KVPR Public Radio Receives Large Grant for New Replacement Transmitter

The Valley’s public radio station, KVPR, won’t have to worry about going off the air in the event of a natural disaster soon.

The station was awarded a grant of up to $38,607 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to build an emergency auxiliary transmitter site as a backup to its transmitter at Meadow Lakes near Auberry.

Funding is provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through the Next Generation Alert System grant program.

Staying on the air is critical to distributing emergency alerts to other area radio and TV stations, said Joe Moore, the station’s general manager. KVPR and KMJ are the only two stations with that responsibility in the San Joaquin Valley, he told GV Wire on Thursday.

The system is designed to work even when internet and cell phone service is down, Moore said.

“The problem was that disasters, which often required emergency notifications, increasingly threatened our broadcast infrastructure and our ability to deliver those notifications,” he said in an email.

KVPR has been taken off the air twice in the past four years due to emergencies at Meadow Lakes, starting with the Creek Fire in 2020 and record snowfall in February and March of 2023, Moore said.

And KVPR isn’t the only publicly funded station at risk; Valley PBS went dark in June after a fire destroyed the station’s transmission facility in Bear Mountain. A few months later, it was able to continue over-the-air broadcasting exclusively on digital channel 18.1, thanks to a deal with Cocola Broadcasting in Fresno.

Related Story: Valley PBS is Back on the Air. But You’ll Need to Rescan Your TV Channels

The New Transmitter Will Be Close to Home

KVPR will use the grant to install a replacement low-power transmitter the station already has at the Clovis studios on Alluvial Boulevard at Temperance Boulevard, Moore said.

“This will allow us to stay live in the immediate metro area,” he said. “This not only increases the reliability of our programming, but also our ability to provide emergency alerts to listeners/viewers of all other broadcast operations locally.”

KVPR’s grant is one of two awarded in California and one of 38 awarded in the $40 million first round of funding approved by Congress in fiscal year 2022.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received applications from 170 stations seeking more than $109 million in the second round, for which Congress approved $56 million in fiscal year 2023. FEMA recently announced that the company will administer the third round of $40 million approved by Congress. In fiscal year 2024.