KWIZ an Uninvited Guest, Residents Near Its Tower Say

When Barbara Stutheit sits down to play her electric organ, its speakers blare the soft rock tunes of Fleetwood Mac, Phil Collins and Whitney Houston.

Stutheit, an artist, is not being visited by a soft rock muse. The nonstop pop she hears through the amplifier of her double-keyboard instrument is courtesy of KWIZ radio.

Like many in East Orange, Stutheit has a gripe with KWIZ, located on the radio dial at 96.7 FM in English and 1480 AM in Spanish. The Santa Ana-based station has a 3,000-watt antenna on a hillside in East Orange that residents say continually transmits soft rock into their telephones, tape decks and televisions.

“It was funny at first,” Stutheit said of her haunted instrument. “When I called the station at first, I said, ‘How do I get you out of my organ?’ ”

But Stutheit has lost her sense of humor in the eight years since the 150-foot antenna went up. The organ she once played daily, a gift from her mother, now gathers dust. After hiring organ specialists to “fix” the instrument and after a radio station engineer was unable to help, she is convinced that only removing the antenna will solve her problem.

In response to complaints from residents, the Orange City Council is getting tough with the station. The council has warned that if interference problems are not cleared up by Dec. 1, KWIZ risks losing the conditional-use permit that allows the station to broadcast from a western slope of Crawford Hills in East Orange.

KWIZ officials say they were unaware of these problems until recently. General manager Lenard Liberman said the station has had only a handful of complaints since Liberman Broadcasting bought KWIZ in March, 1988.

Last year, KWIZ changed its antenna after residents complained to the city that the tower did not comply with its conditional-use permit. This year, there are interference complaints.

“It seems to me that there are a few people who want the tower removed,” Liberman said. “They don’t like looking at it, and they’ll do anything to get rid of it.”

The KWIZ signal isn’t strong enough to turn metal braces in the mouths of local teens into radio transmitters. It’s not even as strong as that of Los Angeles-based KDAY-AM radio, recently criticized for causing chain-link fences and bathroom plumbing to pump rap music.

Still, residents say there is enough interference from KWIZ to make color televisions go black and white and to cause garage doors controlled by automatic openers and closers to short-circuit, crunching the hoods of cars.

“I get KWIZ when I try to record on my tape deck,” said Dick Garfield, who lives just 200 yards from the station’s tower. “If I am playing Johnny Mathis,” he said, Mathis is singing one song but the music is from KWIZ. “It’s very distressing,” he said.

Fed up, Garfield circulated a petition among his neighbors and sent a copy to the Federal Communications Commission and to the City Council.

The City Council subsequently ordered KWIZ to advise all residents by mail that station engineers are available to investigate all interference complaints.

KWIZ engineers have made house calls to install the electronic filters that are connected to the cable at the back of a stereo receiver or television set. The station has even replaced the telephone system in one home at a cost of $600. Hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars have been spent trying to resolve interference problems, Liberman said.

He contends, however, that KWIZ is in compliance with FCC regulations and, although the antenna may be responsible for some interference, it is not entirely to blame. Electrical wires, the hilly terrain, passing airplanes and other radio signals all may be culprits, Liberman said.

KWIZ engineers have visited the home of Joost Koenig, who complained that the station’s signal prevents him from listening to his favorite classical music stations.

“The thing that bothers me more than anything else” about KWIZ programming, Koenig said, “is all the chitter-chatter they have on there. The guy gets on and gets going and it makes me very nervous.”

Koenig believes that the station will “bend over backwards” to help East Orange residents, though the filter provided him by the station only partially blocks out the interference.

“But are they prepared to do the same thing with everyone in the neighborhood?” he wondered. “They’re gonna spend a fortune.”

Liberman said he does not expect calls from hundreds of residents.

“If they do call, we’ll take care of hundreds of problems and hire more engineers and buy truckloads of filters,” Liberman said. “We’ve never tried to shirk our responsibilities.”

But Koenig, a retired electronics engineer, said the station has little chance of making everyone happy.

“In my opinion, the interference is not going to go away no matter what they do unless they relocate the antenna to an uninhabited area,” he said.

That, Liberman said, is impossible.

“We can’t move our tower 10 feet one way or the other without hurting signals of other stations,” he said. “It would put the station out of business if the council asked us to move that tower.”