virginia.
FM signals follow line-of-sight, so are blocked by the curvature of the earth, and are not reliably heard more than about 150 miles away, no matter how powerful the transmission. But they can, in some circumstances, be reflected back down to earth by temperature inversions, an be picked up briefly but cleary over a thousand miles away. The FM band occupies the frequency between channel 6 and 7 on television, and would have about the same carrying distance.