Photo credit: athleticsnation.com

By: Amaury Pi-Gonzalez

Historic KIQI1010AM/990AM Oakland Athletics Spanish Radio Network used to be 10.000 watts at day and 500 Watts at night, but is now a clear 10,000 watts all day and all night. Owned by Multicultural Radio, a media company based in New York City owned by Chinese-American businessman Arthur Liu. it caters mostly to the multi-cultural community and owns television and radio stations in several of the top markets’ multiple languages. One of those stations is the flagship station for the Oakland Athletics Radio Network KIQI1010/990AM covering the nine counties of the Bay Area as well as Sacramento/Stockton and other communities in Northern California.

KIQI1010 AM radio is a historic radio station in the Bay Area that was once owned by James Gabbert, a radio and television entrepreneur and innovator. I met Gabbert at the last year’s Christmas party for the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame and we reminisced of the year 1980 when he sold the station to Cuban-born René De La Rosa, who became one of the first Latino owners of a radio station in the State of California. During the 1980’s, De La Rosa’s KIQI 1010AM broadcasted MLB and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors in Spanish with a format that included live news, sports and talk shows.

Gabbert, who speaks fluent Spanish, told me how proud he was of selling the station in 1980 to De La Rosa, who intended to change the format to Spanish. James Gabbert, who is still involved in the media business of radio and television, also told me he travels frequently to Latin America and predicted that California would become one of the largest markets in the US for Spanish format stations with the influx of the Hispanic population, the largest minority in California and in the United States.

With a signal of 10,000 watts, located in the middle of the radio dial (1010AM frequency), KIQI now can serve the over 2 million Hispanics in the Bay Area with a much stronger signal at night, which is vital for sports, especially most Major League games, which have night schedules.

These increases in wattage power are authorized by the FCC and sometimes takes years for a radio station to obtained that permission. The old KOFY had the radio dial of 1050 AM in Spanish format. The studios were located in Burlingame, near the San Francisco Airport. It took them many years to increase their wattage from 1000 watts to what it is today. Also, they originally had permission to broadcast from sunrise to sunset. It seems that it took them forever to become a 24/7 station.