Radio buy adds to mini-media empire in San Antonio

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A major media empire in a given market might include some blowtorch FMs and a couple of television stations. The group being added to in San Antonio by Claro Communications Ltd. isn’t going to live up to those lofty and often waiver-requiring standards, but it does touch the radio and video bases with no waiver needed.


The station being bought is KEDA-AM, licensed to San Antonio itself. Claro principal Gerald G. Benavides will pay $700K to Albert Davila’s D&E Broadcasting Company Inc. for the station. $200K of that will be in cash, and Benavides will pay the rest at 5% interest over the course of six years at the rate of $5.5K monthly.

The station plays Tejano on 1540 kHz with 5 kW-D, 1 kW-N, DA2. It has excellent market coverage during the day, but is limited to the southern part of the city at night, while still throwing a secondary signal over most of the rest of the urban area.

The station will double up with KBRN-AM, a station currently throwing out 250 W-D on 1500 kHz, covering an area northwest of the city. That is scheduled to change, however – it holds a CP that will up its daytime power to 1.9 kW and will add night services, however with only a modest 15 W.

Benavides, with brothers Albert and Rick, has media interest in Texas, Florida and California. Included in that are both radio and low power television properties, and two of the latter are in San Antonio – KBNB-LP and KFLZ-LP gives Benavides access to an audience on both audio and visual broadcast media, and low power facilities do not have to be figured in when determining if a cluster is within the local ownership caps. Hence, no waiver required.