All posts by Gary Stigall

Local News

52nd Street Transmitter Site Has A New Master Antenna

The 52nd Street Transmitter Site, owned now by Vertical Bridge, has a new master FM antenna, recently erected by crews. iHeartMedia San Diego Market Director of Engineering, John Rigg, says that once the multiplexer is completed, the 8-bay, 1/2-wave spaced array will serve KHTS 93.3, KWFN 97.3, KGB-FM 101.5, and KLNV 106.5, as well as auxiliary use for KMYI 94.1 and KIOZ 105.3.

New 52nd St. Site Master FM Antenna. Photo by Bill Lipis

The same 52nd Street tower will host KLSD 1360 and KSDO 1130 AM.

The old KOGO transmitter site in Emerald Hills is slated for housing development, so the transmitters there need to be moved to the single-tower Vertical Bridge-owned site, originally occupied by KGB-AM 1360, on 52nd Street, about a mile to the northwest.

KLSD is operating on an STA at the historic KOGO tower site, and KSDO is operating at 52nd Street using a vertical drop wire.

KOGO 600 moved to multiplex with KGB-AM 760 near Santee in 2024.

Until work is completed, KNLV continues to operate from the old KOGO tower. KHTS and KGB are operating from a lower-gain auxiliary antenna at 351 feet on the 52nd Street tower. KWFN has an aux site at Mt. San Miguel.

Meetings

March Online Meeting: Greg Ogonowski on Streaming Audio Best Practices

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Your radio station has been streaming online for some time, but does it really sound so good that your listeners stick with it? Are you using the best codec available? What should you consider for hardware? Can you just feed your FM station processed audio to your stream encoder? 

Longtime audio processing guru Greg Ogonowski of the Modulation Index “StreamS” Audio Encoder will address these questions and more in an online Zoom meeting on Tuesday, March 17, at 11:30 AM PDT.

Register in advance for the Zoom Link (ignore the wrong meeting date on that site if it’s still there).

Many thanks to the SBE Chapter 47 in Los Angeles for organizing this meeting.

About Greg Ogonowski

(Stolen from MellowRock.com) Greg started his broadcast career at WWWW in Detroit in the early 70’s. By 1985, he was tasked with rebuilding the Heftel cluster in Los Angeles (we’re honestly not sure what that is, but it sounds impressive).  He went on to form his own audio processing company, Gregg Laboratories, that produced AM/FM processors that threatened the leading producer, Orban, so much that they hired him!  Greg would form the PC Products division at Orban and was the first to license the HE-AAC codec, then called aacPlus, for streaming.

At the end of 2014, Orban spun off the PC products division to Greg’s existing consulting company, Modulation Index, LLC. Greg developed a new streaming audio encoder using HLS and MPEG-DASH to reduce costs and improve reliability and quality. He would also be the first to license the new xHE-AAC codec and has already completed work on using HLS with xHE-AAC. Over the years, Greg has developed a reputation for improving both audio processing and audio streaming.

Local News, National

Cox Cable and Charter to Merge

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Remember when San Diego was once served by two cable companies? Southwestern Cable had the territory north of Interstate 8, and Cox Cable had the territory south of that highway. Well, now it’ll be one company.

On February 27, the FCC approved Charter Communications’ $34.5-billion purchase of Cox Communications. The combined corporation will be called Cox Communications, but the fiber and cable TV delivery service will continue to be called “Spectrum.” It’s set to become the largest internet service provider, with 38 million customers.

The two companies’ business services have been competitive over most of San Diego County for some time.

The future impact on San Diego employees is unknown.

Best of Site, Local News

Monument Peak Tower Collapses

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A tower housing KNSJ (FM) 89.1 MHz and other communications antennas toppled at approximately 10:00 AM on Wednesday, February 18, 2026, atop Monument Peak. The American Tower-managed site, at an elevation of 6,255 feet, is at the steep transition between the forested mountaintop and the Anzo-Borrego Desert at near sea level. Engineers familiar with the event say the tower and antennas were laden with ice, and that winds were reported at 80 miles per hour or higher. The FAA-registered tower, originally constructed in 1972, was 93 feet tall and heavily laden with microwave dishes and cellular panel antennas.

  • Now you see it… This UCSD HPWREN webcam capture was taken on February 8 and includes the tower to the north, appearing to the right.
  • …Now you don’t. This HPWREN screenshot was captured on February 23.
  • American Tower Corp. building wrapped in collapsed tower steel.
  • Tower pier with severed leg.
  • Lifted pier.

If you watch the site HPWREN webcam time-lapse video (play the left-most video labeled “09-12”), you can see the tower “disappear” just before 10:00 AM. KNSJ’s antenna is the slanted Shively FM log-periodic array pictured.

KNSJ has been off the air due to weather damage before. The station, owned by Activist San Diego, is licensed for 330 watts ERP directed southwest toward San Diego, with a slant polarization.