28,153! Maybe more quality and less quantity. ;-)
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KABC? Wow....a 0.6?!?!?!
- Thread starter Wimmmex
- Start date
28,153! Maybe more quality and less quantity. ;-)
Jockeying for the last word again?
28,154?
While they look similar, the lobe of KEIB comes from the east side of the MSA and it is the equivalent of about 200 kw over the LA Basin. While the north and south limits are similar, it is really a much better signal over much of the market.
Why would they invest in program development if they know that the area they cover well (it takes about 15 mV/m to be listenable in LA) has very few potential listeners.
Not in English, at least.
LA (MSA) is now less than 30% US born non-Hispanic white.
They might get better ratings in Farsi... KIRN seems to even with a signal that practically misses nearly all the market.
Once again, this latest ratings drop to .6 happened after the station moved its antenna. This is why I say this is specifically a technical issue, with very direct cause & effect. A similar thing happened to WMAL-AM in DC, but that station has an FM simulcast.
If KABC's signal is so poor, why was it #1 in the market for many years (in the 1970s and 80s)? I'd argue it's also a content issue. KABC failed to adapt after the Fairness Doctorine was dropped in the mid-80s. That triggered the rise of Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk and "hot talk" stations. KFI went hot with lightning-rod hosts like Limbaugh and Tom Leykis, but KABC stuck with moderate, cerebral talk from Michael Jackson and others. After a few years, they sounded boring compared to KFI. So KFI eventually left them in the dust, and that's pretty much where we remain today.
The population changed, particularly in the areas where the signal is strongest. There were once very popular Jewish delis in certain neighborhoods too. But their customers left, and the delis closed. It's correct that ABC failed to recognize that talk radio changed in the late 80s and 90s. That was 30 years ago. However, they're a pretty typical conservative talk station. The station was still above a 1 share until the antenna moved a few months ago.
KABC had an adequate signal in the 60's and 70s, but as more population moved out the San Gabriel Valley, up to the San Fernando Valley and Santa Clarita, and down deeper in Orange County, the signal did not reach them well.
At the same time, the areas that KABC did cover became areas with mostly Asian, Hispanic and African American populations, groups that generally underindex with conservative talk.
Finally, the last several decades have seen man made noise levels increasing exponentially with CPUs, wall warts, dimmers and all kind of other devices making the usable signal contour rise from under 5 mV/m to 15 mV/m in urban areas (per the ITU and my own experience in diary analysis).
The elimination of Fariness was not the real cause of the rise of lots more talk stations; it was the end of the viability of AM for music. That's why KFI went to talk in the first place. Limbaugh's syndication came a number of years after Fairness was discarded. KFI did not go talk to carry Limbaugh. They were already talk and they added him to the line up. KABC simply did not change with the times and part of the KFI decision was the stale KABC format and the less and less viable KABC signal.
I went back two years, and in no book out of 27 did KABC have a 1 share in 25-54. Most of 2017 they averaged a 0.5, and in 2018 they went progressively down from a 0.3 down to a 0.2. The transmitter move was only a few miles on the West Side, and they increased power due to the shorter towers but daytime they really stayed about the same.
What caused KABC-AM under ABC's ownership to not go 50kw for 790 AM though to expand the audience size at their height to reach the Inland Empire, San Gabriel Valley, up to the San Fernando Valley , Santa Clarita, Orange County, and Ventura County though? But in 2019 that move would be irrelevant though.
If 790 had tried to go to 50 kw, it would have been similar to another regional channel power upgrade, that of KIIS (AM) 1150 (the old KRKD). They could not send any more signal to the north, to the south or the east. So they moved the site as far east as they could, diplexed with an existing station (KTNQ) and shot the increased power over the LA basin and out towards the Philippines.
KABC can not increase coverage towards the SFV, Santa Clarita, Ventura to the north due to protections of existing co-channel and adjacent channel stations. To the south, they protect Mexicali's 790 and Tijuana's 800. To the east they protect countless stations, particularly at night. There is no way they could put a signal at any power level into the IE or the most eastern parts of the SGV.
And that assumes they could even find a transmitter site and get it zoned for multiple towers. The expense would have been astounding. The KEIB project 20 years ago cost over $1 million and that is without buying a site, building towers and all the legal and permit fees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBET_(AM)
I can see the reasons why 790 Los Angeles could not go to the Inland Empire and one of the reasons here is that a Las Vegas area station was assigned 790AM and its KBET. KBET Radio is owned by Ed Stoltz II.
For giggles, if you have a portable AM radio, approach any wall wart with it turned on. Most of them (particularly the cheap ones that come with lower-cost electrical devices), using switching power supplies, will overpower even the best AM signal the closer you get.
You don't need to use a 'cheap' portable. I have a very high end radio in my Genesis and if I pull up in front of any well-lighted store with the AM turned on the buzz and hash will virtually wipe out any signal. I can't remember over the past several decades being able to listen to static-free AM even way out in the boonies.
Reread, please. I was referring to cheap power supplies, not cheap radios. All radios, cheap or otherwise, will pick up man made RFI.
Of course, the first source of high interference levels was fluorescent lighting. Then came light dimmers. And then we got those little, cheap power supplies, CPUs, CFLs, LED light bulbs and many more noisy devices.
I recall a story a number of years back when they got a new General Manager, he was quoted as saying that KABC has to get above a 2.0 to be successful. I recall they were at around a 1.6 at the time...and they were obviously hurting.
I used to check the numbers when they came out each month to see if they were making any progress towards hitting that 2.0...they never did. That's why I was so surprised to see them slip into the muck with a 0.6.
As we've pointed out through this thread, there have been a lot of factors in this. So far no one's been fired, right?
Year after year, the Angels say they've GOT to make the playoffs. Year after year, they don't.
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