news story / By Bob Doran

Dance of the Dial

Jostling for frequencies and throwing elbows in the tight Humboldt market

(Feb. 19, 2009)  “There’s a lot of radio here, which I guess is good for the consumer. It’s maybe not so good for the companies trying to make a living at radio,” says Patrick Cleary, who straddles the fence in the local broadcast world. He’s interim general manager of campus-based public radio station KHSU and he is CEO of Lost Coast Communications, the Ferndale company that runs three local commercial stations, KHUM, KSLG and KWPT (“The Point”).

As Cleary notes, the already crowded field is about to get more crowded. “There are seven applications pending in Humboldt County alone; a whole lot filed for the [non-commercial] portion of the FM band, the part below 92 — KMUD has one, KHSU has one, some are for Spanish stations, some for Christian stations.” A couple of the new Christian additions are supposed to be on the air by March, which should bring the local station count up to 20.

The latest to enter the crowded Humboldt commercial radio market is Trinidad’s KZCC-FM, “all new, all hits 95.5,” where they promise “more hits than any other station on the planet,” with a 10,000 song playlist “from the ’60s to the 2000s,” including everything “from ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ to ‘1999.’”

The Friday morning before Valentine’s Day was a busy one for 95.5’s drive time “Breakfast Club,” a team made up of station manager Dawne Davis and sidekick John Ford. Between hits they took a call from a couple of comics doing a show at a local casino (and laughed politely at jokes that were not all that funny). A band that was to play at the same casino that night stopped by the studio to plug their show. Then it was time to announce the winner of the Valentine’s Day “Relationship Trivia Contest,” a thankful man named Dave who would receive a prize package from various sponsors.

It was Dave’s lucky day, that cold rainy Friday the 13th, but luck was not with KZCC. Around 10 a.m., an hour after the Breakfast Club ended its shift, the hits gave way to white noise. Trouble with the transmitter put the station off the air for most of the day.

It wasn’t the first technical glitch for the station. After an unsteady launch they got permission from the Federal Communication Commission to go off the air in February 2008 so they could “identify and establish a power source more reliable and practical than the generator the station had originally intended to use,” according to an FCC filing.

There are some, Ron Kramer — executive director of Jefferson Public Radio, for example — who would love to see KZCC stay off the air. Since the NPR-affiliated JPR operates from the campus of Southern Oregon University, Kramer has the state of Oregon’s attorney general’s office helping with a legal battle against KZCC. Why? It’s a long, complicated story, a game of radio musical chairs that starts in McCloud, a small town in southern Siskiyou County.

JPR has had a translator in McCloud serving the southern Siskiyous since 1981, but by FCC rules a full-on station with a transmitter can preempt a translator. For that reason, in 1995 JPR filed an application for a transmitter permit. Another radio company, calling itself Fatima Response, Inc., applied for the same frequency, but let on that they’d be willing to drop their application for a price. JPR discovered that Fatima was “totally fraudulent,” having appropriated their name from a religious broadcaster that was no longer operating. Instead of paying Fatima off, JPR opted to bring on their lawyers.

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