KRCB (TV)

KRCB (channel 22) is a PBS member television station licensed to Cotati, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Owned by Northern California Public Media (the Rural California Broadcasting Corporation), it is a sister station to NPR members KRCG-FM (91.1) and KRCB-FM (104.9) and independent noncommercial station KPJK (channel 60). The stations share studios on Labath Avenue in Rohnert Park; the TV station's transmitter is located at Sutro Tower in San Francisco.

KRCB began broadcasting on December 2, 1984. Its sign-on culminated years of effort to bring a public television station to the North Bay, which was underserved in local programming and signal coverage by San Francisco public station KQED. In 1994, KRCB expanded to FM radio broadcasting. After agreeing to sell its spectrum for $72 million in the 2016 incentive auction, it rapidly expanded, moving its transmitter to San Francisco; buying San Mateo public station KCSM-TV (now KPJK); and rebranding as Northern California Public Media. KRCB continues to serve as a secondary member of PBS and produces programming of local interest to the North Bay as well as regional programming for the Bay Area.

History

Construction

In 1963, at the request of the Sonoma State College Foundation, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allocated educational channel 16 to Cotati. This channel was changed to 22 in a national overhaul of the ultra high frequency (UHF) table of allocations in 1966.

In the late 1970s, John Kramer, a professor at Sonoma State University, served in the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy and discovered that the Cotati educational allotment was still available. As a result, in 1981, John Kramer founded the Rural California Broadcasting Corporation (RCBC) to file for, construct, and operate the educational station. The station would broadcast from Sonoma Mountain and serve North Bay communities; the founders envisioned it primarily rebroadcasting KVIE from Sacramento with local programming and using studios at Sonoma State. Kramer envisioned the station as serving, first and foremost, rural and agricultural communities, providing North Bay coverage not produced by the San Francisco stations. However, Sonoma State did not provide support for the station; the two split when president Peter Diamandopoulos declared, "If I don't control the board of directors, it cannot be on campus."

Another group also applied for the Cotati channel: the Black Television Workshop. Its proposal, filed on the last day to do so and without any public notice in local newspapers, envisioned using channel 22 to broadcast subscription television programming for the Black community in the Bay Area. It also forced Rural California Broadcasting into comparative hearing to adjudicate who would get the channel. During prolonged FCC hearings, Kramer approached Nancy Dobbs-Dixon to be the station manager; she stayed, ultimately married Kramer after her previous marriage ended, and had a child. However, facing an expensive case at the FCC, the two parties agreed to settle, with RCBC paying the Workshop in exchange for its withdrawal and the Workshop instead seeking channel 62 in Santa Rosa. The FCC granted a construction permit in September 1982. The station slated a mid-1983 launch and began to receive grant funds from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to finance construction; by the end of 1982, the station needed to raise funds and find permanent studio space to support its local programming plans. These included programs in Spanish; the station manager of bilingual radio station KBBF sat on Rural California Broadcasting's first board of directors.

In February 1984, the city of Rohnert Park approved the station to build studios and offices at a city-owned site on LaBath Avenue, to which the station would move buildings once used by Synanon in Marin County and donated by the San Francisco Foundation. By that time, the station appeared to be headed for a launch in mid-1984. Capital fundraising efforts in the community reached a crescendo as the station needed to raise matching funds from the community for the grants it had received.

KRCB began broadcasting on December 2, 1984, providing service to more than a million people, including many in the North Bay that could not receive KQED from San Francisco. One local child wrote a thank you to the new station, containing 35 cents and a handwritten card claiming, "Now I can get ''Sesame Street''." The length of time it took to put the station on the air left its finances in a precarious condition: it had to nearly immediately refinance its studios to raise money that would count as matching funds for its original 1982 grant. Where it had once proposed 15 hours a week of local programs, it was airing short interstitial items instead. However, its local programming steadily grew over the next several years. This was a service not matched by KQED, though the San Francisco public station continued to have a far wider base of support and a far larger operating budget. In Sonoma, Marin, and Napa counties alone, KQED had some 12,000 members in 1988; KRCB had 2,800 members in total. The station also struggled with poor placement on local cable systems.

In 1991, KRCB obtained a construction permit to launch a new radio station at 91.1 MHz after a religious group that had held such a permit failed to put its station on the air. It would provide the first English-language public radio station for the area. KRCB-FM began broadcasting on September 1, 1994.

By 1997, KRCB was a member of the PBS Program Differentiation Plan, only airing about 25 percent of the network schedule with most shows on an eight-day delay from when they aired on KQED.

Growth

KRCB debuted on the Comcast cable system in San Francisco in 2003, the first time it had been broadcast there. In 2004, it acquired the land on which it was located from the city of Rohnert Park after it faced a budget crunch; the city sold the site of Rohnert Park Stadium for development and the adjacent KRCB site to the station.

KRCB began digital telecasting in late 2003, participating in a pilot program to use bandwidth to provide internet service to households in rural Sonoma County; shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 22, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 23 to channel 22.

Repack and transmitter move to San Francisco

KRCB agreed to move frequencies to the very high frequency (VHF) band in the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction for $72 million on February 10, 2017. The proceeds were used to start an endowment and upgrade the Rohnert Park studios. On September 7, 2017, KRCB announced that it would acquire KCSM-TV in San Mateo from the San Mateo County Community College District for $12 million, using some of the money earned in the auction; the acquisition allowed KRCB to expand its reach into the Bay Area, as KCSM-TV's transmitter is located at the Sutro Tower in San Francisco. KRCB relaunched KCSM-TV as KPJK on July 31, 2018; the station was named in honor of John Kramer, who had died in 2014. Concurrently with the launch of KPJK, the stations came under the Northern California Public Media banner. After the auction, Northern California Public Media's annual budget swelled from $2.8 million to $4.1 million.

One result of the change to VHF channel 5 was that, to remain on Sonoma Mountain, the tower would have to be replaced; it was at capacity with existing uses. Sonoma County told RCBC that it would have to pay the full cost of a new tower and was considering evicting it from the site. As a result, in December 2018, the station applied to the FCC to relocate its transmitter to Sutro Tower, whose operator had approached the station and suggested it relocate to co-site KRCB with KPJK. The frequency change took place on April 29, 2020.

In 2019, Nancy Dobbs retired after having run KRCB for its entire 35-year history. She was replaced by Northern California Public Media content manager Darren LaShelle.

Local programming

KRCB airs local programs about the North Bay as well as environmental issues in the Bay Area with series such as ''Bay Area Bountiful''. Series such as ''Fly Brother'' and ''Common Ground with Jane Whitney'' are packaged for national distribution.

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:

Notes

References

External links

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{{PBS California

Mass media in Sonoma County, California
Television channels and stations established in 1984
1984 establishments in California
RCB
Rohnert Park, California