KLIL 94.5
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
KCBS was Off Air for about 15 Minutes Last Tuesday Afternoon
- Thread starter cc333
- Start date
That's half the answer. When?
dilapidated is certainly an exaggeration, but I do remember moss and brown/black staining on the building — it looks like I can pull in and snap some pictures on foot without stepping on private property, so I’ll do that this weekend, and find a reason to head over to Union City or Fremont (if anyone has a suggestion feel free to theow it my way!)
There's a decent Walmart in Union City, right off the Nimitz (I-880), if you need some cheap clothing or household staples. Somewhere in Fremont is the dead carcass of a Fry's Electronics. Other than those, can't think of anything that's not available closer.
Many fair-to-weak AM signals fade away in the mountains, due to poor conductivity of the rocks/soil. That poor conductivity is also why AM towers are rarely built on mountain-tops.
No, the solar array doesn't even come close. It was a "feel good" project that gave progressive (liberal) people passing by the impression that KGO was "green". Literally, that's it.
The panel array that moves is actually pretty amazing. Each panel is a large lens of sorts that focuses all the light energy into a small area and onto a PV element that runs at a temperature of several hundred degrees. If you look right into it with sunglasses on, the collector itself is only a couple inches in diameter.
That array was made by the failed Solindra (sp?) plant nearby. It was funded by some federal grant of some kind. My involvement was merely assisting my friend who was C.E. , and it was a long time ago, so my details may be incorrect.
The panel array that moves is actually pretty amazing. Each panel is a large lens of sorts that focuses all the light energy into a small area and onto a PV element that runs at a temperature of several hundred degrees. If you look right into it with sunglasses on, the collector itself is only a couple inches in diameter.
That array was made by the failed Solindra (sp?) plant nearby. It was funded by some federal grant of some kind. My involvement was merely assisting my friend who was C.E. , and it was a long time ago, so my details may be incorrect.
Found this old article in Radio World:
www.radioworld.com
Looks like it was about 17kw. Not nearly enough to power the transmitter and not a lot by today's standards. But it was 2008.
Dave B.
KGO Flips the Solar Switch
Station to Be PG&E Incubator for Other Solar Power Efforts
www.radioworld.com
Looks like it was about 17kw. Not nearly enough to power the transmitter and not a lot by today's standards. But it was 2008.
Dave B.
It was. That's what the "O" stands for.
In my ten years at KOL AM/FM, we did all our regular maintenance Sunday night between midnight and 4am. Unscheduled issues, on the other hand, were dealt with as required. That was then, when we had staffs, including a full time on-site Chief Engineer. In today's world, I doubt if very many stations get any "scheduled" maintenance.
As a kid who got into radio as a DXer, I loved Sunday night / Monday morning as nearly every station went off the air at midnight, allowing to hear marvelous catches in Ohio. KRKO, KVI, KOL, KGW, and many others.... even some 500 watters from the Pacific Coast and even a 250 watter from Hawai'i.
But when I owned stations in the later 60's, I did my work on Saturday night starting around 1 AM on Sunday. The next day was not a workday, and I figured I would lose fewer "working" overnight listeners from factories, services and the like. I never understood why Sunday night / Monday morning was picked almost universally.
And there was a time when nearly every frequency would be totally silent after midnight in each station's time zone. By 4 AM, we could hear the stations to the East like Argentina, Brazil and Puerto Rico signing on before any of our locals came back on.
Sure, but what was theorized that the reason KCBS was down for a few minutes, was because they hadn't done Sunday night maintenance. Actually, because something about the GM requiring Sunday night maintenance. One of the stranger theories I've ever read on this site.
When I was at KCBS from the late 80s to mid 90s we had a maintenance period every Saturday night to Sunday morning, not the traditional Sunday-Monday, There were just some things with the DA that required downtime. When we re-built the plant in 1989-1990 we included two non-DA modes which meant there were very few things that couldn't be done while the station was on the air. That along with very quick pattern and transmitter switching made daytime maintenance acceptable to the powers that be.
Why Saturday/Sunday maintenance instead of the more traditional Sunday night/Monday morning? The official reason was it allowed us to reduce weekend staffing by one person. Unofficially if something went south and we couldn't get back on the air cancelling part of the Sunday morning PSA programs caused a lot fewer headaches than cutting into Monday morning drivetime.
Why Saturday/Sunday maintenance instead of the more traditional Sunday night/Monday morning? The official reason was it allowed us to reduce weekend staffing by one person. Unofficially if something went south and we couldn't get back on the air cancelling part of the Sunday morning PSA programs caused a lot fewer headaches than cutting into Monday morning drivetime.
Last edited:
I used to do maintenance once a week, also. But I picked Sunday morning after 2 AM as that was my perception of when listening was lowest. To verify, I talked with a number of cab drivers and they told me that about 2 AM to around 5 AM on Sunday there were few rides... and those might be medical emergencies and the like.
I'd rotate my transmitter sites and the studios. One week, the FM site and then back to the FM studios until about 6 AM. Next week, the two diplexed AMs. The following was one of the two stand-alone AMs and the 4th week was the other single-station AM site.
For those not aware of the issues with gear in that era, I had to check the cooling fans, then check relays for "spotting" and then measure anything that could be indicative of a change, like voltages on certain pins of tube sockets. Usually, at least every 60 days, check the finals and modulators and any good modulator that looked "soft" became a final. I'd run the generator and test the transfer, check the line voltage regulator and other stuff.
Then I'd run by a bakery near the station offices and studios and buy fresh loaves of bread, get an empty can full of coffee and run to the studio to have breakfast with the staff who would run the 6 AM shift.
There were plenty of times that spotting something that was about to fail avoided a "prime time" failure. I had no auxiliary transmitters, so keeping the main on the air was critical.
Today, you can just pull a board out of the transmitter, put in another, all while on the air.
One other factor that you probably had to consider when it came to maintaining availability were earthquakes, which tended to happen in the middle of the night, especially if the Hayward Fault was involved. There would be a shake somewhere along the fault; we would wake up, turn on KCBS, and, within a couple of minutes there would be a brief story. Then some of the KCBS reporters would call in and go on the air, and maybe a few listeners would be put on the air as well. I can’t count the number of times that Holly Quan was awakened by one of these earthquakes in the 2 am or 3 am hour and would be the first to call in, with the anchor on duty putting her on the air. Someone unfamiliar with the Bay Area might consider that duplicative, but, given that I lived a mile from the fault, I found it reassuring. Over a quarter-century in Oakland, I never was in a bad quake, but we were always told that it was just a matter of time before a really bad one. In any event, KCBS always was ready.
Unfortunately, I'm not so sure that would be true anymore.
Before about 10 years ago, it seemed higher quality and more local (they're still among the relative few stations that have a decent local presence with good coverage, but they used to be even better).
c
Earthquakes never really affected the transmitter sites. The exception was the Loma Prieta quake and that was only because we were in the middle of rebuilding the Novato site, including replacing all 4 towers. We had one new and 3 old towers up when the quake hit and they all came through just fine. Guyed towers are flexible enough to ride out a quake, unlike KGO's self-supporters that buckled in the middle.
The issue was we were about to chop down the 3 remaining old towers and the night before the quake we rigged up a temporary non-D ATU in the tuning house at the base of the new tower and we were running at 12.5 Kw through it. I got to the site about 20 minutes after the quake and found the ATU about to fall off it's shelf. It was kind of exciting to push it back into place and secure it while the station was on the air.
The next morning, after talking to our engineering consultant I did take the station off the air for 60 seconds to pull apart a transmission line flange and move the transmitter feedline to the phasor to go back to 25 Kw DA using the 3 other towers.
Last edited:
Just so the record is clearer, not all three of KGO's towers collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake. As I recall, one of the towers rode out the quake with no damage, another did catastrophically buckle in the middle, and the third had some lesser amount of damage. IIRC, they were able to get the station back on the air at 10KW ND with emergency STA either that night or the next morning from the one unaffected tower.
Really? What harm is this doing?
This is a San Francisco forum, after all. The relevance of the discussion is pretty clear.
This is your absolute final warning.
YOU ARE NOT A MODERATOR.
If the discussion here isn't the way you'd like it you be going, your options are to use the "report post" tool, use the "ignore poster" function, or just accept that not everything that happens on this site is going to comport with your very specific preferences.
You have spent a lot of time here lately critiquing other posters, which is against the terms of service you agreed to when you joined the site.
Your historical knowledge is of great value here, and I would hate to lose that portion of your contributions here, but the rules here are very simple and you seem to have a real problem following them.
Are you sharing something you know that's of value to other users? Great. Please do more of that.
Are you criticizing another user or trying to control the way the discussions here are run? That's not acceptable and you WILL lose your posting privileges.