KKOB, going back to KOB, went through years of litigation and filings and multiple frequencies to be on 770 with WABC. Maybe the FCC regards the license as a special case and they are allowed to keep the booster. I don't know that, but the station sure got kicked around for decades.
The most concise explanation of the KOB situation - though one that appears to have some errors - is in
KOB - Goddard's Magic Mast, 50 Years of Pioneer Broadcasting, by Ann Velia. It's at worldradiohistory.com, but I have a physical copy as well. Velia's explanation regarding the NARBA negotiations is at the start of Chapter 23 on page 170:
In that year (1934), and for the following two years, KOB was still an educational radio station. KOB did not send a representative to the conference, for it was felt the educational interests in Washington would see that KOB received a good channel assignment.
It took a number of years for the new allocations to be implemented. It wasn't until 1941 that KOB discovered that, through its sin of neglect, it had been left out entirely and had no wavelength assignment on which to operate!
Yeah, but.
Broadcasting, September 15, 1940, on page 14 in an article written by Sol Taishoff himself, reported:
The biggest single surprise was the assignment of KOB, Albuquerque, which holds a construction permit for 50,000 watts, from 1180 kc to 1030 kc. It was slated to operate on 1200 kc, with WCAU, Philadelphia. On 1030 it will use the same wave as WBZ-WBZA, Boston-Springfield. Thus WCAU retains clear-channel status, unduplicated, while WBZ-WBZA, which are synchronized, get a treaty-defined I-B status.
In the process, KOB was downgraded to class II status. If KOB had not found about this until 1941, as Velia wrote, the station management, at the very least, wasn't paying attention. And, apparently, KOB had been accounted for. The explanation offered in the quote from her book seems just a bit fishy.
Velia went on in the chapter to write extensively about the interference complaints that resulted, quoting station documentation, so I tend to believe what she wrote about that.
When the SSA for 770 kHz was issued (October 14, 1941 per FCC history cards; actually implemented on November 3, 1941 according to KOB advertising in the Albuquerque
Journal and the Albuquerque Tribune) it was spun in the local papers as an improvement in dial position. It undoubtedly was that, but other motivations weren't made clear in the articles that I've found.
The sequence of frequencies in 1941 was 1180 → 1030 → 770, just two frequency changes. So there wasn't a lot of shifting around but I'm sure there was a lot of nail-biting, especially given that a brand-new 50,000-watt transmitter (which began operating July 9 of that year according to
Broadcasting) was in the mix.
The SSAs for 50 kw day, 25 kw night on 770 were renewed again and again until 1957. In 1956, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against Time-Life, KOB's owner at the time, and the commission ordered KOB to install a nighttime directional antenna. KOB got it installed and operational in just under seven months, according to the FCC history cards.
After Hubbard bought KOB radio and TV in 1957, it continued to pursue relief through the 1960s and 1970s but those efforts ultimately came to an end.
The irony here is that nighttime coverage over far-flung distances became less and less important. In the end, KOB came out pretty well with the deal, especially with daytime coverage, with the main remaining problem being nighttime coverage in Santa Fe, which is about 60 miles northeast of Albuquerque and thus in the nighttime null. It could be received in Santa Fe at night, but it was a noisy signal, with phase shifts making it hard to listen to. KOB's real stroke of luck, though, was being in a city that never seemed to stop growing until about 15 years ago. Santa Fe coverage may have been of some importance just to show that the broader market was being covered...and, as sparsely populated as the state of New Mexico is, every person counts...but Albuquerque is what made it prosper. The KKOB booster is icing on the cake.
