March 27 - April 3, 2003
San Diego, California (part II)
 When
we left you last week, our recap
of our August 2001 visit to San Diego found us parked alongside
highway 52 in Santee, California, checking out the three-tower
KFMB (760) array that straddles the freeway (we'll neither admit
to nor deny having videotaped the array with one hand while steering
the rental car down 52 with the other...)
In any case, KFMB is just one of several stations that found
Santee, a few miles inland from the rest of the San Diego metro,
to be an ideal spot from which to blanket the region with a good
AM signal.
Follow 52 into Santee itself and it turns into Mission Gorge
Road - where a familiar local landmark is the six-tower array
of KCBQ (1170).
At one time, KCBQ was the big top-40 station in San
Diego (though hampered by a night signal that goes from 50 kW
down to 1500 watts at sunset), but the move to FM ended that
chapter of KCBQ's history and it struggled through a succession
of less-successful incarnations before ending up in the hands
of Salem, which is programming the station with conservative
talk as part of a multi-station cluster.
 While the new format
has been a relative success, it still can't overcome the fact
that all that land along a major artery (it took us ten minutes
just to find a break in traffic to get across the street to shoot
these pictures!) in a growing suburb has become more valuable
than the station itself, a familiar song for AM directionals
everywhere.
When we visited the old KCBQ site in 2001, we heard that it
would soon be replaced by a Home Depot; in any case, there's
a CP to move to a new array up in the hills east of Santee, and
if these towers (and the old studio building for KCBQ and KCBQ-FM
105.3, now KIOZ) aren't gone yet, they soon will be.
(UPDATE: It took a few months for this prediction
to come true, but the towers and buildings on the Santee site
were demolished in early September 2003. Unable to get the needed
permits to build its new site for now, KCBQ ended up running
under an STA from a wire hung from one of the guys of the KPOP
1360 tower seen below.)
There's change in the air as well for another big Santee directional
array. KSDO (1130) was once the pride and joy of the Gannett
broadcast group, along with its sister KSDO-FM at 102.9 - but
later years found KSDO changing hands and ending up as a business
talker, owned by Chase Media Partners but managed as part of
the enormous Clear Channel cluster (seven stations on the US
side and five in Mexico).
 Any day now, though,
that will change, and these six big towers at the corner of Jeremy
and Braverman will be sending forth 10,000 watts of Spanish religion
in the hands of Radio Vida.
One more Santee site completes our visit: KECR, at 910 on
the dial, is licensed to nearby El Cajon and transmits from the
foothills just off highway 67 north of Santee, bringing the Oakland-based
Family Radio to San Diego listeners.
Back in the day, Family also had an FM on the San Diego dial
- KECR-FM 93.3, licensed to El Cajon - but the value of a full
class B signal in a relatively under-radioed market (remember,
half the FM dial in the area emanates from across the border)
became attractive enough to Family to put 93.3 up for sale.
Under the new calls KHTS and the new ownership of Clear Channel,
it relaunched as a CHR station a few years back, now known as
"Channel 93-3."
(Look at the hills behind KECR's unusual six-tower array and
you can see the area where KCBQ will eventually relocate when
it builds out its CP.)
Heading back into San Diego proper, there are still three
more AM sites that merit our attention.
Two of them straddle Highway 94 about two miles east of downtown:
north of the freeway sits the tall tower that's home to KGB (101.5)
and KPOP (1360). KGB is the heritage rock station in town, and
its calls used to be on the 1360 facility, which operates nondirectionally
from here with 5 kW day and 1 kW at night. (It was a signal to
be reckoned with back in its top-40 era; today 1360 is doing
standards; it and KGB are also part of the Clear Channel cluster
in town.)
Just south of the freeway, off the Kelton Road exit, two big
self-supporting towers loom over a golf course: these are the
towers of KOGO (600), which is back to its legendary calls after
letting them drop for some time in the eighties and nineties.
 Look very carefully
at the top of each of the two towers and you'll see FM bays;
one set is used by regional Mexican KLNV (106.5), which was paired
with 600 in the days when they were simulcasting top 40 as KKLQ
and KKLQ-FM ("Q106," the top 40 station in San
Diego in the eighties and early nineties) and even before then
when the stations were KOGO AM-FM, while the other is used by
KSON-FM (97.3), Jefferson-Pilot's country station.
Just west of here off 94 is Air Way, at the end of which can
be found the studios of KGTV (Channel 10), the former KOGO-TV.
A big vertical "KG T V" sign here is a landmark on
the highway; it once said "K O G O" back in the days
when radio and TV were under common Time-Life ownership.
Off to the southeast is Mother Miguel Mountain, inaccessible
by road (at least to my rental car), which is home to two FMs
(public radio KPBS 89.5 and KHTS 93.3) and all of the market's
US-based UHF stations: PBS outlet KPBS-TV (Channel 15), NBC O&O
KNSD (Channel 39, which IDs with its cable position on channel
7), independent KUSI (Channel 51, cable 9) and WB affiliate KSWB
(Channel 69, cable 5), as well as their companion DTV facilities.
 And as we head down
to San Diego, we'll pause at the freeway interchange south of
downtown where I-5 meets Highway 15 (it doesn't become I-15 until
it crosses I-8 a few miles to the north) to admire one of the
coolest-looking graveyard towers anywhere.
There's no mistaking what this is: it's KSON (1240), the Radio
Disney outlet in town; in recent years, it's also gained a diplex
partner, Spanish AC KURS (1040), which runs 370 watts by day
and 47 watts at night. This tower is also home to Univision LPTV
KBNT-LP (Channel 17).
And from here, it's just a few miles south on I-5 to the border
crossing - but we'll head over to see Tijuana's towers next week.
See you then!
(In the meantime, we'll be back "live" in San Diego
April 2-3, on the way to the NAB convention in Las Vegas the
following week...)
 Want to see more neat sticks all year
round? Nashville's WSM (at left) is one of the more than
a dozen Tower Site images featured in the 2003 Tower Site Calendar,
still available from Tower Site of the Week and fybush.com.
If you liked last year's edition, you'll love this one: higher-quality
images (in addition to WSM, this year's edition includes Providence's
WHJJ; Mount Mansfield, Vermont; Buffalo's WBEN; KOMA in Oklahoma
City; WTIC, Hartford; Brookmans Park, England; WPAT, Paterson;
Four Times Square, New York; WIBC in Indianapolis; WWVA in Wheeling,
W.V.; WGN Chicago and more), more dates in radio history, a convenient
hole for hanging - and we'll even make sure all the dates fall
on the right days!
This year's edition is still available in limited quantities!
Orders placed now will be shipped within 24 hours! And this
year, you can order with your Visa, MasterCard, Discover or American
Express by using the handy link below!
Better yet, here's an incentive to make your 2003 NERW/Site
of the Week subscription pledge a little early: support NERW/fybush.com
at the $60 level or higher, and you'll get this lovely calendar
for free! How can you go wrong? (Click here
to visit our Support page, where you can make your NERW contribution
with a major credit card...)
You can also order by mail; just send a check for $16
per calendar (NYS residents add 8% sales tax), shipping included,
to Scott Fybush, 92 Bonnie Brae Ave., Rochester
NY 14618.
Thanks for your support!
|