San Francisco Bay Area, May, 2012

My cousin Melissa, who lives in San Franciso, married her fiancé Keith at a ceremony in Sebastopol, California, on May 5, 2012. I decided to make it a six-day vacation, which left plenty of time outside of the wedding-related activities for some tower tourism. I arrived early in the afternoon on Thursday, and after making quick time through San Francisco got stuck in bad traffic on US 101 in Marin County, but still saw a couple of AM sites there. (The recurring story of the trip, however, quickly made itself clear as the most interesting sites are all behind locked gates far from the end of long private roads, many impassable in my rental car.)

On Friday, I left our rental house in Windsor and headed north to Healdsburg to find the Windsor stations, up in the hills west of US 101 between Windsor and Healdsburg, wasting a precious hour going up twisty one-lane county roads through the forest only to find an impassable private road some five miles from my target. I did manage to get a distant view of KJOR (104.1A Windsor), one of the area's Spanish-language stations, and eventually made my way down to Guerneville to find KGGV-LP (95.1). Guerneville's commercial FM was more elusive, and a local told me that it was about five miles beyond a locked gate that would have required a high-clearance vehicle even if I knew the combination. From Guerneville I made my way down to Monte Rio and then back inland to Occidental, where KOWS-LP was clearly located somewhere on the property of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, but I could not see where (and the signs around the property made it very clear that they did not welcome visitors). The station didn't do a legal ID, either.

After my disappointment in Occidental, I fell into a spot of luck in Point Reyes Station, where community station KWMR has studios just off Coastline Highway (the main drag, also California route 1). Their booster KWMR-FM2 was nearby but off the air (and also at the end of a private driveway), and when I stopped by the three-room studio, the station manager entered right behind me and invited me to take whatever pictures I wanted. There's not a whole lot to see there, just a main reception/management/music library office, an engineering office, and a single air studio; I was able to chat with the transmitter engineer and with the woman who was on the air. The main transmitter site, of course, was inaccessible.

From Point Reyes I headed back north and east to Petaluma, where I found KTOB (1490), a station made famous as the home of Wolfman Jack in the film “American Graffiti” (although the studio scenes were actually filmed at KRE in Berkeley). Now a Spanish-language station, it looks forlorn and unloved (not to mention unpainted) in the midst of a huge tract housing development. Had it not been for the real-estate crash, KTOB might well have succumbed to development. North of Petaluma in Rohnert Park I found KRRS (1460), with a directional pattern shooting north the eight miles or so to downtown Santa Rosa, its community of license; KRRS is a full-time simulcast of KTOB. Continuing north into the west side of Santa Rosa I found KSRO (1350) before heading to Friday evening's pre-wedding guest mixer at the city of Santa Rosa's De Turk Round Barn.

On Saturday, I had several hours free before the wedding proper, so I went up north into Mendocino County, to see if I could find KORB, a little 100-watt class-A non-comm licensed to a bump in the road called Hopland. (KORB is the nominal primary of “Broken FM”, a Christian rock network with five translators around the Bay Area.) I didn't find it, but continued on over the mountains into Lake County. Lake County's population is clustered around the shore of Clear Lake, likewise the broadcast facilities. I visited downtown Lakeport, the county seat, to find the cluster studios for the principal commercial stations in the market, and then headed south and east to the KXBX (1270) tower. From there, I made a rather long (and unproductive, for airchecking purposes) visit to Clearlake, at the southeast corner of Clear Lake, where KMOB-LP (100.3) was holding forth with automated music and nary a legal ID to be heard. From there, I headed south on Route 29 into Calistoga, but ran out of time to continue on to St. Helena and its LPFM before I had to head back over the mountains to the west and the wedding ceremony at the Vine Hill House in Sebastopol.

On Sunday, I went to a Giants game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. The drive was a bit longer than I had anticipated when I bought my tickets, so I had to miss the post-wedding brunch in Santa Rosa. I nearly missed the whole first inning, as well; the traffic was fine heading into San Francisco but a horrible creeping mess approaching the parking lots for the ball park. (Should I ever have the occasion to do this again, I should instead take Golden Gate Transit's ferry-to-the-game from Larkspur.) Now my only remaining west-coast ball park is the Al Davis Memorial Dump (as Peter Gammons puts it) in Oakland—assuming the team doesn't find a way to move elsewhere before I next get back to San Francisco during baseball season. I didn't take any radio-related pictures on Sunday.

On Monday, I finished off the accessible facilities in Sonoma and Napa Counties, found the original KDIA (now KDYA) in Vallejo, and then crossed into the East Bay to see the booster farm on Mt. Diablo. The coordinates make it look as if there are four towers on Diablo, but in fact there's just one, a self-supporter owned by American Tower. (Mt. Diablo is a state park, and there's a $10 per vehicle user fee to enter, but it's the tallest hill in the East Bay and has excellent views towards San Francisco Bay and Carquinez Strait on those rare days when it's neither foggy nor hazy.) From Mt. Diablo I headed back out through downtown Walnut Creek to the KKDV (92.1A Walnut Creek) tower overlooking the freeway in Lafayette. A short distance away in Moraga, I found the campus of St. Mary's Collge of California, but campus station KSMC (89.5A) was not where its licensed coordinates appeared to put it. I didn't stick around to look for it, but continued on through the canyons and hills of the East Bay to the Grizzly Peak tower site shared by Pacifica's superpower KPFA (94.1B Berkeley) and the backup for CBS Radio's KLLC (97.3B San Francisco).

Coming down out of the hills and into the rush-hour traffic at the east end of the Bay Bridge, I made my way slowly north on I-80 East/I-580 West Berkeley, turning around by the former KRE (1400 Berkeley, now KVTO) site on Ashby Avenue to head west, in much less traffic, towards the Bay Bridge. Three three-tower AMs make their home on the north side of the Oakland approach to the bridge: Radio Disney's KMKY (1310 Oakland, the old KDIA), Clear Channel's KNEW (960 San Francisco, the old KABL), and Multicultural's KIQI (1010 San Francisco). They can only be reached from the Grand Avenue ramp off I-80 west, the last exit before the Bay Bridge tolls; a poorly-maintained road leads north and west from the ramp past all three transmitter sites. Heading back from this site, there is no option but to continue along the flyover to Grand Avenue, but that wasn't a problem for me as KSFN (1510 Piedmont), the station that Mapleton Broadcasting emasculated KGA (1510 Spokane) to upgrade, is located in West Oakland, atop an industrial building at the corner of Grand Avenue and Poplar St. Finally, I crawled back north on I-80 to the El Cerrito exit, where I took a quick picture of the high-school station KECG (88.1) atop a lighting stanchion by the athletic fields. At the other end of Central Avenue, on Isabel St., is Point Isabel Regional Park, where the towers of Clear Channel's KKSF (910 Oakland, the old KNEW) are also home to the day site of KDIA (1640 Vallejo). True to form, there's a sewage-tratment plant nearby. Thus ended my Bay Area visit.