Engineer Bill Agresta of KBRT shows off the new KNSN transmitter, a Nautel J1000. Photo courtesy Crawford Broadcasting.
KNSN (AM 1240 kHz) last month updated its downtown transmitter after its recent acquisition by Crawford Broadcasting of Denver. The downtown site rebroadcasts the religious format 50kW KBRT (AM 740kHz) Costa Mesa in order to fill in some of the coverage lost when KBRT moved from Santa Catalina Island.
Multicultural Broadcasting sold KNSN at a loss to Crawford after having owned the station for only five years.
According to Cris Alexander’s entry in his Local Oscillator corporate engineering news blog, engineer Bill Agresta from KBRT replaced an aging Gates BC-1H transmitter with the new Nautel J1000. Cris was in town from Denver in September to help with some of the final touches.
The station broadcasts with only 550 watts due to its efficient 202° high tower. Agresta and Dick Warren will maintain the site.
Past San Diego market Director of Engineering for Lincoln Financial Media, Eric Schecter was voted into a seat on the SBE Board of Directors last month. He’ll serve two years. Eric served as Chairman in San Diego in 2006 and later in Phoenix, where he’s Director of Engineering for the CBS radio cluster.
Re-elected to second terms in office were President Joe Snelson, CPBE, of Las Vegas; Vice President, CPBE, of Greenville, SC; Secretary Jim Leifer, CPBE, of Boynton Beach, FL; and Treasurer Andrea Cummis, CBT/CTO of Roseland, NJ.
Mike Uhl pays a visit to Chapter 36 for a September meeting in San Diego. He’s representing great German design in Yellowtec audio products and studio accessories.
In July, John Rigg of Clear Channel’s San Diego cluster hired for his engineer opening a kid who would likely have been overlooked by just about any HR department. He has virtually no broadcast engineering experience and he’s never worked with NexGen automation or broadcast transmitters. He has no degree in engineering.
Get to know Matt, though, and you start to see the diamond-in-the-rough package of self-initiative and positive attitude with a base of electronic knowledge he brings to work that makes him a potentially huge win for Rigg’s team. You can train how to maintain software package in couple of months, transmitters are increasingly black boxes with a data port in one end and and RF port out the other. Teaching energy and a customer-service attitude are a lot harder. Continue reading Introducing Matt Anderson, Next Generation Broadcast Engineer→
We humans love our machines. We polish and parade our cars. We line up hours ahead to buy a new smartphone, tablet computer, or video game processor.
Scottie Rice in the KOGO basement with Civil Defense water.
Scottie Rice, staff engineer at KFMB AM and FM, gives homes to elderly AM radio transmitters.
His latest project was moving the RCA BTA-5F 5kW transmitter from KOGO, and I’ll let him pick up the story from here. Note that like a captain describing his ship at sea, Scottie refers to his inheritance as “she.”
