KVEN-AM Ventura

[davideduardo]

I'm glad it worked for you. 50 years ago

I found locations that were flat and moist, right at the bottom of hills or on "páramo" (Terreno llano, yermo, desabrigado, y generalmente elevado.) type plains at high altitudes. And I built towers, not inverted "L" antennae.

1500kHz in Burbank did that and it was a disaster. 10kw yielding 500 watt coverage by day and uncontrollable skywave at night. KSTP in the Twin Cities got the FCC to make them drop their night power to a kw.

1500's bad coverage was due to having a half-dozen towers protecting things like KWIZ in Santa Ana and 1520 in Port Hueneme and 1510 out in Ontario. The problem was not the site, it was the directional system and being on 1500.

My wife was on the air there when it was rented by Teddy Fregoso and was sharing the same (cough, cough from the "smoke") building with the FM. She lived in the Hollywood area south of Melrose at the time, and could not hear it in her apartment near the Wilshire Country Club. In fact, she was a little uncertain of where it actually could be heard, although around Hanson Dam it did come in well.

Presumably that's partly due to the fact that virtually the entire Spanish speaking market has migrated to FM. At one time 910 KOXR had a large audience but no more except for Dodger Baaeball.

But KOXR pretty much died three decades ago when FM began to serve the market. Hispanics, who are much younger than the general population, went to FM very rapidly. In many nations of Latin America, the AM band has lost 50% or more of its stations. Mexico declared AM to be "dead" and allowed about 80% of all of the stations to migrate to FM.

In Ecuador, only one of the 10 AMs I owned at one time is still on the air.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

I think you mean a 10kw FM. You would not put an AM station on top of a tall mountain. The relatively long wave length (compared to FM) of an AM station requires a good ground plane f

or maximum coverage

you missed and ignored my point... the community stations could in no way afford a full power station

 

[K.M. Richards]

I know I'm late in replying here, but I was offline at RD until just last week. (Long story.)

The story here is shorter but not sweeter. Having checked with a few long-time radio people I still know in Ventura (that's my hometown market and I grew up less than a mile from Tower Square), those who surmised that Cumulus did not own the KVEN tower site are correct. In fact, that parcel was sold before Cumulus even acquired 1450 (the McDonald Group moved the studios to a new office building only a few blocks away when they bought it and KHAY in 1996, selling the old building and the land underneath).

There was a long-term lease for the towers in effect, with KVEN using the south tower and wireless using the north. The STL for KHAY was also on the north tower before McDonald). But the lease was ending, all the north tower tenants had relocated long ago, and the whole area around Tower Square has been developed into a huge industrial park. (Back when I grew up, everything south of Market St. was agricultural!)

As is already well-known, KVEN was close to being a non-entity in the market. Outside of the Dodgers games, it was 24/7 CBS Sports Radio and had been since 2013, following a couple of years running ESPN Radio. There were no viable options for them to diplex 1450, as there are only 910 Oxnard, 1400 Santa Paula, 1520 Port Hueneme and 1590 Ventura on AM. All but 1400 are multi-tower directionals and 1400 is on a short stick due to its proximity to the Santa Paula municipal airport. I'm sure it would have been more than the station was worth to try to keep it on the air.

And the towers came down less than a week after KVEN went silent, which proves the above. I'm sure that by this time next year there will be a brand-new office building occupying Tower Square.

What is sad is that, given that KVEN was the first AM in Ventura County (signed on in March 1948 from its original transmitter site in Pierpont Bay), the local newspaper (Ventura County Star) didn't rate its passing or the towers' removal as worthy of even a mention in print. And yes, it happened less than three years from what could have been its 75th anniversary ... not that I think Cumulus would have done anything to mark the occasion.

As for keeping the historic call letters ... they hadn't been prominently used since the switch to Oldies as "The Boomer" back in 2000 under the late Lee Marshall. "KVEN" has no residual value, I am sorry to say.

 

[Frequency1]

The KVEN towers on Market Street are still up.

 

[K.M. Richards]

I was misinformed, then. I was told they had been removed a few days after 1450 went silent.

 

[Joey1986]

Not sure if this observation I just made is relevant to this thread or warrants its own, but I just saw on Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) that the KVEN call letters have resurfaced on AM 1520, formerly KKZZ. Here’s the link to the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVEN#KUNX/KKZZ

I looked on Radio-Locator and found that, despite still being listed as KKZZ in the search results, it says that the station adopted the KVEN calls on May 20, 2022. Here’s the link to R-L.

Radio-Locator.com

Radio Station Search Engine

radio-locator.com

 

[TomásEstefan]

Not sure if this observation I just made is relevant to this thread or warrants its own, but I just saw on Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) that the KVEN call letters have resurfaced on AM 1520, formerly KKZZ. Here’s the link to the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVEN#KUNX/KKZZ

I looked on Radio-Locator and found that, despite still being listed as KKZZ in the search results, it says that the station adopted the KVEN calls on May 20, 2022. Here’s the link to R-L.

Radio-Locator.com

Radio Station Search Engine

radio-locator.com

Glad the calls have been resurrected,,, it would be a shame if those calls were used somewhere outside VC.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Nice to see that Cumulus kept the heritage calls in the market where they have always been.

The funny thing is that when the KKZZ call letters were on a FM in Lancaster, I was the 24/7 imaging voice for its Beautiful Nusic format for a couple of years in the 1980s.