Saving what, exactly? I'm new to Santa Barbara. And while I love the town, there's one fixture I 'm surprised not to find.
There is no local NPR station.
KCBX in San Luis Obisbo and KCLU in Thousand Oaks both have translators in town — that is, they rebroadcast with low power on an otherwise vacant local channel. Were talking very low power here: 9 watts for KCBX and 4 watts for KCLU. To put this in perspective, most FM stations — including the others radiating from the same site as these two tranlators — range roughly from 245 to more than 30,000 watts. The biggest FM station in town, KRUZ, is 105,000 watts.
Both KCBX and KCLU are also mostly music stations. KCBX features classical fare while KCLU's oeuvre is jazz (in fact, it's an outstanding jazz station). Their NPR and PRI programs are limited to Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Fresh Air, A Prairie Home Companion and little else.
In fact there are two local noncommercial stations. KFAC is a 12,000 watt full-time classical station owned by the University of Southern California, and serves as an extention of KUSC from Los Angeles, which it similcasts in its entirety. If there is any local origination, I haven't heard it. KCSB is the student station at UCSB. It's just 62 watts, but its signal from Broadcast Peak gives it a fair amount of reach (at least to places where the transmitter is in sight). Like most student stations, it mostly features an ecelectic mix of music programs.
KCBX has an application for a new station, small but big enough to serve the region fairly well. There's no reason to expect, however, for the station to have any kind of local origination if the FCC grants it a license. My guess is that it would just replace the 10 watt translator with a 4000 watt one from the same location. (A notice of that application, along with licensing info about the other stations, is here.)
And then there's KDB, a full-size (12,500 watt) commercial classical station that has been around for many, many years. It's also for sale. So there is a now a campaign to save KDB by coming up with $3.6 million to buy it for UCSB. The station has apparently imposed a March 1, 2002 deadline. (Yesterday's paper has a story on the subject that isn't encouraging. Even though advocates put a positive spin on it, they've only raised about 1/10 of the money they need.)
I love the idea of saving the station, but not the classical format. Since we already have two classical signals in town, why buy KDB for the purpose of putting up our first full-time NPR news and public affairs station? Alternatively, how about working a deal with USC to operate KFAC as a local NPR station and to move the classical programming up the dial to KDB, continuing to call the station KDB, and keeping it as localized as possible? That makes sense to me. Betcha it would raise a lot more money, too.
Meanwhile I'll continue to hear what I'm missing over the Net, from KQED and WUNC, both of which have nice clear streams.
Additional background: Here's what I wrote about the same subject last Spring.
4:32:03 PM 
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