WGDR’s New Antenna!
After over two years of planning and months of project managing, we are in the final days of the new WGDR antenna install project!
We have been hard at work with many local partners to ensure we take care of key project needs: upgrade the radio shed to protect our gear, avoiding interference with our new tower co-users, ensuring proper broadcast gear set up, including redundancy, and more. We are on pace to have the install done in June, still on our project timeline and within our projected budget.
On “crossover day” we will be having planned broadcast outages at 91.1 FM. We will announce this on the air, that day. We need to do a range of safety and regulation testing, so full transition to the new antenna has some variation we need to work with. We have back up broadcast ready to go if this is the case and we will keep you updated.
Once the new antenna is on, we’ll put the call out far and wide to get real listener feedback on how the broadcast signal sounds. This includes quality, new reach, and any other feedback you got for us. This is the best way for us to assess our new broadcast impact, everything else up to now has been engineering estimates. In Vermont, you gotta plug it in to see how it really sounds and how far it really reaches due to our topography. We’re excited to have you help us map this!
Special thanks to our partners on this project:
The state of Vermont for funding $25K of the project, especially Senator Perchlik for being such a champion for community radio!
Two anonymous major donors who funded $35K of it.
The city of Montpelier for a $2,500 grant to help us finally reach all of the city.
And many donors just like you who have given what you can to be part of this historic moment.
Thanks to our contractors, suppliers, and community partners, ROI, LLC engineering, Joules Electric Vermont, Prescott Towers, Sweetwaters, BSW, Murray’s Heating and Cooling, Vermont Association of Broadcasters, and Broadcast Tools & Die.
A big thanks to our new tower partner, Cloud Alliance, for being our new antenna forever home!
To our hard working staff, Levi Kerchner and Llu Mulvaney-Stanak for all the big and little things to make this project come together.
And, to our programmers and listeners. Together, it is your unwavering belief in this mighty station that keeps us not only going, but helps us do historic moves like this for our future success.
A reminder! Why are we doing this?
A need to replace the current antenna: What you listen to at 91.1FM is coming from a 30 year old antenna that is at end of its life and showing performance issues. This new antenna, thanks to the new tower location, will get us further and be cheaper to run long term.
Better coverage! The new location and stronger, new antenna will get us to the cities of Barre and Montpelier, and much further all around to places we’ve been spotty for 53 years! This truly takes us from our college station roots, to being a community broadcasting station.
Future possibilities! Moving the WGDR antenna off the old Goddard College campus makes us more nimble for the station’s future.
Protecting your investment! A higher, better, safer, location for the antenna protects us from impacts from future floods and the dangers of our current tower location—the forest and falling trees and the failing tower structure on campus.
