A Day in the Life: KCRW’s Chief Engineer, Steve Herbert

My first stop was at 7:40 am above Santa Paula as to correct a situation which was triggering a monitor alarm for the site. The alarm threshold was set a little too tight which in turn sent text alerts to us through out the previous night.

From South Mountain I headed to our KCRI transmitter above Indio which is accessed via unpaved road across the desert and a climb only possible in a 4WD vehicle.

I was delivering equipment to project engineers Tom King and Hal Williams who were working at the site. Access to the site is across land which is actively being mined by a neighboring cement plant to use for gravel. It requires leaving the main highway and transversing a rough utility road through the locked mining area. Once through that we drive through some deep sand to reach the base of the step climb up to the site. Here’s a shot of the road and our truck with the hilltop and road up the hilltop visible in the distance.

I was on site for a couple of hours arriving around noon and then scrambled off to reach site number three for the day.

This was to our 90.9 signal located in the San Gorgonio mountains above Banning and Beaumont. The site is called “Snow Peak” at 7980′ and is snowed in from November through May. Here’s some pictures of the site in May with ice on the tower, antennas and trees with a temperature that day of 38 degrees.

On the the June trip it was in the low 60’s and you’d never guess there had been snow there. I arrived there around 3:30pm and successfully repaired a cooling fan on the transmitter for that site. This day I saw several deer, a fox and coyote (I believe) as I drove up and down the dirt mountain roads to the site. It’s not uncommon to encounter bear at this site as well.

While its unusual to hit three sites in the same day, not unusual are the scenic views, the wildlife, and the long hours and miles of driving it takes to reach these sites in the effort to provide our radio signals of KCRW to you.