The KSIQ booster FM signed on in mid-March from Mt. San Miguel, putting a decent 700 W signal on 96.1 MHz into San Diego and its community of license, Santee. The station has a Top-40 format similar to that of Channel 933 FM. You might remember that the originating transmitter moved from its Imperial desert location in Brawley in late January to Campo.

KSIQ’s owners, Cherry Creek Radio, also closed the sister AM station in Brawley. According to the Imperial Valley Press, the station went silent and is now for sale.

The FCC granted an application to give KZSD-LP a permanent home. McGraw-Hill, licensee for KZSD-LP and KGTV, seeks to move the station from channel 41 to 39, make it digital, and leave it at 15kW on Mt. San Miguel. According to station Chief Engineer Andrew Lombard, the station would continue as Azteca-America Spanish language affiliate. KNSD abandoned channel 39 in June last year when their analog service shutdown.

After 30 years, KGTV engineer Frank Cruz is hanging it up this Friday. Frank, 65, has been with McGraw-Hill’s channel 10 for the past 10 years. Before that, he spent 20 years at channel 39.

Frank came to broadcast engineering somewhat accidently. He says he had been working as electronic technician at Southcomm International (purchased later by Loral), where he tested and set-up backpack transmitters for the government. He took some classes at Palomar College where he learned there was an opening at KCST (now KNSD). He jumped at the chance to do something new, and found out that he loved the variety of duties there. Under Tom Wimberly, who himself retired last year from McGraw-Hill, Frank specialized in ENG repair and operations, working with Umatic decks, Plumbicon cameras, and their fleet of remote vehicles.

While he liked bench work, he has fond memories of challenging field operations, such as when they would set-up an ad hoc microwave network across the desert from San Diego Padre Baseball spring training camp in Arizona to Chocolate Mountain near the California border, to Laguna Mountain, aiming to Mt. San Miguel for relay to their studio in Kearny Mesa. They used only BMS portable ENG equipment and 6-foot dishes.

When NBC had a reduction-in-force in 2000, Frank took a job under Ron Eden’s supervision at KGTV the very next workday. He continued specializing in ENG maintenance and operations, but took over much of the transmitter care at Mt. Soledad when Eden left. Frank ceremonially signed off the analog transmitter in March of 2009 for the last time.

Frank plans to “take it easy for at least the next six months” with Rebecca, his wife of 42 years.

KGTV is honoring his retirement with a luncheon this week.

Matthew Schiller of KGTV last month passed his exam and is now a Certified Broadcast Television Engineer. Congratulations Matt!

Nationally, SBE says they are rewriting many of the certification questions and preview materials to update them. Exam takers were questioning the increasingly irrelevant questions about analog video technologies and the like.

If you would like to take a certification exam in June, have your application in by April 16, the end of the NAB Convention. You can sign up for the exams given at the NAB Convention before March 26. See the SBE website for more information.

On February 15, Leon Messenie took the elevator to the top of 939 Coast Boulevard across the street from the La Jolla Cove Park and turned off the power to his two analog TV translators, perhaps for good.

K59AL and K67AM have been broadcasting with less than 2kW ERP from downtown La Jolla since at least June 1974, according to current FCC records. Messenie, now Director of Engineering, remembers that the translators have been there since before he started as a bench technician with KPBS in May 1981.

The site offered to fill the signal for the patrons of KPBS who couldn’t receive the signal by antenna because of Mt. Soledad shadowing the main signal from their channel 15 UHF analog signal on Mt. San Miguel. (At one time, KNSD had a similar fill-in translator on channel 62 at the top of Mt. Soledad.) They took a Time Warner Cable feed as video and audio source. At one time, K59AL and K67AM were at different locations, but they lost their lease on the alternate building, according to Messenie.

He looked for a displacement DTV channel for the La Jolla translators, but when he applied for channel 15, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department asked for the entire 6 MHz wide channel as a new land mobile band, and the FCC formally agreed last year, citing support for Homeland Security. Then he filed for channel 38. During international coordination, Mexico objected, then it suddenly appeared occupied as XHAS-DT from Tijuana.

Messenie says that Verizon is now ready to take over the 700MHz bandwidth they purchased by auction years ago. “They have been very supportive. Verizon was working with our Washington DC legal firm and even wrote a letter to the FCC when we were waiting to hear back from the FCC. They were on our side trying to get channel 38.  Then Mexico fired up on 38 and it was all over. Eventually all they could say was that they now had their 700MHz equipment in place and were ready to start testing. They worked with me until I could get our ducks in a row for turning off the translators. Once our Audience Service department was ready for the call I shut off the translators. Verizon was very nice throughout the whole ordeal.”

KPBS licensee San Diego State University said in their STA filing for a dark channel that they will continue to pursue a replacement digital allocation. Meanwhile, reaction to the shutdown resulted in four calls during the first two weeks of being off-the-air.