By now, we all know that when a group owner buys a broadcast property from a privately-held company, there’s bound to be a lot of change. After all, there’s a big mortgage to pay. Centralized human resources, accounting, promotions, graphics composition, and master control send laid-off local employees looking for work. Newsrooms shrink. And accountants look over spreadsheets and start looking for ways to layoff, dismiss, or have senior or highly-paid employees retire.

TEGNA bought family-owned KFMB-AM-FM-TV in December of 2017, and since then, veteran engineers have been leaving.

Last year, Manager of Technology Chris Hoffman was picked up from a sister TEGNA outlet in Buffalo, NY. Dean Imhof left. Senior Engineer Chris Aamodt was laid off. Long-time RF Supervisor Rick Bosscher resigned. Earlier this year, Director of Engineering Leann Lanflisi, who had been at the job just two years, retired.

We learned this month that Mark Goodman, a brilliant engineer acquired when XETV closed its San Diego facilities in 2017, has moved to KPBS. Mark says he’s happy to be making the change, which puts him closer to home, working with a great team of veterans, and, to paraphrase, “is less stifling.”

Scott Casale is leaving KFMB to join KUSI in the coming week as the Assistant Chief Engineer. Scott had been with KFMB since 2004, doing everything from RF to data transmission set-up and systems installations.

In the plus column for KFMB, Steve Cilurzo joined this month as an Engineering Supervisor, taking over Rick Bosscher’s office though with broader duties like a radio studio rebuild. He said he feels very fortunate to have such “big shoes to fill” and much to do. He was downsized at Entercom in June.

Disclosure: I worked for KFMB for 15 years as a staff engineer and briefly as Director of Engineering before the TEGNA purchase.

Last year, newly consolidated CBS and Entercom broadcast teams moved to a new facility on Granite Ridge Drive, across from the iHeart and NBCUniversal studios, forming a new media row. On July 29, 2019, JR Rogers and his staff allowed Chapter 36 to peek at the new studios recently and we can report they’re gorgeous. The new digs incorporate a modern Audio Over IP (AoIP) architecture by SAS, so fewer wires were used in building the system out. Al Salci of SAS gave us a rundown of the system architecture and some of its options. Many thanks for lunch, Al!

On June 27, 2019, the FCC granted low power FM broadcaster KVIB-LP a license to operate on 101.1 MHz from its facility at the World Beat Cultural Center in Balboa Park, San Diego. However, as of the first week in July, no signal was heard when in the vicinity, and no new transmit antenna is in place there. KRTH-FM has a dominant 50 kW signal on 101.1 from Mt. Wilson, easily receivable throughout most of the San Diego area. World Beat can’t build a tower above tree level due to its location in the flight path for the San Diego Lindbergh Field airport.

KECR 910 kHz El Cajon won the latest FCC auction to get an AM “cross-service” 10 watt translator on 100.1 MHz at Mt. San Miguel. According to the July 3, 2019 FCC announcement, Family Radio prepaid $35,000 for their bid.

The new translator assignment is part of the FCC’s AM Revitalization program in which AM stations, where possible, have been granted FM translator channels to retransmit their primary signals.

Many AM stations in San Diego now have an FM translator in place in San Diego County.

Entercom, owners of KWFN 97.3 FM San Diego, commissioned GEO Broadcast Solutions to install a network of FM boosters for the station. The FCC in late May issued a license to cover the construction of a co-channel FM booster station for La Jolla (Bird Rock). They were also granted Construction Permits for boosters in Escondido, Romona, San Marcos, and Encinitas.

Entercom management hopes the five new boosters will help extend coverage and reduce multipath in the regions chosen for enhancement. Remember that KWFN swapped frequencies with KSON in November 2017 in order to give KSON’s country music fans greater coverage from Mt. Soledad. This left KWFN disadvantaged serving north San Diego County listeners.

KWFN-FM1 is atop a building on La Jolla Boulevard in the Bird Rock neighborhood. The FCC granted the license for this site May 15, 2019. JR Rogers, San Diego market Technical Operations Director, said, “The project in La Jolla is a piece of the ‘Grand Experiment.’ La Jolla was our test case and seems to be doing what we need it to do. We will be adding a few more to see if the system benefits or hampers us.”

In late May, the FCC granted four additional KWFN (FM) Construction Permits. KWFN-2 would be located on a cell tower near downtown Romona; KWFN-3 at the 92.1 facility near San Marcos that used to house KSOQ 92.1, the original and highly effective KSON booster; KWFN-FM4 Escondido at Black Mountain and aimed north-northwest to serve the I-15 corridor, an infamous FM reception strip; and KWFN-FM5 Encinitas at the I-5 Leucadia Boulevard exit to serve the I-5 corridor northwest toward Carlsbad and Oceanside.

GEO Broadcast Solutions installs GatesAir low power boosters that both synchronize their low power signals with the main transmitter signal and rebroadcast the HD signal. Synchronization can now be maintained to within ±2 µS. The boosters are fed by IP.

GEO asked the FCC late last year to allow booster station to originate some programming so that they could geo-target advertising (“ZoneCasting”) and emergency alerts as cable companies have long done. The FCC has not acted on that rule change.

KXST (later KPRI) 102.1 Oceanside experimented with boosters in the 1990’s to help extend their signal to geographically challenged locations to the south, like Mission Valley and Pacific Beach. However, they had no means to synchronize the signals, so the boosters tended to create significant interference zones with mobile reception sounding like multipath. The project was scrapped after a short time and the station changed its city of license to Encinitas in order to move the transmitter to Mt. Soledad.