Every Winter

Along toward the end of October and on through the dark months of winter I start getting emails, blog posts, voicemail and comments at the grocery store about KAST AM and the difficulty listeners have in tuning the station. The station becomes more difficult for listeners outside Astoria to pick-up.

As the station has grown in popularity over the years these comments have increased substantially.

Nothing we do with our signal has changed in the 30 years I've been here. With one exception.

When I first started working at KAST we turned the station off at Midnight and turned it back on at 6am for the broadcast day. Everybody knew when I was late for work! Back in those days we didn't have automated systems or radio networks that offered all night programing. Astoria itself was a very different place. The sidewalks rolled up promptly at midnight and were largely deserted hours before.

Over the years as we changed our format from music and news to news and talk we fundamentally changed how people listened. As we got better at covering local news and public affairs those listening habits changed as well. We went from "saying" we were number one to "being" number one with listeners.

Through all those changes our station has remained a 1000 watt directional/non-directional operation as far as the signal goes. It's that directional/non-directional item that creates the problem.

We are always at 1000 watts. At around sundown we change from broadcasting on one tower to broadcasting on two towers which changes the antenna pattern and your ability to pick up the station over the air. Single tower, stronger, non-directional broadcasting kicks in again in the morning which coincides with the time each morning that our licence states we can change the antenna pattern from month to month. As we have longer daylight in summer months the change happens later and later until we reach the longest daylight day of the year and then starts back the other direction until we end up changing our pattern as early as 4:30pm and going back to stronger single tower broadcasting as late as 8am.

Changing this would require a frequency change.

When the FCC expanded the AM radio band a few years back we applied for a construction permit to change from 1370 to 1700. The problem was two-fold. Most car radios at the time were not able to pick up 1700. It wasn't until years later that car makers started installing those expanded frequency radios. There are still millions of portable radios that can't pick up those frequencies. Then there was the cost of the conversion. AM radio stations are far more expensive to put on the air than FM stations. We just couldn't recover the cost in a reasonable time frame to justify the estimated $350,000 the change entailed. The project was abandoned.

Today we have an alternative. KAST AM, along with our other stations, are broadcast on the Internet. We are a little ahead of the game on this as far as car radios go but if you have an Internet connection you can go to our website www.kast1370.com and click "Listen Live" which allows you to hear the station digitally with studio quality audio. This requires a browser plug-in which works with most browsers and directions for the download appear when you access the listen live page. Our webmasters are working on improvements and upgrades all the time.

Eventually, when car makers catch-up, you will be able to get Internet streaming radio stations on your car radio. That's the future of this whole thing. Portable Internet streaming radios are not too far away either.

Hang in there gang. Things will get better.