Go Tell It On The Mountain

Mountains are synonymous with Colorado. When KUVO was a mere concept, mountains played a central role. KUVO had to transmit a beam to a high point – logically a tall tower on a tall mountain - from which its signal would be distributed sixty miles in all directions.

Denver’s KRMA was a protected broadcaster because the FCC had declared that nothing could interfere with the signal from any Channel 6 public television station. KCFR, which later became the behemoth CPR (Colorado Public Radio), already had its antenna perched on the Channel 6/KRMA tower up on Lookout Mountain. And KRMA wasn’t looking to add more weight on its tower – there was no room at the inn.

A couple of think-outside-the-box engineers, Ken Devine and Peter Trosclair from Louisiana, came up with an innovative solution. With guarded, conditional agreements from the engineers at KRMA and KCFR, Ken and Peter worked with a German transmitter company to test its invention – a diplexer. A 2-for-1 solution that ran KCFR’s and KUVO’s signal through a single antenna and created two distinct broadcasts without interfering with the KRMA transmission. If it didn’t work, KUVO went the way of the dinosaurs and KRMA and KCFR continued to live happily ever after.

But it worked! So forty years and many engineers later – Paul Montoya, Mike Pappas, Justin Peacock, Will Barnett, and Joey Kloss (now Rocky Mountain Public Media’s Chief Technology Officer) – KUVO is still on the air, broadcasting 24-hours a day.