Station to Program a Backcountry Voice

From the kelp to the cactus, a voice for San Diego County’s backcountry soon will be heard on the airwaves.

KBNN, with studios in sun-baked Santa Ysabel and a transmitter high in the pines atop Volcan Mountain near Julian, will take a decidely homey, non-city tack when it goes on the air, probably in the fall.

“We don’t want to be a big-city radio station with a slick format with canned newscasts and satellite feeds. We want to develop our own personality, and, oh lordy, we must keep a sense of humor,” said Andy Smith, one of the station’s owners.

It was nearly nine years ago, during a hot Labor Day weekend, that Smith and Harold Schachter were sitting by the pool at the Smiths’ rural Ramona home, talking about nothing in particular when they hit upon a common desire: a lifelong yearning to run a radio station.

Smith, just retired from 34 years of teaching high school English, will be the program director of KBNN. Schachter will concentrate on sales and a third partner, John Singer, will use his 40 years of business experience to run the county’s newest station.

None of them knew anything about running a radio station when they started. But nine years of a roller-coaster ride through bureaucratic regulations have turned them into professionals. None of them knew much about their own backcountry, either, but they are learning.

“They are a lot younger than we realized,” Schachter said of his backcountry neighbors, “so the ‘golden oldies’ won’t be the songs I remember.”

Backcountry demographics and a professional consultant convinced them to opt for a “broad-based format,” and “light adult contemporary” music aimed at a target audience, ages 24 to 54.

After a trial run, Smith said, the partners have agreed to analyze the feedback and give their listeners what they want.

“If I had my way,” Schachter admitted, “we’d play nothing but opera and barbershop quartet.” But he took a bit of advice from his son, Carl, a marketing consultant, not to create a station to cater to his own tastes.

There are plenty of other AM and FM stations in North County, catering to the regional audiences with hard rock, country and Western, light jazz and everything in between, Schachter said, but KBNN will be one of the few originating in San Diego County which can reach a potential radio audience of 2.75 million listeners 24 hours a day.

With its transmitter at an already established antenna site at the northern end of Volcan Mountain, KBNN can reach into Riverside County--Hemet, Sun City, Palm Springs, Indio--eastward into Borrego Springs, Salton City, Scissors Crossing, westward to the ocean and south to include a big chunk of metropolitan San Diego.

Earlier tests brought responses from as far away as Coronado and Imperial Beach, Schachter said.

Even so, KBNN plans to stay close to home.

“We are going to be locally oriented. We are going to provide the people in the mountain and desert area with a voice of their own, something they have never had,” Smith said. That puts a little pressure on the sales staff of the station, which must concentrate on the Ramona, Julian, Borrego Springs businesses for their client lists. But Smith is optimistic about the revenues because the mountain-desert territory is “virginal,” never having been solicited for business since other stations’ signals do not reach up and over the inland hills.

The Santa Maria Valley, in which Ramona lies, has more than 1,200 businesses registered with the state Franchise Tax Board, Smith said, “and that’s a lot of business.”

As for the programming--Smith’s forte--it’s going to be as down home as it can be. There will be early-morning weather and traffic reports for folks who have to go “down the hill” to their workplaces. There will be school closing notices, “not too rare in the mountains,” and even school menus, live broadcasts of selected local high school sports events, at home and on the road.

Smith plans to recruit local school districts to produce programs of interest to teen-agers, such as student-produced plays. There will be a daily bulletin board of meetings and events and celebrations. And, most importantly, there will be live hourly broadcasts of local news.

The fledgling station has one big “cash cow” in its stable, an agreement with the San Diego Padres and KFMB-AM to broadcast Padres’ games starting this fall, spring training games and the 1992 season.

For years, backcountry listeners have tried to tune in the Padres only to have the KFMB signal waver and fade just as the game came on. Now, KBNN will boom it loud and clear across the sparsely populated hills and into the desert vastness, earning much of its initial profits from ad spots between the action on the field.

Smith’s dream is to someday have a “flexible, spontaneous format” with a local team like KFMB’s Hudson and Bauer hamming it up, ad libbing and boosting the ratings.

But right now, he concedes, “we can hardly afford one on-air person, and it will be years before we can afford two.”

KBNN had hoped to celebrate the nine-year anniversary of its inception by going on the air for the first time Labor Day, but the staff is still incomplete and the console is still at the East Coast manufacturing plant.

More realistically, the three partners agree, will be a late September or early October debut.

“It’s not likely, but I wouldn’t count it out,” Schachter said of a Labor Day premiere. “We’ve made it this far, and not many thought we would. It’s as if we had an angel on our shoulder. It’s remarkable. We’re like the Israelites wandering in the desert. And now we see the Promised Land.”