Radio KSFH 87.9

KSFH FM 87.9 is a student radio station broadcasting an active rock radio format. Licensed to serve Mountain View, California, USA, the station's broadcast range is the San Francisco Bay Area. The station is owned by private school Saint Francis High School, and is completely run by its students, broadcasting a wide range of music. The radio station is available in all of Mountain View, most of Los Altos, and the northern part of San Jose. The station also broadcasts home football, basketball, and baseball games.In the 1970s, KSFH broadcast from two rooms adjacent to the boys' gymnasium. The signal was so weak, it was joked that once you left the parking lot, you lost the signal. Patients in nearby El Camino Hospital (diagonally bordering the campus, separated by the football field) would call in and make requests. The format in that decade was album-oriented rock, emphasizing Jethro Tull, Yes, Led Zeppelin, and other major rock groups of the era. Despite its weak signal, music director Jeff McCallion successfully negotiated with several record labels (A&M Records among them) to provide free promotional records for the station to play. This was a rare benefit for a high school radio station. Many of the stations' student disc jockeys went on to work at KFJC FM -- the Foothill College radio station -- after high school.KSFH originally used 90.5 MHz before moving to 88.1 in 1982. KSFH moved to 87.9 MHz in 1999. The application to move to 87.9 was applied for on August 17, 1998 and granted in 1999. A license to cover was issued on October 9, 2001.KSFH is one of only two radio stations (K200AA being the other) that broadcast on 87.9; that frequency is not normally issued by the FCC due to it being in the same band as television channel 6. KSFH is the only one operating under the rules as written, which only permits the use of 87.9 for displaced full-service class-D FM stations. Other radio stations that broadcast below 88 MHz today must do so by having a low-power analog television broadcast license for channel 6, which would allows them to transmit with reduced modulation (and therefore at low sound volume) on 87.75 MHz; the FCC is no longer issuing new licenses of this sort, though some stations that predate this moratorium continue to operate, and this does not affect border blaster stations in Canada and Mexico.