Does signal reach matter any more in a world where Bluetooth exists?
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
KEXP Buys KREV
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
The folks at KEXP think there are at least 3,750,000 reasons why a radio signal still makes sense. If nothing else, it convers some legitimacy to their stream. There are tons of AAA streams out there, but there will only be one AAA-like format on broadcast FM in one of the richest markets in the US.
I suspect they will simulcast to start, then add local elements as they can. The growth of the station in Seattle has been very much an evolutionary one, albeit given a huge boost by billionaire Paul Allen roughly 20 years ago. But they now have over 30,000 contributing members and seem extremely healthy.
If folks in the Bay Area have not heard KEXP, you will find it to be one of the widest interpretations of AAA out there.
I don't have the data, but I bet someone here does. My gut tells me that the two signals probably serve a similar number of people. 92.7 Alameda maybe comes out on top over 90.3 Seattle. Likely a similar demographic breakout as well.
I think the challenge will be to get the people who want such a station to find it. I think those people may have already found their radio station somewhere else. The station needs to find a way to put what they do in front of the people most likely to listen. That means hosting music events around town and doing outreach. They've been able to do that in Seattle, with the Experience Music Project. Can they do something similar in the bay area? Maybe open a branch of the museum in SF.
I wonder if the Friends of KEXP did research and found that they already have listeners in the Bay area that stream KEXP. Just takes a good solid IP link from Seattle to transmitter in the Bay area and a good remote control. The EAS should already be in place.
Big question is what physical presence KEXP will make in the area and outreach.
Big question is what physical presence KEXP will make in the area and outreach.
Interesting reading about how KEXP became a hit in Seattle:
americancommunityradio.medium.com
KEXP IS PERFECTING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PEOPLE & MUSIC THAT MATTERS
On Sunday night, May 30th, I fell in love with KEXP, an independent noncommercial radio station that touches thousands of music fans in the…
americancommunityradio.medium.com
Even with its bad signal, KEXP still manages to make it across the Cascades occasionally. And I know of a few people in Ellensburg on the east side that listen to KEXP via stream.
Chances are most of their listeners who can't hear the OTA signal will just stream the station. Same would happen in Cali.
A lot of former KFOG listeners are willing to move heaven and earth just to stream another AAA station that suits their taste, so I think they will give 92.7 a go. The worse the signal, the more “underground” and interesting it might be to them.
I would like to see some stats on that - if they exist - particularly since there has been an OTA/streaming attempt at such a format, though absent of personalities, in the form of KOIT-HD2's "Highway 1 Radio".
My own suspicion is that the KFOG audience was beginning to skew old by the first decade of the 2000s, tending to appeal to the gray-ponytail crowd that's in its own San Francisco-Berkeley-Oakland bubble. When Cumulus moved away from the longstanding KFOG format, around 2015 or 2016, it obviously was an attempt to get younger listeners.
I think KEXP is slowly trying to shift its branding to be more neutral to location to cater to internet radio listeners, versus being localized to Seattle. They even host live sessions and shows from remote locales. If I had to guess, a fair number of KEXP donations come from outside of Seattle. I would guess they would run a small studio somewhere in San Francisco and will do remotes, or have one on-air personality based out of the city. I would also say that the $3.75 million is essentially an advertising fee for guaranteed listenership support. There are a ton of hipsters with disposable income in San Francisco, it's a great audience match.
If I had to guess, KEXP might try to take over operations of KCSN/KSBR in Los Angeles, as it was rumored the universities wanted to look for a third-party operator for the station. American Public Media previously had interest, which would have likely been a simulcast of The Current in Minneapolis. I wouldn't be surprised if Friends of KEXP continue to acquire stations across the U.S. on the cheap. It's essentially the K-Love model, pipe in the stream from a single studio and collect donations.
Probably the high elevations. Usually 92.5 gets overlapped by some mexican station from the Tri Cities in the Cascades around Mount Rainier and probably also around The Snoqualmie Pass.
Except KEXP isn’t on 92.5, and the radio station in question is on 92.7 and broadcasts from a site near the old candlestick park.
Street Novelist
Banned
God works in mysterious ways 🙏 😁
KEXP is on 90.3 and does get overlapped by KNWY Yakima (NWPB) east of the Cascades. Although there are a handful of locations east of the mountains with westward slopes where KNWY is blocked, allowing for KEXP to take over. KOLU 90.1 and KQBC 90.5 (both in Tri-Cities) are too weak that far west to cause any issues to KEXP.
In a similar fashion, KREV might be overlapped by other stations on the same channel such as KTOM Marina/Santa Cruz (and in HD) once you go south a certain point. There's KBEB in the Sacramento area on 92.5 which also transmits in HD. But if you're on a slope facing San Francisco, you may be able to null other stations and pick up KREV.
Keep in mind that KREV has had a lax engineering dept under Royce, who was more pre-occupied with lawsuits than signal. It will be interesting if the new ownership reviews the maps to see if there's a window to improve the signal.
There were two previous attempts to move the station from the apartment tower at Leavenworth and Green in Russian Hill. The first, in 2004, was apparently not pursued past a grant of the CP, and came before Flying Bear owned the station. The second, in 2008 for Flying Bear, was briefly in operation. Then-KNGY subsequently went back to Leavenworth and Green due to coverage issues, with that CP subsequently being cancelled as well. Both proposals were for a site at the Sutro tower; both were short-spaced to 93.3 (now KRZZ). The Hatfield & Dawson study in the 2008 application alludes to possible coverage concerns in Alameda, the city of license, and proposed an alternate method to demonstrate compliance with FCC requirements, which the staff accepted.
Stolz applied in 2013 to move the KREV transmitter site to the KSFB(AM) tower in southeastern San Francisco and adding a directional antenna. These are the current facilities. This proposal had compliant coverage of all of Alameda (70 dBµ contour) and continued short-spacing with KRZZ (which is pretty much unavoidable), which was allowed due to the short-spacing's existence in 1964 and before. A comparison with previous applications indicates that coverage of Marin County was curtailed as a result of this move. It also reduced theoretical coverage of the portions of Contra Costa County adjacent to the ridge separating Contra Costa and Alameda counties, but the important word there is "theoretical" since the ridge would block most reception anyway.
Any changes involving KREV would be tricky. Aside from the unavoidable short-spacing with KRZZ, there is a co-channel station in the Monterey Bay area with what's now minor overlap (KTOM-FM Marina, a B1 owned by iHeart); the old facility was short-spaced with that station. As a practical matter, the Santa Cruz mountains would have kept the stations from interfering with one another.
There are multiple possibilities here, all involving additional station acquisitions and thus money. Often, cash solves problems. Regardless of how this comes out, it is going to be very interesting to watch, even if from afar.
Last edited:
Maybe Vallejo or Benicia but I have my doubts, to be honest.
- Status