Low-powered KPFB is a sister station of the Pacifica Foundation’s non-commercial KPFA. The Foundation asked the Federal Communications Commission for a permit to build the new station in 1953 and it went on the air in 1954.
We can best explain KPFB’s existence with an excerpt from the KPFA Folio program guide published in February 1954:
”To expand KPFA’s listener range, the station’s transmitter was moved from
downtown Berkeley to the top of the Berkeley hills, and in making the
move, we gained new subscribers in Marysville and Monterey, but lost a
good proportion of those subscribers who had originally helped the station
grow—listeners in the Berkeley Hills. Because KPFA’s hilltop transmitter
sent radio waves bouncing and echoing down through the hill area, those
original listeners found that KPFA’s signal sounded as if somebody was
muttering Urdu at the bottom of a rain barrel.Permission has now been granted KPFA by the Federal Communications
Commission to operate an auxilliary station—KPFB—which will
broadcast the same programs as KPFA and will beam its low powered
signal from the station’s studios in downtown Berkeley directly into the
hill area of Berkeley and El Cerrito. 10,000 families in the area will be
able to receive KPFA’s programs at 89.3 megacycles, at the extreme end
of the FM dial, and we hope that many of KPFA’s founding subscribers
will welcome the return of KPFA on February 14th. Over 75 listener
parties are already planned for that evening.There is of course no assurance that KPFA will not be broadcasting
some readings of Urdu poetry in the original sometime hence. But listeners
in the hill area can be assured that it will be good, clear, understandable
Urdu, and may it be enjoyed by all.”
Aside from live broadcasts of Berkeley City Council meetings, KPFB programming has long been a simulcast of what’s airing on KPFA.
