Welcome to the Alice@97.3 transmitter site. The transmitter is located on top of beautiful Mt. Beacon in Sausalito. Mt. Beacon is just north and west of the Golden Gate Bridge and sits 1115 feet above the bay. There are four commercial FM stations located here, Alice@97.3 (KLLC), KBGG, KDFC and KEAR. The site is also host to multitudes of two-way transmitters and cellular phones.
In this photo you can see the Alice tower. Alice broadcasts with 82,000 watts of power making it the third most powerful FM station in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alice's antennas are located on the side of the tower. They are the eight rings that you see on the wider part of the tower. The four rings on the pole at the top of the tower are KDFC's antenna.
If your interested, the following is a quickie course in FM antennas.
Unlike AM radio stations that feed the transmitter power into the whole tower structure, FM antennas sit on the side or top of a tower and are electrically isolated from the tower structure itself. FM stations also use multiple antennas to increase the radiated power. If you take two of the rings that you see on the tower and feed a transmitter into them you will get just slightly less out than what you fed in, eg. 10,000 watts in would give about 9800 watts out. This is because the antennas, also known as "bays", have a gain of less than one. If you stack the antennas as you see in the picture, you can add the gain of each antenna together. In our antenna we have eight bays. If two bays give a gain of about one, eight bays will have a gain of about four. If we feed 20,500 watts into our antenna we will get about 82,000 watts out, four times 20,500 equals 82,000.
In actuality, Alice uses 20,000 watts TPO. The stated gain of the eight bay RCA antenna is over four. This means that even with transmission line loss the antenna still has enough gain to make 82,000 watts ERP with only 20KW in!
Questions or comments about the tour?
Updated 01/22/99
KCBS-KLLC ENGINEERING DEPT