KTRB Files For New Daytime Site

Pappas Radio's KTRB (860 AM), which has been operating with a directional 50,000-watt signal from the Livermore hills for the past few years, has filed an application with the FCC to move its daytime transmitter to the Hayward shoreline, where it would transmit a non-directional signal.

The move, if approved, should provide KTRB with one of the strongest AM signals in the Bay Area. Only KNBR (680 AM) operates a fulltime 50,000-watt non-directional signal in the Bay Area; KTRB would have a comparably equal signal from local sunrise to sunset.

Other 50,000-watt AM stations in the Bay Area, including KCBS and KGO, operate with directional signals, which limit their coverage in some parts of the region.

KTRB's new location in Hayward would have them sharing the existing KFAX (1100 AM) transmitter site. KTRB's signal would be transmitted through KFAX's current tower #3.

KFAX is owned by Salem Communications, which also operates KDOW (1220 AM), which has been working towards a power increase of its own for several years.

At nighttime, KTRB -- which re-branded itself as "Xtra Sports 860" recently -- would continue to broadcast with a directional 50kw signal from the Livermore site.

The technical exhibit, with all the details, may be reviewed on the FCC website.

Rumor: Salem Buying KLOK/1170?

The rumor being bandied about last night in the high-altitude press box at HP Pavilion in San Jose was that KLOK/1170 has been/is on the verge of/might be sold to Salem Communications by Univision.

From there, the scenarios started being thrown about: perhaps Salem would either (a) move the KDOW/1220 programming to 1170 and put the KLOK programming on 1220; or (b) abandon the plan to build a new transmitter plant for 1220 in Hayward and diplex both KLOK and KDOW off the same 1170 towers on South King Road in San Jose, which seems like a more NIMBY-proof way of doing things.

All of this is, of course, rumor and speculation, as far as I can figure at this point.

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KNTS Towers On Shaky Landfill?

Matt O'Brien reports in this morning's gaggle of local ANG Newspapers (Hayward Daily Review, Fremont Argus, et al.) that a group of concerned citizens are raising a stink about Salem Communications' plan to plant four 200-foot transmitter towers on the site of the former Russell City trash dump in Hayward.

The dump, which was used from the 1930s through 1974 according to the article, is the planned site of a new transmitter plant for Salem's KNTS/1220, which has received the FCC's go-ahead to boost its power from 5,000 to 50,000 watts at the new location.

KNTS currently transmits its schedule of right-wing talk programs from a single tower in East Palo Alto, in the swamps near the Dumbarton Bridge. The present KNTS site dates back to the late 1940s, where it began life as the ancestral home of Millard Kibbe's KIBE.

The main concern with the new Hayward location is that the towers would stand on the old dump, which was capped with clay, and the construction of the towers could expose some of the long-buried waste material.

"I am really disturbed about it because it's on a landfill," Janice Delfino, a member of the citizens advisory committee to the Hayward Area Shoreline Planning Agency, told O'Brien. "I don't know how the city could even think of allowing this kind of operation."

Considering how many new homes have been built on landfill around the Bay over the last few years, and keeping in mind how much engineering goes into the construction of a radio antenna farm, I'm thinking that there are numerous more significant issues that the good people of Hayward should be concentrating their energies on instead of this.