About 1-mile away with antenna up on a tall dormatory building is 9-Watt KWUR 90.3 FM at Washington University St. Louis, which in the 90s I could receive with full quieting.
But in more recent years when the station can be heard it's way down in the noise as if someone broke the antenna by hanging laundry on it.
This morning I could just barely make out music and voices, so I strained to listen and heard male and female co-hosts staging an argument... he asked her to tie his shoes but she refused saying he had bad Karma.
I liked the way it was going, so I tried their stream but nothing doing.
http://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/finder?call=kwur&x=6&y=5&sr=Y&s=C
Thought that you needed 100 watts or more to get a licence?
Mark
I think the old 10 Watt LPFM's are Grandfathered. They can actually re apply for the 100 Watt LPFM license if they want, but then they would have to abide by the new rules.
Actually I don't see why they killed the 10 Watt stations. I know the 60 dbu countour thing. But some stations were happy getting out that 5-10 miles to a good boom box. There was a Mount Pleasent Michigan station that actually did that. To a car Radio you could hear it 10 miles away and after that nothing at all.
You are right, Mark, so here's what I think might explain some lower power stations that are found in a few cases...
I think these are "legacy" stations that have survived from the days when there were lower powered FM stations... and I know that KWUR the 9 Watt station I wrote about was started way back in the mid 1970s.
We have another one of those here, a high school station at 90.1 MHz KRHS 14 Watts.
Weather here in the mid Mississippi River Valley is great, so we did the lawn with our precision German manual mower while enjoying the Jazz Festival from New Orleans where rain was alternating with humidity but the thousands of revelers just dripped dry surrounded by tubas, trombones and drums.
The song writers and vocalists are something else. A male vocalist sang, "I'm going to make your heart melt like butter. In the bed under the sheets I'm gunna make you stutter."
This is going out across the U.S. on a hookup of 10 stations.
An excellent female singer just topped that one by announcing, "This next song is about shitty people."
A shocked voice from the sidelines screamed, "You're on the radio!"
The lady paused and apologized, "Pardon my French, of course I meant bad people."
Slow power radio.
WOVI 89.5 was a High School station in Novi, Michigan which was a city just a few miles from Ann Arbor. In the year 2006 I remember picking it up about 15 miles away to a car Stereo and to Richie's digital boom box and home stereo there was some hiss about 5 miles from the High school. I don't remember how high off the ground their antenna was, but they are operating @ 100 Watts.
There seems to be a temperature effect on that station as well because certain times of day it did seem to come in better than others.
Our LPFM license was granted in September of 2014 allowing 18 watts ERP.
Apparently 18 watts at 138 feet AGL produces the required 60 db contour required.
So, it seems you don't have to have 100 watts.
LPFM's are required to have a 60dbu contour that extends at least 4.7 kilometers. The FCC will even license an LPFM station with a one-watt ERP, if it's high enough. (In that last case, antenna height above average terrain would need to be 450 meters.)
And like all licensed FM stations, coverage is based not on height above ground level, but by height above average terrain. So there's a lot of room to play.
Our staion is licensed at 86 watts.