Welcome to my humble repository of technical facts about West Virginia Radio and Television broadcasting. Below is a table of options.

I used the FCC Audio Service Division's Web-based HAAT tool to create the FM and TV coverage plots. With access to digitized terrain data, the tool automates the calculation of VHF or UHF propagation by FCC standard methods for 360 radials. However, only the first 16 km of terrain is used in each radial to establish the average terrain needed in the propagation calculation.

With that limitation in mind, I have chosen to plot only the city-grade and service (protected) contours for FM stations given the terrain of the area. Potential reception at greater distances is certainly implied (check out some Morgantown and Fairmont stations' coverage towards Preston County as an example), but wholescale plots of 40 dBu (car radio) or 48 dBu (most in-house radios) will certainly overestimate potential reception in many cases.

There is one other limitation of the HAAT tool: it does not use HAAT values below 30 meters. This causes smooth arcs to appear in strange places on some of the plots and forces over-prediction of some of the class D and translator stations (WMUL, for example).

Key to the FM coverage plots: black = city grade coverage limit (70 dBu), blue = protected coverage limit (54 dBu for Class B, 57 dBu for Class B1, and 60 dBu for all non-commercial stations, translators/boosters, and Class A and Cx stations). Technically, city-grade does not apply to non-commercial and translators/boosters.

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