Big Trip 2007: Salt Lake City

When the International Radio Club of America and the National Radio Club scheduled their conventions a week apart in Salt Lake City and Boise, respectively, the ~~excuse~~ opportunity to take a much-needed vacation in the intermountain West proved too tempting to pass up. So on Wednesday, August 22, I packed my bags and flew to Salt Lake City, where I was joined by my frequent traveling companion (and co-founder of this site), Scott Fybush. As per our custom, Scott did most of the organizing and navigation and I did most of the driving.

We spent three days and parts of two more exploring the Salt Lake City area. In that time, we saw all of the AM stations in the market, only one of which (clear-channel KSL) was particularly impressive—and even KSL was operating from a relatively new building (the classic Art Deco transmitter building having been demolished in a renovation project several years ago).

On Thursday, the 23rd, we began our travels by heading south into Utah County to see Provo and Orem, then hitting most of the major Salt Lake AM sites on the way back north to our hotel. For dinner, we drove out to Park City, where we had a nice (and unexpected) studio visit at KPCW, a community station with studios in Park City City Hall.

The next day, joined by our friend Dennis Gibson from Santa Barbara, we headed north to Ogden and worked our way south for a few hours before joining the IRCA group tour of the KSL Broadcast Center in downtown Salt Lake City. This was followed by another group tour, of heritage country stations KSOP and KSOP-FM. Scott, Dennis, and I were then joined at our hotel by John Dehnel, KSL's chief engineer, to drive out to the KSL transmitter site a few miles west of SLC airport.

On Saturday, we took a quick jaunt out to Evanston, Wyoming, returning in mid-afternoon to pick up a few remaining north side AM sites before the IRCA convention banquet and auction. On Sunday, the 26th, we visited a few downtown SLC sites and the University of Utah campus to see the public-radio and -TV studios there, before heading north on I-15 towards our next stop, Bozeman, Montana.

At the end of our trip, we returned to Salt Lake City to fly back home. Scott's flight was on a Wednesday, in the early afternoon, but we had enough time to visit with Friend Weller at KUSU, the Utah State University station in Logan, before I dropped Scott off at the airport and then headed west down I-80 to the state line and the casino town of West Wendover, Nevada. Even more so than Primm, on the California border an hour south of Las Vegas, the casinos of West Wendover are built right up to the state line—with their parking lots on the Utah side. Having seen the spectacle, I turned around and headed back into Salt Lake City for a good night's sleep and my flight home the following day.

If Salt Lake City is famous (or even infamous) in the broadcast community for one thing, it is the rampant abuse of the FCC's rules to wedge in new FM stations on second-adjacent channels using boosters. Here's how it works:

Find some tiny community north or east of Salt Lake City that doesn't yet have a station licensed to it.
Find another community that has more than one station.
Find a channel that's second-adjacent to Salt Lake City stations that transmit from Farnsworth Peak (which is south and west of SLC proper).
Get the FCC to allow you to move the station identified in step 2 to provide “first local service” to the community identified in step 1 by upgrading it to a full class-C facility on Humpy Peak. (“First local service” is a legal fiction used by the FCC to allow stations to be taken away from rural communities and moved in to larger markets.)
Observe that, while the Humpy Peak transmitter theoretically puts a 60 dBu contour over the Salt Lake Valley, it can't actually be heard there (or anywhere else, for that matter).
Apply for boosters up and down the Salt Lake Valley, thereby accomplishing your original aim of shoehorning in another Salt Lake City FM. Places that might need boosters include Ogden, Bountiful, North Salt Lake, SLC itself, Park City, Sandy, and Provo, just to name a few possibilities. Make sure that the boosters are fed by microwave, so that they keep working even if the main Humpy signal should “accidentally” get turned off. (Not that any legitimate FCC licensee would do that.)