FrankCalabrese

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KcprAudioUnknownYear

KcprAudio1971

harold

Over the next several years, I ended up doing various engineering jobs for most of the stations in the county. In 1974, Frank Calabrese, Eric Dausman, Len Filomeo, Gerry Franke, Rick Smith, and I started Hallikainen And Friends. We started as a station technical services company. Every Friday night, we had a crew that went north, covering the SLO through Paso Robles stations, and another crew that went south covering Arroyo Grande, Santa Maria, and Lompoc. After a few years of this, we started to design and manufacture equipment for radio and TV stations. Our best selling product (the TVA series of audio mixers for TV stations) was designed by Eric Dausman and Gerry Franke. One year, at the NAB convention, Len Filomeo dragged a guy into our booth and forced him to look at the TVA. He turned out to be from the Navy Broadcast Service. The US Navy went on to buy tons of those mixers to put in pre-fab TV stations that were put on ships. I designed various other products for H&F. Finally, by 1995, everyone who had founded H&F but me had gone on to "real jobs." We sold the assets of H&F to Dove Systems. I designed most of the products Dove now sells.

KcprHistory1968-69

  • Frank Calabrese told me early-on that the first words spoken over KCPR were, "Christ! Are we on the air?" This was before the license had even arrived, bootlegging using the stolen KCSB Phasitron transmitter. (from Jan A. Tarsala, KCPR engineer 1975-77)