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KKOB proposes downgrade

Mark Roberts

Mark Roberts

KKOB is giving up on its Alameda site on the north side of Albuquerque after the balloon crash that took down its main tower last year. It has filed for a CP to diplex* with co-owned KTBL southwest of Albuquerque near the Pajarito neighborhood. Under the proposal, while KKOB will continue with 50 kw daytime non-directional, it will do so from an antenna height of 53.5° rather than the 180° of the former tower.

Nighttime power would go down to 5 kw, directional to the southwest. The Santa Fe synchronous booster apparently will remain. I would anticipate that both daytime and nighttime coverage would be reduced from what they were before the previous KKOB tower was destroyed. I suspect that daytime coverage would be reduced even from the present temporary operation using the 90° tower that had been used only at night.

It's worth noting that KKOB has simulcasted on FM for five years.

While not entirely surprising that KKOB would choose to downgrade instead of rebuild, given today's economic circumstances for radio, it's still sad to see such a historic facility end up diminished.

Full details: Draft Copy « Licensing and Management System « FCC

* = technically, triplexing, since KOAZ is also on the KTBL array.
 
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. With a nighttime power of 5 kW, the most powerful nighttime station in new Mexico becomes KCKN in Roswell :)

Is this also a case where the real estate in Albuquerque is more valuable then keeping up a 50 kW signal?
 
K6JHU said:
Is this also a case where the real estate in Albuquerque is more valuable then keeping up a 50 kW signal?
Click to expand...

Knowing a little about this issue, since I consult/program a cluster in that market, it's more that the cost of replicating the original tower array was excessive for a station which has a good chunk of its audience listening on FM.
 
K6JHU said:
Is this also a case where the real estate in Albuquerque is more valuable then keeping up a 50 kW signal?
Click to expand...
It is a case where 5 kw on 770 covers the Metro Survey Area well enough to be viable. And the FM is the "bread winner" as K.M. says.
 
I live 20 miles from KKOB. I get a listenable signal during the day on AM. But not all that great at night. At 5 kW it will disappear completely for me. I say that because the 5 kW signal on 610 is gone at night.
 
K6JHU said:
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. With a nighttime power of 5 kW, the most powerful nighttime station in new Mexico becomes KCKN in Roswell :)
Click to expand...
Which took long enough to get back up to full strength. I was in Carlsbad 10 years ago and KCKN was either off the air entirely or at very lower power, too low to reach Carlsbad. It took several years after that for KCKN to get back up to 50 kw.

K6JHU said:
Is this also a case where the real estate in Albuquerque is more valuable then keeping up a 50 kW signal?
Click to expand...
In a moment of MBA-driven brillance, Cumulus sold off all the tower sites it owned to Vertical Bridge several years. The main benefit for Cumulus now is simply to have one less site to pay rent on.
 
davideduardo said:
It is a case where 5 kw on 770 covers the Metro Survey Area well enough to be viable. And the FM is the "bread winner" as K.M. says.
Click to expand...
I'm not so sure about Sandoval County. But it hardly matters; there's been an FM simulcast from the Crest since early 2020.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Ironically (for me, at least), KKOB is on the same translator (K233CG) that KRKE was on in 2014-15 when Don Davis let me run an early version of The Eighties Channel™ on it for 14 months.
Click to expand...
It's now rebroadcasting KTBL as "94.5 The Pit", active rock. "The Pit" is a reference to the University of New Mexico athletics stadium.
 
Mark Roberts said:
It's now rebroadcasting KTBL as "94.5 The Pit", active rock. "The Pit" is a reference to the University of New Mexico athletics stadium.
Click to expand...

Right. I forgot that ... which there is no excuse for since the change in call letters on 96.3 to KKOB-FM and the move of the simulcast happened over five years ago.

Brain freeze.
 
While there was a time when KKOB's 50kW night signal would have been needed throughout much of the west, those days are gone. There's now a station in Manteca, California, blocking KKOB-AM from that area; and another in Miles City, MT, blocking KKOB from that area. And while the Lafayette, Louisiana station has discontinued broadcasting altogether, you still have the 24-hours-a-day broadcasts from Garland, TX. Finally, there is the directional 50kW station licensed to Seattle, WA, on the 770 frequency.

So yes, the battle's over for KKOB!
 
ted chittenden said:
While there was a time when KKOB's 50kW night signal would have been needed throughout much of the west, those days are gone.
Click to expand...
Before KOB got permission to move to 770, there were fulltime 50 kw non-directional stations KSL and KOA, serving... better... that area of the country.

KOB was in a relatively small market with limited resources, and never really attempted to serve anything but its immediate area of New Mexico.
 
davideduardo said:
Before KOB got permission to move to 770, there were fulltime 50 kw non-directional stations KSL and KOA, serving... better... that area of the country.

KOB was in a relatively small market with limited resources, and never really attempted to serve anything but its immediate area of New Mexico.
Click to expand...
The picture is actually somewhat more complex, since the station was actually based in Las Cruces at New Mexico State University until 1932. After Goddard's station literally bit the hand that created it, there were arrangements for a while with an El Paso newspaper for broadcasts. This raised alarms up north about a potential move to Texas, and the Albuquerque Journal stepped in to offer to run the station if it was moved to Albuquerque, and so it was done after FRC approval. All this is in Goddard's Magic Mast, chapter 20.
 
Mark Roberts said:
The picture is actually somewhat more complex, since the station was actually based in Las Cruces at New Mexico State University until 1932. After Goddard's station literally bit the hand that created it, there were arrangements for a while with an El Paso newspaper for broadcasts. This raised alarms up north about a potential move to Texas, and the Albuquerque Journal stepped in to offer to run the station if it was moved to Albuquerque, and so it was done after FRC approval. All this is in Goddard's Magic Mast, chapter 20.
Click to expand...
Las Cruces, El Paso, Albuquerque are all small markets and could not invest in programming like Denver and SLC. 50 kw or not, this was not a "regional service" other than New Mexico and some small border areas.
 
davideduardo said:
Las Cruces, El Paso, Albuquerque are all small markets and could not invest in programming like Denver and SLC. 50 kw or not, this was not a "regional service" other than New Mexico and some small border areas.
Click to expand...
Nonetheless, in my travels around the intermountain west decades ago, the then KOB had a very nice nighttime signal throughout the region. I recall it booming into the Yellowstone area in the late 1960s, for example.
 
davideduardo said:
Before KOB got permission to move to 770, there were fulltime 50 kw non-directional stations KSL and KOA, serving... better... that area of the country.

KOB was in a relatively small market with limited resources, and never really attempted to serve anything but its immediate area of New Mexico.
Click to expand...

Maybe. But I have to tell you. Between 1972 and 1976, I attended the boarding school for the deaf and blind in Tucson, AZ. Most of the other visually impaired students were native American (Navajo with a springling of Hopi and Apache) and many of them lived on the desolate tribal lands in northeastern Arizona. When I asked them about radio, nearly all of them said that KOB was the one radio station they could receive consistently day and night on the reservation. That would all change in the 1980s with the arrival of KTNN at 660 kHz but prior to that, KOB was king in that area of the country.
 
It seems like the new tower/nighttime downgrade is now in effect.

In the NE Heights, the dBu for 770 on my Qodosen DX-286 went from the low-mid 90s down to the high 60s/low 70s, with the highest signal strength now to the SW, rather than the NW. The signal is now noticeably noisier.
 


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