Why would they?
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560
- Thread starter K108 Sacramento
- Start date
As a purely technical matter, I'm sure it is possible to transmit a signal on 560 from the 810 towers.
As a business matter, it seems very unlikely. There is no authorization from the FCC to build such a diplex, and there's no business reason for Cumulus to invest in a station with no advertisers and no format.
It was just a question about if it could be done, not asking why they would want to do it.
We can solve this 560 issue very easily:
Give the license to Kaylee Lynn Stein.
…if nothing else, just to see how a person who has desired for years for a cheap radio/TV station would run it. STA for programming running out of a Mr Microphone (or Talking House) transmitter.
…and for the inevitable application running 500kW several miles off of Stinson Beach…with multiple floating towers of course…
Give the license to Kaylee Lynn Stein.
…if nothing else, just to see how a person who has desired for years for a cheap radio/TV station would run it. STA for programming running out of a Mr Microphone (or Talking House) transmitter.
…and for the inevitable application running 500kW several miles off of Stinson Beach…with multiple floating towers of course…
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
There's a name we haven't seen in a while. I suspect that the FCC programmed LMS to reject any filing by her. @Michi can tell the entire story of that poor insane soul (if she wants to).
I suspect the lease was a minor factor at most.
I'll stick with the theory I described in post #845:
"Since this is an illiquid market, the value of one's other properties are only as good as the last sale price for a comparable property. Cumulus could have offered 560 for sale for, say, ten dollars, but then imagine what that would have done to the value of its other AM properties, not exactly elevated to begin with."
(560)
Note also the language in the explanatory exhibit for the tardy September STA for KZAC:
"Now that RLH is negotiating a purchase contract, it hopes to clear up its operation status and resume service in the near future."
It's possible that Cumulus was engaging in wishful thinking with that statement. I certainly don't know what the state of play with the station was at the time. But it's also entirely possible that Cumulus did have a willing buyer lined up, but that buyer would not come up with an offer that Cumulus deemed sufficient. It may have appeared that Cumulus was in a position where it might take a lowball offer, but, even back in September, the processes may already have been in place for Cumulus to do another prepackaged bankruptcy filing with debtor-in-possession financing. Counterintuitively, that could have given Cumulus a stronger negotiating position. It clearly did not want the station. It knew that it could surrender the license with few consequences. Whatever cash it would have gotten for KZAC would have been orders of magnitude smaller than the DIP financing was going to provide. The party on the other side of the proposed transaction wouldn't have known any of those things. It would have thought that Cumulus was more eager to sell.
There's a concept in negotiation tactics known as BATNA: the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In Cumulus' case, that was shutting down KZAC and (most likely) surrendering the license.
For all we know, there could have been other offers that were low. No doubt there are bottom feeders out there. But imagine if one of those lowball offers had been taken. It already feels as if the dam has burst for relinquishing AM licenses. The inrushing flood would have even gotten stronger. It would be like a run on a bank. It would also have devalued the AM-heavy San Francisco cluster more than it already has been.
I freely admit that this is speculation. Those who know the actual decision process aren't talking. Cumulus is going private, so we may never find out. We'll just see Cumulus (and others) surrender more AM licenses whenever there's a need to throw off more weight from a sinking ship.
Edit: to make corrections to reflect that the currently active silent STA was filed in September, not August. That STA gave an August date for when KZAC went silent, and the FCC accepted that prima facie.
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Maybe. There are only four tower leases in the bankruptcy, and this is one of them. Canceling a lease is a big deal. It says to me that it's a longterm lease that has little wiggle room. I suspect the lease cost them a possible sale. By canceling the lease, it allows them to move forward with whatever they're going to do with the license. If they turned it in, that likely wouldn't absolve them of paying the lease.
On the other hand, the Port of San Francisco didn't renew KEST's lease of its site 12 years ago. KEST ended up relocating with KSFB (originally KYA) with some decrease in coverage. The Port may be perfectly happy to see KZAC go, for whatever reason. There are numerous Port planning documents online. Currently, the Pier 94 area has multiple uses, primarily support of material shipments used to make concrete, but there is restoration of a wetland and a park as well, and the site was recently used for RVs to house the homeless. Future plans include using the area for staging wind-turbine components. Nowhere in any planning documents that I have found are the KSFO/KZAC towers mentioned.
This also jogged my memory. A long time ago, a few months after I moved to San Francisco, I had a whole bunch of cardboard moving boxes that were too much for my apartment's recycling service (Sunset Scavengers then, now Recology). So I had to drive out to Pier 96, next to Pier 94, to the recycling center there. Though I never left the city limits of San Francisco, it felt like the middle of nowhere out there.
Among the documents:
https://www.sfport.com/files/2024-02/20240209-waterfront_plan_quick_reference_guide.pdf (especially page 44)
https://www.sfport.com/sites/default/files/032216_Piers 80-96 Strategy.pdf (an older document)
Plus a map of the area with some detail: https://mapcarta.com/23110950 (watch out for the pop-up ads) -- edit: this may be a better site with less crap on it: Piers 96 and 94 | The Center for Land Use Interpretation (second edit: I put this link in the wrong place. Fixed.)
Hopefully, the KZAC lease will be part of the exhibits entered with the bankruptcy court, so we can see costs, lease duration, etc.
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You should have seen China Basin before they built the ballpark.
I got there just as they were finishing up Pacific Bell Park and the Ferry Building was still being renovated. I worked just a short walk away for the better part of 20 years and witnessed the Manhattanization of South of Market. It made some things better, some things worse.
I was at Candlestick for a game during the Giants' last season there in 1999. That also felt like the middle of nowhere. I wondered why anyone would ever have built anything out there. Then the fog rolled in shortly after 4 o'clock. Then I really thought that was an insane place to build a ballpark.
Moving from Chicago, where there were still quite a few attractive choices on AM radio, I found that, in San Francisco, only KCBS was worth my time (on AM). I also had to adjust to KCBS's slower pace compared to WBBM. The news wheels were mostly the same, which helped. But, aside from KCBS, all my listening went to FM.
Because this was the era (1960) where the thought was you needed enough land to park 12,000 cars, they went for the biggest plot of undeveloped land they could ---Candlestick Point.
The real trouble with Candlestick was wind. Even a light breeze off the bay once the sun was at your back felt like wintertime. Going to a game on a 75-degree day? Take a ski jacket with you.
As for fog, Kezar Stadium (the 49ers old home) was worse. It was (and in its current form still is) at the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park---essentially at the end of a funnel for fog coming off the Pacific. Games had to be paused for visibility. They moved to Candlestick in 1971.
Was Candlestick that much colder than PacBell? I went to a Giant games at PacBell in April a few years back, and me and my colleagues left early due to the cold/damp.
Yeah. A lot. PacBell (now Oracle) can be chilly (it's SF), but it doesn't have the breeze/wind problem Candlestick had.
Back a while ago, my wife spent some time working for the mayor of San Francisco. (It was Mayor Frank Jordan, so the less said about that, the better.) But one of the (few) perks was that once a year, each departmental team got to have a "team-building" outing to a Giants game in Candlestick Park, with spouses if available, and they could use the Mayor's Box. It was an afternoon game on a warm sunny day, but at 3 pm the wind became intense enough that we needed to close the sliding windows before we were all blown onto the field. That place was a design nightmare that made Shea Stadium look good by comparison. PacBell/SBC/AT&T/Oracle (/Paramount-Skydance-Ellison?) Park is heaven compared to the Stick.
When I was about 10, my aunt and uncle took me to a Giants game and all I remember about it is I was so cold that I was shivering.
I have some things I could say about the former Mayor London Breed (what a name!), but I won't say them here because it would probably be too political.
So suffice it to say that, so far, the current Mayor is doing a much better job (in my opinion) of staying relatively low key and focusing on actually doing his job without a bunch of PR theater.
c
And he has the (somewhat rare in politics) ability to actually admit when he's made a mistake.
That’s something to take up with her parents, isn’t it? Her mom was Priscilla Breed.