[BC] KFRC becomes KEAR

[Alan Kline]

------ At 12:32 PM 12/16/2005 -0500, The Most Honourable Scott Fybush wrote: -------
>(Amazingly, they have measurements that show that KCBS 740's 
>0.5 does NOT reach Sacramento, which I find hard to believe.) 

Interesting, since the last time I drove I-80 east from Sacramento to Reno,
I had a very usable daytime signal from KCBS until I hit the Nevada border.
However, IIRC KCBS changes at night to a very directional north-south pattern
that actually may not put a 0.5 over Sacramento at night. The station also
puts a solid signal toward Fresno during the day, as well.

>And that set up the station swap with Family - it got 610 and netted 
>something like $40 million in much-needed cash, while Infinity got Family's 
>106.9, which does not overlap with Sacramento at all, and which gave 
>Infinity a platform to launch its "Free FM" talk format in San Francisco.

Wonder how long CBS will give that to succeed, considering that they have
$40 million invested in it...

>I don't know that I'd blame Les, or Viacom/Infinity/CBS at all, for taking 
>the KFRC call off AM. Family has a long association with the KEAR calls. 
>That's been their San Francisco flagship station for something like 45 
>years now, and it's understandable that they'd want to keep those calls 
>when they moved to AM. And the KFRC calls are alive and well on Infinity's 
>99.7 FM, so they're hardly gone from the market.

I don't recall where I saw it, but I do recall reading at the time of the
transfer that Infinity required the call change as a condition of sale.
The 10/17/05 date makes sense, as it was shortly after the end of the 2005
baseball season (at least, for the A's...).  I agree that it's a good thing
that the KFRC call hasn't disappeared from the market, but it's still gone
from the frequency it occupied for something like 83 years, and that's sad.

>The bigger trashing of history, to my mind, is the fairly recent complete 
>disappearance of the three-letter KYA and KRE calls from the market. Once 
>those calls are gone, they're not ever coming back... (absent a change in 
>FCC policy, like the one that allowed KRE to be revived in the seventies 
>after having lapsed for a few years.)

Agreed...along with all of the other 3-letter calls that are now silent...

I do think that if someone *really wanted* to revive a 3-letter call on
the same facility where it was once used, the FCC would have to consider
the request.  The precedent was established in the KHJ case, and the
"ka-ka" rationale has been pretty well dismissed as "urban legend", so
the FCC would have to come up with some other reasoning for denying what
it has granted to another applicant.


Alan Kline, CBT, KN?H
akline at netins.net or kn?h at arrl.net (home)