Spring Trip 2009: South Mountain, Arizona

Part of the Spring Trip 2009 series.

Friday morning, before heading to Tucson, Bonneville engineer Aaron Farnham brought us up to South Mountain, from which most of the Phoenix market's FM and television stations transmit. There is apparently some confusion as to the precise name of the mountain, but “South Mountain” is what the locals say.

At South Mountain, unlike many eastern transmitter sites, but like a number of well-known western mountaintop sites (including Mount Wilson in Los Angeles), most stations have their own completely separate facilities. The two Bonneville FMs, KTAR-FM (92.3C Glendale) and KPKX (98.7C Phoenix), share a transmitter building and tower, and a number of FMs share space with their former TV sister stations, but that's very nearly the extent of it. Most stations have their own tower and their own building.

For this reason, I can't provide detailed identification of exactly what each photo shows—the various stations are just too close together on the map and the coordinates are insufficiently exact to be absolutely certain what is what. So these photos will all be titled “South Mountain”, except in those rare cases where I can identify exactly which tower I was looking at.

The stations located up here include: