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C       1 5  The FM Network To make application for such facilities as may be needed to provide satisfactory coverage Through the 1930s and the war years, WHA and WLBL faced two problems, both peculiar to AM broadcasting. One was their daytime-only authorization. Staff members at WHA truly wanted to provide more adult education but were unable to broadcast in the evening when working people would be able to listen. The other problem was finding a way to efficiently get the broadcast signal to all parts of the state.The line connecting WHA and WLBL was frightfully expensive, and the coverage of the two stations, despite both being at 5,000 watts, still didn’t provide a clear signal in many parts of the state. Reception in eastern Wisconsin from Kenosha to Manitowoc, including Milwaukee , was described as “wholly inadequate,” as was reception in the far north, the far northwest, and heavily populated northeastern parts of the state. Reception became more of an issue as the postwar years saw an explosion in the number of AM stations. Many of those in Wisconsin and nearby states were on frequencies adjacent to those of WHA and WLBL and further limited the listening range of the two state stations. The stations tried other ways to extend the reach of their programs. Some School of the Air programs were recorded on transcription discs and shipped to commercial stations for airing. However, for this to be a reliable service, it required the continuing cooperation of commercial broadcasters. Moreover, it was awkward, because a local station might air a program weeks after it first aired over WHA and WLBL. With the availability of FM broadcasting, WHA managers realized they might have a solution to all their transmission problems. FM broadcasting had been available in the years before World War II but operated on a different area of the broadcast spectrum than today’s FM 150 broadcast band. The prewar FM band consisted of forty channels between 42.1 and 49.9 mHz. In 1940, the FCC reserved the first five channels (42.1 to 42.9 mHz) for educational use, a departure from earlier years when noncommercial AM stations had to compete with commercial broadcasters for frequencies. Some FM broadcasters (including some educational ones) who had entered the field before the war put broadcast expansion on hold. FM’s inventor, Edwin Armstrong, had even put together a network of commercial FM stations in New England called the Yankee Network that had managed to amass an audience of a half-million listeners. With the end of the war concern over interference issues and successful lobbying by some in the radio industry resulted in a shift of the FM band in 1945 to 88–106 mHz (with 106–108 mHz added later). The several dozen prewar FM broadcasters found themselves with useless frequencies and the hundreds of thousands of consumers who owned prewar FM receivers were equally out of luck. The one positive aspect of the switch was that a larger percentage of the new band had been reserved for non-commercial broadcasting: 88.1 to 91.9 mHz, twenty full channels. Many commercial radio operators shied away from the “new” FM system, unsure if it would be permanent or whether the “once-fooled” public would buy new receivers. This era of uncertainty would turn out to be a boon for non-commercial broadcasters. They would enter the field in force and would learn to use the new medium with minimal pressure from commercial competitors. For WHA, the possibilities of FM were all they could hope for. Here was a transmission system unhampered by daytime restrictions. Also, its signal was unaffected by electrical interference. Glenn Koehler of the WHA engineering staff had the idea to build a statewide network of seven (later eight) FM stations. These were not to provide additional programming staff nor to generate their own programming but rather would serve as a way to efficiently get the signal of WHA in Madison to the entire state. The design proposed was simplicity itself: carefully placed FM transmitters that would pick up a clear, static-free signal off the air on one frequency and rebroadcast it on another. The stations would be located so that the Madison station would be picked up off the air and rebroadcast by a station near Milwaukee. Its signal would be picked up and rebroadcast by a station in northeastern Wisconsin, whose signal would feed a station...

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