AIRWAVES : Radio Mire

The weather won’t cooperate. Neither will Mexico. So now it’s up to the Clinton Administration to keep Motley Crue guitar solos from interrupting L. A. radio listeners’ Mozart concertos.

One cause of this cacophonous clashing is the inversion layer, which does more than trap pollution: It also bounces Mexican radio signals into California.

The phenomenon has affected several local stations to varying degrees, but nowhere has it struck a more jarring note than on KUSC, whose classical offerings were rudely interrupted starting in January, 1992, when a Tijuana rock station, XHTIM, began broadcasting on 91.5 megahertz, KUSC’s frequency.

“People in Los Angeles were screaming,” says KUSC’s attorney, Lawrence Bernstein, who filed a complaint with the FCC, which assigns frequencies in the United States. The FCC’s international branch began discussions with XHTIM, which refused to budge.

So Bernstein turned to the State Department, which almost persuaded XHTIM to scoot over to 91.7 megahertz. But talks broke down soon after Election Day, Bernstein says, because of uncertainties about how the new Administration would handle the conflict. New meetings are scheduled for February.

In the meantime, KUSC has moved its transmitter to higher ground. That will stave off some of the Mexican rock ‘n’ roll invasion, but it won’t prevent it.

“KUSC has lost substantial amounts of listener support,” Bernstein says. “There’s only one solution. We want them off. That’s it.”