SJC

Needless to day the towns not all taco trucks and indie rock. In terms of market area, San Jose is the southern lobe of the San Francisco market. It's fully embedded, and in fact in terms of DMAs it's inexplicably embedded in Sacramento and Stockton. In radioland that leaves it poorly defined. I've visited this town once before but my stay was very brief.

I caught San Jose on a bad day. Too much talk on that September day back in 2006 drove me away from from KSJS, KSQQ and KPFA. I ended up listening to KPIG. Nothing wrong with KPIG you know, but there's a lot more to be heard here.My plane landed on a Sunday night so that's when I did my first band scan. 91.1 KCSM was cranking out some Hammond organ -fueled jazz. 91.5 KKUP was running an old radio play. 89.7 KFJC was rocking boogie-woogie piano and old bluegrass. Mysteriously this has nothing to do with what the kids had on the schedule that night. Monday morning I checked in again and 90.5 KSJS was laying into a strange mix of obscure oldies and rockabilly. I don't hear the Bob Wills version of "Straighten Up and Fly Right" very often. This afternoon I caught a drone-rock program on KFJC and some great brit-rock on KSCU.

When you look at your non-coms in San Jose it's interesting how few are really based outside the metro. KZSC and KUSP are both really in the Monterey market However 88.1 KZSC is completely blocked by a KAWZ satcaster K201FW-FM . KFJC, KSCU, KKUP, KMTG, KSJS, and KZSU are all in on or around San Jose. If you're unfamiliar with the bay, you might not know that KMTG is boxed in on 89.3 by KOHL in Fremont. Strangely I can only hear KOHL in San Jose today. In 2007, KMTG owned their corner of the bay for a couple days when KOHL went off air. KOHL plainly explained their outage as follows

"The cause was found to be normal weathering of the antenna, exacerbated by hawk excrement. This is the longest KOHL has been off the air in more than 20 years."

Tonight the best game in town is on 89.1, KCEA where I caught the program ""Two Hour Tuesdays" hosted by Ms Victoria.