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.

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.

Through the 1980s and early 90s, John Barcroft and Ron Foo, both engineers at KGB-FM and KPOP-AM, wrote and duplicated on a company copier, the monthly newsletter for SBE Chapter 36. They competently reported some local news, paraphrased some national news of interest, and promoted local meetings. Ron composed these on early PC software.

In about 1995, I offered to help them out, leveraging my journalism degree from the University of Oregon. I began sending it out via an email ListServ offered to us by Dave Biondi, an SBE supporter who had created Broadcast.net. The internet had been available to the general public for only a couple of years after American OnLine (AOL) and Prodigy began offering connections.

The FCC on November 15, 2021 published a list of applicants for the latest non-commercial educational FM station filing window, and San Diego County was well-represented. It appears as though some applications used software that failed to take into account Mexican licensees, and those applications will likely be dismissed. Keep in mind, too, that some applicants get cold feet after considering the time and money commitment of a radio station, or may have requested more stations than they can outfit, or may have not yet negotiated to occupy the space they have applied for. Any of these filers may ask to have their applications canceled. Here’s a list of San Diego County applications that the FCC has received and marked as “pending”:

KRPE-LD San Diego, low power TV channel 6, atop Mt. San Miguel, is the first local station to broadcast ATSC 3.0, marketed as “NextGen”. The FCC granted a Special Temporary Authorization (STA) for a signal that includes an innovative analog FM carrier at 87.75 MHz. According to Director of Engineering Daniel Bissett, licensee Venture Technologies Group, LLC completed construction of the new signal on October 7, 2021.

If you’ve been in TV broadcast engineering management at any time over the past 27 years, you’ve had the pleasure of working with Dennis Younker, Cox Communications Headend Manager, regarding getting your signal on cable TV. He’s told you if you had issues with color, lip-sync, signal dropout, and even digital drift or jitter. In other words, he’s had your backside. After 43 years in the business, he’s hanging up his keys and will be doing exactly what he wants to from now on. Dennis sat down and wrote this memoir about the cable business and his part in it for SBE 36. Enjoy.