Towering Achievement In Santa Rosa
• The crew at Amaturo Sonoma Media Group in Santa Rosa, CA has been dealing with some serious engineering challenges for the past week, including the temporary loss of audio signal for Country KFGY (Froggy 92.9) and a host of other not-so-fun complications. Jim Murphy, Amaturo Sonoma VP of Programming & Operations, graciously took a few minutes away from his busy schedule to lay out the situation, which should hopefully be resolved later today —
“Last Monday at about 8am, we lost an STL receive unit on the tower of [News-Talk] KSRO-AM,” Murphy said. “That unit (about 100 feet up the tower) was used to receive KSRO audio at the transmitter site and was also the first of two hops to the transmitter sites of Froggy 92.9 and Top 40 KHTH (Hot 101.7). The replacement unit was not scheduled to arrive for a week. In the meantime, engineers Eli Cavazos, Paul Siebert and Phil David were able to get KSRO and KHTH back on-air by midday Wednesday by receiving the station streams at the KSRO transmitter site, then feeding each station’s stream into its audio chain.
They also got KFGY back on at that time, but it proved to be unreliable, and Froggy went off again on Thursday afternoon. The engineering team then found a still temporary — but more stable — way to get audio out to the transmitter, and Froggy 92.9 returned loud and clear late Friday morning. This was no easy task, as the Froggy transmitter site on Geyser Peak is 34 miles (nearly an hour) from the studio in the best of conditions. The terrain up there is mountainous, and the access road was wet and treacherous after the heavy rains.”
Murphy says delivery of the replacement STL — and the welcome arrival of the professional tower climber — is expected sometime today. Fingers crossed!
