Jim Gabbert’s 1997 sale of Oakland’s legendary KDIA to the Walt Disney Company closed a long chapter in Bay Area radio history. On the night of December 15, 1997 blues disc jockey Frankie M. spun his last song on KDIA. The station then became Radio Disney, part of a new network created by Disney to target children under 12 (and their parents) with fast-paced music and other programming based on the Disney brand.
KGO’s Mickey Luckoff served as general manager of the new co-owned property. It would be a few more weeks before the call letters were officially changed to KMKY (the “MKY” representing “Mickey Mouse”).
Disney never gained much listener traction with the station; the Fall 2000 San Francisco Arbitron ratings report listed 37 stations and KMKY wasn’t along them.
The station ran a busy promotional operation, sponsoring numerous family-focused events. In 2007, KMKY moved its studios and offices from San Francisco to a location in the San Carlos Business Park on Industrial Road. While Oakland remained the city of license, San Carlos officials said it was the first time a commercial radio station had called the Peninsula city home.
Meanwhile, Disney was beginning to offer ways of hearing Radio Disney that didn’t require an AM radio. The service was being offered online and via the Sirius/XM satellite service. By the summer of 2014, Disney made it official: it would sell off its terrestrial radio stations to focus on digital distribution.
In June 2015, Disney filed notice with the Federal Communications Commission that it planned to transfer the KMKY license to a group headed by Charanjit Singh Batth for a reported $600,000 sale price.Â
Batth’s Radio Punjab AM 1310 Inc. would maintain the KMKY call letters but switch the programming to target the estimated 500,000 South Asians in the Bay Area, primarily of Indian origin.
Studios and offices are in Milpitas. In 2022, KMKY abandoned the longstanding antenna array near the Bay Bridge toll plaza and began a diplex transmitter operation with KSFN from a site in West Oakland.
