8 thoughts on ““I Take Up My Pen”: KSL, 1936”

1. I know that AM radio stations could transmit a pretty good distance, especially at night, but “the voice of the west” seems like a pretty bold claim. Did they (perhaps better: could they) have any appreciable daytime listenership in, say, Denver or San Francisco? I’m asking mainly ’cause i don’t know how to calculate the possibilities.

2. Oh, yeah, it reached Hawaii, even. A number of the KSL ads through the ’30s and ’40s are made up of quotations from postcards they got from listeners — it apparently was a “thing” then to write to a radio station to report that you could hear them on such-and-such a date when the weather was so-and-so. I don’t know how steady the reception was, but I think they weren’t exaggerating, by the standards of the day, to claim “the voice of the West.” By today’s standards, probably not so much.

3. This whole thing got me to do some digging (anything to avoid finishing up course syllabi!), and I found a list of US radio stations as of summer 1925 (which is when the call letters KSL were moved to Salt Lake City). In what i’d think of as “the West” (read: Denver and beyond) there weren’t a lot of stations, at least by present-day standards. (Though, particularly considering its population at the time, Washington state had a comparative lot of stations—but with most broadcasting over a quite small area—and if i counted right Seattle had more stations than nearly any other single city in the West. Go figure.)

   But yeah, going through the list, KSL had one of the strongest signals in the West, and not a whole lot of strong-signal competition—so “the voice of the west” was probably marketing fluff just as all such mottoes are, but it was marketing fluff with some reality behind it.

4. It all depended, too, on atmospheric conditions. I remember driving through high desert country in Utah on clear nights, back in the 60s or 70s, and listening to KOA from Denver or KOMA from Oklahoma City. And it wasn’t at all unusual to pick up KNX or KFI, both Los Angeles stations, in Provo.

   And, back then, KSL would advertise itself as a “50,000 watt clear channel station.” Google “clear channel” and you will end up knowing more about what that means than I did a few minutes ago.

5. Just one note: part of the reason for establishing the “clear channel” stations, authorized to power up to 50,000 watts, was to provide radio service in areas that were otherwise unlikely to support a local station–due to the low population density.

   And, KSL probably was justified–in the world of advertising puffery, to call itself the voice of the west–it was the only clear channel station between Denver and the west coast, and there was nothing east of Denver until you got to Oklahoma City or Omaha.

6. 50,000 watts will get an AM signal from Los Angeles to Idaho Falls on a clear calm night. I wonder if KSL still broadcasts with that much power, or if they’ve cut back the wattage to something more local.

7. KSL-AM still powers its transmitter at 50,000 watts.

8. According to Wikipedia, there are 90 clear channel stations in North America, KSL being one.

   When I was about seven or eight I picked up an old radio — vacuum tubes, air-gap tuning capacitor, black bakelite case — at a garage sale for probably 10 or 15 cents. I remember lying in my top bunk at night with the volume turned way down to keep from disturbing by brother below me, carefully tweaking the tuning knob to bring in stations from all over the Western US. It always amazed me that broadcasts from west coast could make it to Idaho and be picked up by my little radio.

   I wish I still had that radio…

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