GET BREAKING NEWS IN YOUR BROWSER. CLICK HERE TO TURN ON NOTIFICATIONS.

X

Headphones Podcast On-Air
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:

The first low-powered FM station in the Los Angeles area is now on the air. KBU (97.5 FM) launched full time in early March and can be heard along the coast near Malibu, broadcasting with a 50-watt transmitter from a hilltop overlooking Paradise Cove from studios located in a spare bedroom of station founder Hans Laetz.

Venture far from its signal area and you’ll pick up a 72,000-watt Spanish station out of Riverside or a 50,000-watt religious station in Santa Barbara. But along Pacific Coast Highway, from Trancas Beach to Escondido Beach and in a few other spots, KBU comes in loud and clear.

You also can stream it on a computer at www.kbu.fm, soon to be available on the TuneIn smartphone app.

Right now it’s not much to speak of — continuous music when I tune in, with a few announcements. Laetz says hosted shows — prerecorded at first, unfortunately — will be the bulk of the broadcast day, with NPR shows “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition” set to begin later this month.

“Malibu is one of the few areas of Los Angeles County that does not receive NPR affiliates cleanly due to the mountains blocking the signals of NPR affiliates KCRW (89.9 FM), KPCC (89.3 FM) and KCLU (88.3 FM),” explained Laetz. “I believe we are the first low-powered FM station in the nation to win NPR licensing rights.”

About 8,000 people live in the station’s broadcast area, which includes Trancas Beach, Zuma Beach, Point Dume and the Paradise Cove area. That makes KBU truly local.

Low-powered history

Low-powered FM stations are actually nothing new. In the old days, when the Federal Communication Commission actually did something useful rather than to let three media companies control more than 75 percent of the nation’s radio stations, licenses were issued to local community organizations — mostly colleges and universities — in the educational part of the band.

One such station was KNHS, licensed to the Torrance Unified School District in 1967 and broadcast from the campus of North High School, utilizing at first a 1-watt transmitter and later a full 10 watts on 89.7 FM. That 10 watts covered an area extending from approximately Palos Verdes Drive North at the border of San Pedro all the way up into Redondo Beach.

Unlike educational licenses today, in which professionals staff the stations and little education is involved, KNHS was truly student-run and driven. Students played the music. They covered local athletics. They kept the logs. They did the transmitter readings. All on a shoestring budget.

Unfortunately, short-sighted thinking (or downright stupidity) on the part of the Torrance school district allowed the license to expire during an era in which such licenses were not allowed to be returned after expiration. Some reports say it expired in December 1983, just one year after an unnamed television news segment offered some great publicity about the amazing radio program at North High (see http://tinyurl.com/KNHSRadio). Other reports say it was on the air possibly as a pirate station until as late as 1991. Records are a bit hard to find.

But KNHS — and others such as the also defunct KSUL at Cal State Long Beach — are exactly what educational licenses were designed to provide: student experience in radio. That the FCC stopped issuing the licenses, or allowing renewal when they accidentally expired, reflected the new era of the FCC in which money is everything and public airwaves are not public at all. Indeed, there are no students allowed on the staff at KUSC (91.5 FM), KKJZ (88.1 FM), KCRW, KPCC, KCLU or KCSN (88.5 FM). Locally, that leaves KXLU (88.9 FM) as the only “educational” station broadcasting under the spirit and intent of its educational license.

In my opinion, that is criminal and the “professional” broadcasters on the educational band should lose their licenses. Unfortunately, the FCC has proved it will do nothing. Meanwhile, stations such as KNHS and KSUL remain but memories.

Richard Wagoner is a San Pedro freelance writer covering radio in Southern California. Send him email at rwagoner@cox.net.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.

blog comments powered by Disqus
https://www.dailynews.com/2015/04/15/malibu-get-its-own-low-powered-fm-station-kbu-975-fm/
www.dailynews.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-26
149880
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YH6Z7ENLOM3V77AJDSDGXIPZLOAM7GGZ
<urn:uuid:1db23853-ca7d-4837-b1f0-32fafc57041e>
2019-06-25T06:27:42Z
192.0.66.2
text/html
sha1:VYZ477TIGOCOLGYPVSYNBN5UYHW4DFG3
<urn:uuid:149c9021-875a-4443-9c5b-e0197d0a22eb>
https://www.dailynews.com/2015/04/15/malibu-get-its-own-low-powered-fm-station-kbu-975-fm/
response
<urn:uuid:b6426040-242a-416c-8943-db6c2fe7ac22>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-231-195-157.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/