KWKR-FM 99.9 Garden City KS EBS Test 1985

I am posting this one for all my Kansas radio friends whom I worked with back in the day.  KWKR was one of my first radio gigs.  I worked there from 1984-86, first hosting nights and then afternoons.  On my last day, I decided to be “cute” with the EBS test.  Our engineer had warned us NOT to do this!  “Play it straight.  Don’t make jokes or comments.  The FCC considers the Emergency Broadcasting System to be serious stuff!”  But being the snot-nosed 21 year old kid that I was, I had to break the rules to see if I could get away with it.  After all, it was my last day.  What were they going to do?  Fire me?

The EBS test was rather difficult to perform on KWKR.  You had to patch the tone generator from the KIUL-AM studio, then pot it up on the KWKR control board.  After doing this, you would fire the intro cart, run into the KIUL studio, hit the tone, then run back before the tone ended to fire the outro cart!  I wasn’t quick enough getting into the AM, which explains the dead air before the tone is heard. 

This was recorded directly off the KWKR studio monitor.  An inexpensive Realistic mono “shoebox” recorder was used as an aircheck skimmer.  The tape ran slow when recording, so it a bit too fast on playback.  I’m not going to complain, though.  I’m just glad these tapes have survived for over 33 years.  Source tape was a TDK D90 cassette.  Our engineer Dave Sawyer voices the intro and outro.

KWKR_FM_EBS_Test_November_15_1985

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *