The KWKR Garden City board was a Harris Micro Mac. 1983 vintage. Designed as a TV sound board, it was much more than we needed for radio. But it sure looked cool with all those lights. Especially at night. The engineer hated it though because every one of those channels had a separate "on" and "off" light. It burned through bulbs like crazy!
During the time Harris Enterprises owned them, KWKR ran 61,300 watts ERP. The deal was that they could NOT have an FM station in Garden City, due to the fact they owned KIUL and The Garden City Telegram (newspaper.) The FCC defined a "Garden City" station as having a 3.16 mV/m (city grade) signal contour inside the Garden City city limits. This is why KWKR was licensed to Leoti, why the "main studio" was in Leoti, and why they had such an unusual power output. The system was set up for 100kW ERP, but backed down to the exact point where the 3.16mV/m contour would fall just outside the NW city limits of Garden City. When Harris sold KWKR, the new owners simply turned up the transmitter to full output.
As an aside, not having a city grade signal in Garden City was a REAL pain to deal with! The signal was fine in cars and solid in most houses. But get anywhere near concrete and steel and you couldn't hear it. For starters, this meant we could not hear the station inside the Garden City studios, except for the air monitor (which was connected to a 6 element FM yagi on the utility tower, pointed at the Lydia transmitter site. The other big problem was doing remotes. No signal inside any of the stores at Garden City plaza which was then the big shopping complex in town. It took 2 people to do a remote: one to be on-the-air and another to stand outside, monitor the station, and give a visual cue through the window when you were live. Although it was worth it because Harris paid $10 per hour for remotes...which was BIG money for a small-market jock in 1984-85!
I never got to the transmitter site. Although we *did* all broadcast from Leoti for a week once. That was after one of our part timers dumped an entire large Dart In cup of soda pop into the Mirco Mac. Fun times, driving 120 miles round trip to work each day. Needless to say, the engineer wasn't too happy, either!
