Note: the KEAR call letters have been used on several Bay Area radio stations on differing frequencies at different times. This display deals with the station at 106.9 FM between 1978 and 2005.
By 1978, the portfolio of religious radio stations held by Harold Camping’s Family Radio had grown considerably from its 1959 beginnings at San Francisco’s KEAR. The organization would at one time rank among the nation’s twenty largest radio license-holders with more than 200 stations, many of which were low-power repeater stations.
Along the way, Family Radio had moved from an original concept as a platform for local churches to share their messages to a megaphone for Camping’s increasingly-marginal teachings. A prediction that the world would end in September 1994 would not be the last of Camping’s apocalyptic forecasts.
When Family Radio played a central role in a three-way 1978 frequency swap, it moved its programming from 97.3 on the FM dial, its home since 1959, to 106.9. That’s where it stayed until another frequency-swap deal 27 years later that landed the station on the 610 AM frequency long-associated with the legendary KFRC.
