God Bless KTRB...

[weav]

Don't be so sure that failing to ID at sign-on/sign-off is a violation anymore. I think the next (or previous, for sign-offs) TOH (or thereabouts) ID covers it.

Just for reference:

[section] 73.1201 Station identification.
(a) When regularly required. Broadcast
station identification announcements
shall be made:
(1) At the beginning and ending of
each time of operation, and
(2) Hourly, as close to the hour as
feasible, at a natural break in program
offerings. Television and Class A tele-
vision broadcast stations may make
these announcements visually or au-
rally.

 

[oldiesfan6479]

[section] 73.1201 Station identification.
(a) Broadcast station identification announcements shall be made:
(1) At the beginning and ending of each time of operation, and
(2) Hourly, as close to the hour as feasible, at a natural break in program offerings.

Thanks, weav! I was just going to look for good ol' 73.1201.

I'm sure Professor Fybush will back us up on the ID requirements.

Now as to what can be in a legal ID, aw geez... :

 

[BossRadioDJ]

The missed ID at sign-on was caused by a mistimed branch command. It has been fixed. Thanks.

John,

With all due respect, is the missed ID every time the station signs on or off a "mistimed branch command"? Back a few weeks ago, when the station was signing off every night after A's baseball by just cutting the power with no station ID of any kind (well, perhaps "Xtra Sports 860" was mentioned within a few minutes of the shut-down), was it a "mistimed branch command"? I'm guessing it wasn't.

Feel free to call me a jerk about this, but after it happened ten separate times over the past month or so, I quit counting. Yes, I'm the type of foamer that pays attention to stupid stuff like this -- I realize it matters 0% to anybody at the station or at the FCC -- but I'm guessing that at least a few of those times it had nothing to do with branch commands of any kind...

 

[danjache]

KTVU just had a short mention on the 10 o'clock news that the A's are trying to buy KTRB.

 

[OhioMediaWatch]

The A's wouldn't be the first team to buy a radio station...not even recently.

The St. Louis Cardinals are still majority owner of KTRS/550 there, even after they agreed to move the games back to long-time flagship KMOX/1120...

 

[SCV_Ears]

The A's wouldn't be the first team to buy a radio station...not even recently.

The St. Louis Cardinals are still majority owner of KTRS/550 there, even after they agreed to move the games back to long-time flagship KMOX/1120...

The A's have also parted company with long-time broadcasting director Robert Buan, as per a story in this morning Chron, partly because of the A's bunny-hops around the dial, partly because many of his pre- and post-game duties now being performed by Chris Townsend.

 

[BossRadioDJ]

The A's wouldn't be the first team to buy a radio station...not even recently.

The St. Louis Cardinals are still majority owner of KTRS/550 there, even after they agreed to move the games back to long-time flagship KMOX/1120...

A good example is Arte Moreno's KLAA (830 AM) down in Orange County, which is the flagship station of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (also owned by Moreno) and the NHL's Mighty Mallards. KLAA is also the Raiders' Southern California radio outlet.

 

[BossRadioDJ]

The A's have also parted company with long-time broadcasting director Robert Buan, as per a story in this morning Chron, partly because of the A's bunny-hops around the dial, partly because many of his pre- and post-game duties now being performed by Chris Townsend.

The Chronicle article (at least the version online) said nothing about "bunny-hops around the dial." Why would that be his fault?

 

[LKellerIII]

It seems to me that most of the As radio moves have been somewhat beyond their control. The team was on KSFO (simulcast with KYA days) for a number of years until the ownership changed, then moved to CBS and KFRC-AM where it stayed for years until CBS sold the station. Still with CBS, they were then affected by the 106.9 mess (not their fault) and switched to KTRB.

Perhaps I'm not fully informed, but it seems more like corporate radio "bunny hopping" than anything the team is responsible for.

 

[SFStatic]

Part of it is the A's fault. At one station, they gave up NO spots to the station inside games. That's a pretty poor deal for the station to lose all spots 5 hours a day for 5-6 months. The station didn't resign, of course. The next one down the line got a couple in-game spots in their deal. As with most teams, they are also very tough on the station as to advertisers...big restrictions on beer, auto, soda, and basically any type of client that would buy baseball. Those are pretty tightly reserved for the team themselves.

 

[BossRadioDJ]

Part of it is the A's fault. At one station, they gave up NO spots to the station inside games. That's a pretty poor deal for the station to lose all spots 5 hours a day for 5-6 months.

Would that be because, at the time, the team was a "good draw" on the radio? If the team's broadcasts are a magnet for listeners, I guess that's a good trade-off. Otherwise, it's a bad deal all around.

 

[SFStatic]

No matter how good a draw at the time, when you have regular advertisers that have spent 6 figure amounts with you who leave because they can't run any PM drive spots for 5 months at a time, you take a hit. All the cume in the world doesn't help if you can't run any spots in that portion of your broadcast day.

 

[BossRadioDJ]

I was chatting with Lenhockey a bit earlier when the question arose: if propane is so expensive, why didn't the KTRB brain trust install solar at the night-time site?

KGO runs 24/7 on solar, doesn't it?

 

[travisl5678]

I'd imagine that solar is a lot more expensive than a 15 dollar propane refill

 

[Lou_S]

I was chatting with Lenhockey a bit earlier when the question arose: if propane is so expensive, why didn't the KTRB brain trust install solar at the night-time site?

Because the KTRB brain trust realized the sun doesn't shine at night? You'd need to charge a whole lot of batteries to carry the transmitter through the dark hours.

KGO runs 24/7 on solar, doesn't it?

Not hardly. KGO's array produces about 12 kw/hr during peak hours - less when the sun is low in the sky, during cloudy or foggy weather, etc. And, of course, nothing all night long. The generated power is fed into the commercial grid and offsets PART of the transmitter site's utility bill.

A 50 Kw transmitter, no matter how efficient, consumes quite a bit more power than that. Not to mention tower lights, building air conditioning and ventilation, auxiliary equipment, etc. I'm guessing the KGO solar array offsets less than 1/10th of their power consumption.

http://www.solfocus.com/news_file/20080221124357_KGO Goes Solar 02 012 08-2.pdf[/url

 

[Mediaace]

I'm located in Pleasanton roughly 7 miles from their night time facility in Sunol and normally will pick them up on my toaster. My CC Radio Plus is picking up a foreign language (spanish?) music station very faintly. Definitely no sign of KTRB.

The propane cost during nighttime isn't an issue currently ... KTRB is essentially a daytimer right now -- unless they're running the station with the burners on low, and the nighttime signal just isn't drooling over the hills and reaching beyond Livermore.

If the station is on at night, I'm not hearing it.

 

[BossRadioDJ]

I'd imagine that solar is a lot more expensive than a 15 dollar propane refill

There goes Travis doing the funny again.

If it was a $15 propane refill, they wouldn't be signing off at 6:30 PM right now. I was guessing (wildly) from the Google Earth view of the KTRB night site that the thing that looks like a giant silver railroad tank car is their propane storage tank; they ain't running over to Raley's for a Blue Rhino to fire up the barbeque every afternoon.

ADD: Here's the view of the night site I'm refering to (I may be assuming incorrectly that the silver "tank" to the left of the transmitter building in the photo is for propane storage; it may not be a tank at all):

http://bayarearadio.org/ktrb/pix/ktrb_2010_night-xmtr-site.png

 

[Lou_S]

Yeah, there's a reason large trucks run on diesel instead of propane.

A 100 Kw propane generator uses about 28 gallons of liquid propane per hour (1000 cu ft. vapor) at 75% load.

If they're paying $3.00 per gallon delivered to the site, that's a kilobuck in fuel every 12 hours it's on the air.

By comparison, the diesel generator at KCBS used about 10 gallons per hour to run the DX-50 transmitter and auxiliary building loads.

Running nothing except the tower lights will reduce KTRB's propane consumption to about 4 gallons per hour.

 

[DanStrassberg]

Running nothing except the tower lights will reduce KTRB's propane consumption to about 4 gallons per hour.

There are no tower lights, unless there is an airport nearby. Since I'm 3000 miles away, I wouldn't know about the proximity of the site to airports. The towers in KTRB's night array are physically 60 degrees at 860 (190') and are top loaded to 81 degrees. Clearly, the use of short, heavily top-loaded towers was carefully calculated to avoid the need for illumination. And unless a nearby airport screwed up the idea, that is one aspect (one of very few aspects) of KTRB's night site that seems to have worked out according to plan.

 

[BossRadioDJ]

KGO's array produces about 12 kw/hr during peak hours - less when the sun is low in the sky, during cloudy or foggy weather, etc. And, of course, nothing all night long. The generated power is fed into the commercial grid and offsets PART of the transmitter site's utility bill.

So, essentially, the KGO solar operation reduces their power consumption off the grid, but the station doesn't really "run" on solar power. Considering that the KTRB site up in the hills is off the grid entirely, that makes my idea implausible. (I had also thought that you could "store" the electricity generated and use it on demand at night when needed.)

Basically, it sounds like KTRB's new owner(s) will need to move the night-time site to some other spot (preferably co-located with another station) unless they want to continue paying through the nose for propane...