Today around 5:30pm I heard 860AM on the air with someone interviewing a former race car driver. No ID, no commercials, nothing. Just the interview. It was off by 6:00 before the legal ID.
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What was KTRB doing on the air?
- Thread starter Tom_KYA1260
- Start date
When did KTRB go off the air for good??
They're on when they can use the day site. This month that would be 'till 5:45. More info here;
http://www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/srsstime?dlat=37&mlat=37&slat=57.00&dlon=122&mlon=7&slon=47.00&tzone=D
I hear they're also on when they have something important to do at night. Like a live game or something. But I haven't caught it to confirm that fact.
Dave B.
http://www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/srsstime?dlat=37&mlat=37&slat=57.00&dlon=122&mlon=7&slon=47.00&tzone=D
I hear they're also on when they have something important to do at night. Like a live game or something. But I haven't caught it to confirm that fact.
Dave B.
They have been on in the evening this last week to cover Stanford basketball. They are on days from their shared site with KFAX, putting out a very good signal, and still hanging in there. At night they cover the East Bay and Peninsula from the old site, but the signal is not so great elsewhere. As far as I know they still run with reduced power at night, due to generator problems at the old transmitter location (on those occasions when they do stay on).
KBOS1965 said:
Seems odd that you would refer to the night site as the _old_ site. There has been a lot of speculation here about KTRB moving to a different site at night due to the cost of trucking in propane daily. Also, KTRB has gotten an STA to reduce its night power from 50 kW to 20 kW because of generator problems, but for better or worse, the night site near Livermore (the one with the propane generator that allegedly is out of order and the temporary Diesel generator), is the ONLY licensed (or applied for) night site. To avoid confusion, I think you should refer to this as the licensed night site or the Livermore site, or use the name of the community that is even closer to the site than Livermore is but whose name I have forgotten.
M
mort guffman
Guest
Sell it for the scrap metal......
Will they be on nights for A's Games?
MarioMania said:
KTRB has never gone "off the air for good." They go off the air at local sunset (except for Stanford hoops) to save on having to pay for propane and additional maintenance at the Livermore Hills site.
Today's Cactus League game between between the A's and the Cubs was supposed to be broadcast on KTRB at 1 PM (I missed it), and next weekend's games against the Giants (Saturday) and Brewers (Saturday) are on their broadcast schedule.
The A's first night broadcast on KTRB is Saturday, March 26, is an exhibition against the Rockies; the A's first regular-season game is Friday night, April 1, against Seattle. Either the sale to new owners will be in place by then, or the A's will be springing for the propane delivery.
DavidKaye said:
And I'm surprised that more AM stations don't do the same these days, in light of economic conditions. Would you be surprised if KNEW, KKGN, KTCT, KMKY, KDOW or KEST signed off at, say, midnight to save money on electricity?
Stations signing off the air at midnight back in the 1970s helped fuel my interest in DXing, when stations like KTRB would sign off, revealing a distant station in its place.
I'm not sure whether I'm being flamed or not. It seems like I tend to get flamed by the guys that I respect the most! It's probably because they care about the details, and getting things right.DanStrassberg said:
I'm looking at it from the perspective of the current operators. For the most part they "abandonded" the nighttime site. It was their "old" daytime site (pending the orginally intended daytime site that never materialized). It's like reluctantly returning to the "old" site to stay on the air for a few hours longer in the evening. Of course, the actual "old" site was Modesto.
Sunol may be slightly closer to the nighttime facility.
DavidKaye said:
Or you have some stations that do have authorization for night-time power that decide to just shut down anyway at sunset. At least that's what our local oldies station, 1440 AM KAZG, does here in Phoenix. When sunset comes around, the lamp timer kicks in at KAZG and pulls the plug on everyone's favorite Goldmine oldies. Wonder if KTRB is using a lamptimer? ;D
KBOS1965 said:
I'm amazed that anyone could interpret my post as a possible flame. No, I wasn't flaming you; if I were, you wouldn't be unsure about it
KBOS1965 said:
I'm amazed that anyone could interpret my post as a possible flame. No, I wasn't flaming you; if I were, you wouldn't be unsure about it
For the record, though, KTRB's original application to move to SF specified a day site in the Sacramento River Delta (I believe this is correctly termed the Delta site) and the Sunol location as the night site. The Delta site could not be built for a variety of reasons that I don't understand well enough to try to explain. Only one of those reasons was lack of $$$. But the Sunol site was built and for a short while was used by day as well as by night. The signal was not competitive, however, and the cost of the trucked in propane for round-the-clock operation from the site proved to be a killer. This led to the development of the diplex with KFAX. Although the KFAX site, with its short towers (of which KTRB uses only one) doesn't come close to providing the coverage that would have been possible from the Delta site, KTRB's daytime signal is much more than adequate throughout most of the market and may be better in San Jose than the signal from the Delta site would have been.
As has been discussed at length on this board, it seems unlikely that KTRB will find a night site that will provide the desired nighttime coverage at an operating cost that any ownership would not consider onerous.
DanStrassberg said:
I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think the delta location was an earlier application, and just sort of a placeholder until real sites could be acquired. The licensed night site was approved for day & night operation, and still is. The Sonoma site was supposed to be the day site but it never got off the ground. Lots of environmental objection, and not much political support were the 1-2-punch. You are correct about $$$ being only one of the reasons Sonoma did not get built. Considering what this did to his company Pappas might have been better off buying a big sail boat.
Pete
In the interest of completeness, I'm pretty sure there was one additional site applied for for critical hours operation. There were at least a couple of issues that cropped up early on with the original applications. I think one of them involved adjacent or second adjacent interference with the station in Soledad. One thing that I think came out of that was that the Soledad station's antenna pattern was not oriented as originally licensed, but was not corrected because it was not otherwise causing a problem. My memory may be faulty, so correct me if I'm wrong.Truthiness4DaBray said:
In hindsight there was a lot that went wrong, starting back when KTRB was still in Modesto. I'm really saddened by all of it because it was well intentioned, but may have arisen out of a broadcast business model that doesn't exist any more. I'm grateful to have enjoyed some of the early years with Mike, Pete, Harry, and Bessie at KGEN and KBOS.
KBOS1965 said:
As I understand it the KTRB move to SF was done as a spiteful slap by the Pappas brothers against people who wouldn't let them into their social clubs because they were of Greek ancestry. Moving KTRB to SF was apparently seen as a way to show people that they were big-time players. That's the way I understand it from a former FCC honcho who had mentioned it many times over the years.
With that overlay, it makes sense that the KTRB move would have been ill-thought from the beginning. It was clever, I feel, that they figured out a way to move 860 to SF at full power by adding 840 to Modesto. That part of the deal was a work of genius.
If KTRB wants a site on San Pablo Bay, I think I may know someone who has land for lease out there. But that would add even more confusion to an already confusing pile of CPs they've put in already.
The only practical solution to any of the coverage issues/transmitter sites for nighttime is for the trustee to sell the facility to a real radio operator. So far, they have refused to do so. The bank probably just doesn't want to take as big a haircut on it as they will have to, and is holding on, hoping the market will improve. While it looks like the market is improving already, it's mainly for "going concerns" with proven ratings/revenue, and not so much for AM's with tremendous and expensive coverage issues (at least as far as night pattern goes.)
If someone were to do something besides night ball games formatically, it seems the best solution is as mentioned above...move to a site and reduce the nighttime power enough to shoehorn the pattern in. Except for ball games, night listening on AM is really no big deal, ratings or revenue wise.
If someone were to do something besides night ball games formatically, it seems the best solution is as mentioned above...move to a site and reduce the nighttime power enough to shoehorn the pattern in. Except for ball games, night listening on AM is really no big deal, ratings or revenue wise.
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