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KCBX To Shutdown Due To "Global Warming"

R

RF101

This story is hilarious:

radioinsight.com

KCBX To Shut Down Santa Barbara Signal Citing Climate Change - RadioInsight

KCBX Inc.'s Central California Public Radio will sign-off Public News/Talk 89.5 KSBX Santa Barbara CA by December 31 citing tropospheric ducting making its signal being increasingly overrun by another station. KCBX claims that the increase in ducting is being caused by climate change bringing in...
radioinsight.com radioinsight.com

Troposcatter (and tropoducting) has been around since the atmosphere and troposphere were formed. Hams have been making use of tropoducting for decades such as occasional longhaul openings between Hawaii and California. On the East Coast, tropoducting is a regular occurence.

Why not just blame bad frequency planning and overzealous engineering?

(I bet the increasing tower rents, electricity costs, and falling income from the public radio donors are really to blame. Another outfit will certainly step in to claim the channel if KCBX turns in their license.)
 
When you are in Santa Barbara you can hear all of the San Diego/Tijuana radios as well as most of their TV stations. When sitting at the KEYT-TV studios there you can get into San Diego 2 way systems.
 
RF101 said:
This story is hilarious:

radioinsight.com

KCBX To Shut Down Santa Barbara Signal Citing Climate Change - RadioInsight

KCBX Inc.'s Central California Public Radio will sign-off Public News/Talk 89.5 KSBX Santa Barbara CA by December 31 citing tropospheric ducting making its signal being increasingly overrun by another station. KCBX claims that the increase in ducting is being caused by climate change bringing in...
radioinsight.com radioinsight.com

Troposcatter (and tropoducting) has been around since the atmosphere and troposphere were formed. Hams have been making use of tropoducting for decades such as occasional longhaul openings between Hawaii and California. On the East Coast, tropoducting is a regular occurence.

Why not just blame bad frequency planning and overzealous engineering?

(I bet the increasing tower rents, electricity costs, and falling income from the public radio donors are really to blame. Another outfit will certainly step in to claim the channel if KCBX turns in their license.)
Click to expand...
Also KCBX will remain on 90.9 FM when 89.5 FM shuts down. There's another factor at play here and it's other public radio stations that have translators or repeaters in the area. Note some of the repeaters have their main station in Los Angeles like KPCC and KCRW.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCBX



 
Mediafrog+ said:
If you want to hear really fierce tropo ducting, try the Gulf Coast. Stations can get out 300-500 miles during peak conditions.
Click to expand...

I lived a couple of hundred miles inland from the Gulf, in southern Arkansas, for three years in the late '70s. That ducting would raise hell on FM and the low VHF channels on TV a few times a week in the summer months. Agree with everyone else here. It's nothing new and would have been the same disruptive reception phenomenon if radio or TV had been invented 200 years ago.
 
I've seen stories of FM stations that couldn't be heard at their studios due to tropo ducting but had a great signal 300 miles away.
Switching to the lower elevation AUX antennas would "fix" the problem. Probably since the lower antenna was below the warm over cold layer.
 
boiseengineer said:
I've seen stories of FM stations that couldn't be heard at their studios due to tropo ducting but had a great signal 300 miles away.
Switching to the lower elevation AUX antennas would "fix" the problem. Probably since the lower antenna was below the warm over cold layer.
Click to expand...
At a different technical level, when 740 in the Los Angeles market had its transmitter on Santa Catalina Island, their STL had several microwave reception antennas on one of the towers at different heights. During certain times, the angle of reception changed enough so that an antenna 100 feet too high or too low had significant loss of reception.

Of course, much of that had to do with air-to-water temperature differences near ground / sea level but it is the same kind of technical challenge.
 
That's the equivalent of if NWPB would cease operations on one of their eastern WA stations because there's too much snow/ice at the transmitter preventing access for maintenance.
But they want to make it political and even 'woke', so it's that dagnabbit climate change!! Is KPBS laughing their butts off yet?
 
crainbebo said:
That's the equivalent of if NWPB would cease operations on one of their eastern WA stations because there's too much snow/ice at the transmitter preventing access for maintenance.
But they want to make it political and even 'woke', so it's that dagnabbit climate change!! Is KPBS laughing their butts off yet?
Click to expand...
Well what should they say? That the repeater was superfluous in a market already saturated with public radio coverage and building it was a boondoggle? Boy that’d go over real well come pledge time.

Regardless of your predilection for or against climate change, KCBX’s claim is Lionel Hutz’s definition of “the truth” in action.


“The house is on fire!”
“Motivated seller!”
 
Last edited:
Frequency1 said:
When you are in Santa Barbara you can hear all of the San Diego/Tijuana radios as well as most of their TV stations.
Click to expand...
The tropo-ducting between Santa Barbara and San Diego works both ways. When tropo is strong, SB stations KRUZ 103.3 and KTYD 99.9 come blasting into San Diego. And there are *two* translators in San Diego on 103.3 that KRUZ regularly wipes out. Maybe those translator operators can ask that 105kw KRUZ change frequencies 🤣 😅🤣
 
Frequency1 said:
When you are in Santa Barbara you can hear all of the San Diego/Tijuana radios as well as most of their TV stations. When sitting at the KEYT-TV studios there you can get into San Diego 2 way systems.
Click to expand...
Not ducting but line of sight. Look at a map and you'll see that the route from Santa Barbara to Tijuana is totally over water. Signals over water travel further than over land.
 
I believe the issue in this situation is that the HD from San Diego is received in Santa Barbara, effectively blocking out reception on HD radios.
 
It's at the same location as an LD TV station and another FM station. Are either of those stations suffering from this type of interference? If not it's either because they aren't getting the on-channel interference because there is no on-channel interference coming from San Diego or it's because their antenna system is better designed.
I can't believe that a transmit antenna with a better design could be found to be able to better concentrate the signal in their coverage area.
 
The cancellation was a "dumb move" on the part of the license holder. The fiscally responsible solution would have been to sell the license to a religious broadcaster, using the income to bankroll the other frequency. The better, technical solution would have been to move the antenna down in elevation and increase the power. Lower elevation sites sometimes work wonders in scenarios like this one.
 
RF101 said:
The cancellation was a "dumb move" on the part of the license holder.
Click to expand...
I agree-- there's no regulatory fees involved, unless there's something with grants or funding or whatnot that holding the license would hurt (that we wouldn't know about looking from the outside).

RF101 said:
The better, technical solution would have been to move the antenna down in elevation and increase the power.
Click to expand...
I'm fairly certain that the issue is not the strength of the analog signal. KSBX is running analog only, and the digital sidebands from the San Diego signal can regularly be received in KSBX's city-of-license, effectively blocking out KSBX on most newer vehicles. The fix would be for KSBX to make the costly upgrade to HD.

I can understand that it may be hard to justify the cost of upgrading a 50-watt signal that serves only a sliver of land area.
 
boiseengineer said:
I've seen stories of FM stations that couldn't be heard at their studios due to tropo ducting but had a great signal 300 miles away.
Switching to the lower elevation AUX antennas would "fix" the problem. Probably since the lower antenna was below the warm over cold layer.
Click to expand...
I've experienced a tropo event while I was working at WLFI (TV) in Lafayette IN where we were not able to monitor ourselves off the air because of the interference from Milwaukee. That particular event slammed all the Chicago FM signals to the ground so they sounded almost local
 
This has nothing to do with climate change. This has been happening with Santa Barbara and San Diego/Tijuana signals as far back as I can remember. We could sit in Santa Barbara and watch all of the San Diego/Tijuana TV stations as well as use our 2 Way directly into San Diego over 175 miles away. A while ago Tijuana put a new channel 3 station on the air and it caused terrible interference to KEYT in Santa Barbara. The FCC proposed adding channel 10 to Santa Barbara but KGTV fought it and the allocation proposal was deleted.
 
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