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940 ESPN Flip
- Thread starter ExKynoJox
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You may be thinking of 150 kw XEROK in Cd. Juárez, Chih., Mexico. That was X-Rock 80, non-directional and listenable at night all across the Southwest, from CA all the way to Louisiana except where there were US stations on 790 or 810 that blocked it.
Tijuana on 690 was never 100 kw. Due to US station KMPC on 710 and the 680 in San Francisco (KPO/KNBC/KNBR) they were always very directional and up to today are 50 kw night. More recently they got 77 kw daytime power, but both day and night signals had to protect a bunch of other stations as well as the Canadian border.
The current daytime 5 mV/m does cover all of the OC and most of the populated coastal areas of LA County up to about Malibu. At night, it skirts the coastal area up till the point where it hit by 50 kw CBU in Vancouver.
If you got as far inland as Palm Springs, it was pretty much gone at night and, of course, nearly inaudible in the daytime. Of course, back in the low noise era of the late 50's and 60's, the signal was usable in all of LA... as both a Top 40 station and as Gordon McLendon's "Extra News over Los Angeles", the first all news station serving a US market (and a copy of Radio Reloj in Havana, all news since 1948).
I would have loved this if I still lived in Bakersfield. Had a lot of fun listening to 1270 there. I wish they swap 790 to country now, keep the sports play-by-play but most of the day its just a wasted signal.
XETRA 690 was possibly one of the first AM Stereo stations in the world. For a while in the 60's, they used Leonard Kahn's Independent Sideband system. You simply took two similar AM radios and separated them by about 6 feat and just ever so slightly off-tuned the left hand radio to the left, and then ever so slightly off-tuned the right hand radio to the right. This system, although unbelievably crude and really impractical, actually worked! I remember my Dad setting this up and explaining it to me. I was just a kid then and although I had built a couple of radios and read books on how AM radio theory works I didn't really believe it. So I took two earpieces and plugged them into the radios, I was astonished, real stereo separation!
When AM stereo was first authorized by the FCC in the 80's one of the stations using the Kahn System here in Los Angeles was 1110 KRLA. (I didn't have AM stereo car radio the because I didn't have an extra $800 to buy one!) I thought it was fascinating when KRLA would play one of the early Beatles tunes which were mixed to have most of the music on the left channel and most of the vocals on the right, I could off-tune the station just enough either way to choose whether I wanted to hear the music, vocals or both, It was quite a novelty!
The Mighty 690 XETRA I heard it at night, sometimes Late Afternoon in Fresno and it came in perfect at Shaver Lake doing some camping, I remember the top 40 format in the 70s and early 80s, they played songs sooner than KYNO 1300, 96FM (95.7) & Magic K104, XETRA 690 played Motley Crue Looks that Kill in 1983, top 40 Radio was very limited in Fresno, we only had one station KKDJ 105.9 were at times their format was too wide, but this happened When The Boss 95 (94.9) Rock 40 change formats to AC Spring of 1983.
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Did you listen to the incomparable Wolfman Jack on the equally powerful 1090 XERB. He was really something!
Yes, I remember Wolfman Jack and 1090 very well, The Station in this thread 50,000 watts KYNO 940 carries his old shows, also wasn't that the station featured in the movie American Graffiti?
I believe the station in American Graffiti was actually KTRB 860 in Modesto if I remember correctly.
Pretty sure it was KRE in Berkeley where they filmed the scene with Wolfman if that's what you mean.
Dave B.
Hmm. A new researchable topic. I understood it was done at KAFY in Bakersfield because of the directional antenna you could see from the studio window.
FILMING LOCATIONS
Petaluma’s largest car show Cruisin’ the Boulevard salutes the movie American Graffiti with reenactments, stars and cars from the film
Petaluma's AG site says the external tower scene was their own (defunct) KTOB 1490, and that the interior scenes were at KRE/Berkeley.
I know that the cruising scenes of the movie was filmed in Modesto on McHenry Ave.
I grew up in San Diego from 1956-1970. Early on The Mighty 690 along with KCBQ and KDEO were favorite stations. I always got a kick out of The Mighty 690 and XTRA news claiming they serve all of LA. We would visit my aunt in Burbank back then. As we drove around the San Fernando Valley at anytime day or night, The Mighty 690 was not audible due to KMPC burying them. This was on any radio including the car. So much for covering all of LA. Lol It was along time ago. Why do I remember these things?
In the time period you're talking about, most AM radios sounded pretty good, and you could say some were almost high fidelity. The IF bandpass was wide enough to let a lot of the higher audio frequencies through at the expense of 2nd adjacent channel (20kHz away) rejection. Today's AM car radios are abysmal in terms of sound because they have nearly total adjacent channel rejection at the expense of listenable audio (band pass of maybe 4kHz). I'll bet if you drove through the valley with a typical AM car radio today, you'd be able to hear 690 with in a few blocks of 710. KSPN is at the corner of Burbank Blvd and Bellaire Ave in Van Nuys. (Another block it would be in North Hollywood).
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