Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

Listeners to three of our FM translators are presently experiencing reception problems that are turning out to be hard to fix. Translators are pieces of equipment that rebroadcast the KUSP 88.9 signal into areas where terrain makes reception difficult.

In Los Gatos (90.3 FM – also serves nearby communities, including Saratoga, Campbell, and parts of San Jose, Santa Clara, and Cupertino) we are facing long waiting times for repairs by Verizon and AT&T. The two telephone companies team up to provide the audio link to our translator site (AT&T serves our studio location, Verizon provides phone service in Los Gatos). Something is broken in the link and after several days of troubleshooting they don’t seem close to finding and fixing the problem. The next step is to bring in more personnel, but that isn’t going to happen until next Wednesday, April 21.

As we were doing battle with our problems in Los Gatos both of our translators on the Monterey County coast began to malfunction. We broadcast to Palo Colorado Canyon on 91.3 and to the Big Sur area on 95.3.

The symptoms of the problem, as reported by our listeners, have been inconsistent. Our chief engineer appreciates listener reports of technical difficulty, the more detailed the better. Key information includes telling us when you are experiencing problems (date and time), the nature of the problem, and how best to follow up with you (name, phone number, e-mail). You can send us reception reports via e-mail to brant@kusp.org.

Rest assured that we will put things right just as soon as we are able to.

This week the Carter Journalism Institute at New York University announced their picks for the top ten works of journalism in the decade from 2000 to 2009. Five were produced by daily newspapers, four were books.

The only piece of broadcast journalism so honored was “The Giant Pool of Money,” the first episode of This American Life that was produced by TAL in collaboration with NPR News. “The Giant Pool of Money” first aired on May 9, 2008 and stands out as the most lucid explanation of America’s home mortgage crisis. The show spawned “Planet Money,” NPR’s ongoing blog and broadcast series about the economy.

We’ve been believers in This American Life since it was just getting started. KUSP’s first broadcast was in 1997, about 350 episodes ago… but no episode is more deserving of this honor than “The Giant Pool of Money.” Congratulations to Ira Glass, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, and everyone else involved in the show. And thanks go out to our loyal listener-contributors, whose financial support for KUSP is part of what makes it possible for This American Life to exist!