Thanks to the efforts of Bryan Broadcasting in Texas and the ingenuity of Dave Kolesar, a Senior Broadcast Engineer at Hubbard Broadcasting, the future of the AM radio band is a bit brighter thanks to the technological innovations HD Radio-only broadcasts can bring.
Sadly, that hasn’t stopped licensees from turning in their licenses for forlorn stations in the kHz band. Cumulus Media did so one year ago; Beasley Media Group also opted to do so with one South Florida AM. Saga Communications did so last week. Now, another licensee has done so, in Portland, Ore.
On September 29, KPHP Radio Inc. agreed to spin an FM translator in the Pacific Northwest’s second-largest metropolitan area, K248DD, to Kris Bennett Broadcasting.
The $50,000 transaction is hardly noteworthy in and of itself, with a $5,000 escrow payment being held at Miller and Neely P.C. of Kensington, Md., a Washington, D.C., suburb.
The bigger story is the fate of the AM station that was rebroadcast on FM translator K248DD, at 97.5 MHz. That would be the former KKPZ-AM 1330, which now carries a “D” — for deleted — in front of that call sign.
On September 28, KPHP Radio — an entity tied to Donald B. Crawford and Crawford Broadcasting — voluntarily surrendered the KKPZ license to the FCC. The Commission, as such, immediately cancelled the license of KKPZ.
That’s the sad end of “The Truth,” which ceased broadcasting on April 30. KKPZ and K248DD were put on the market.
Only the FM translator, which uses the KKPZ tower in Happy Valley, Ore., to the southeast of downtown, attracted a buyer.
With no one interested in the AM, Crawford gave up on its search for a buyer.
What does the pending new owner of K248DD have planned? Targeting the African American community in Portland is in the works, as the buyer, a 50/50 partnership between Chris and Gloria Bennett, is the licensee of a Seattle simulcast pair branded as “Z Twins” — KRIZ-AM 1420 and KYIZ-AM 1620 — and KBMS-AM 1480 in Vancouver, Wash.
KBMS is a Class B, with a signal pattern that does not offer good coverage of Gresham, Tigard and southeast Portland. As Northeast Portland has greatly gentrified in the last five to 10 years, the FM translator will assist KBMS in reaching a market primarily served by stations licensed to OPB, iHeartMedia, Alpha Media and Audacy.
For the former KKPZ, its death comes just three days after its 96th birthday. The station signed on in 1925 and from 1948 until 1970 was known as KPOJ. Between 1976 and 1995, the station was KUPL-AM. From then on, religious programming under the KKPZ call letters aired on the facility.
