Along with two partners, Jorgensen recently rented a multiroom office on the third floor of a tower at the corner of 17th Street and Irvine Avenue. They furnished one room — the broadcasting booth — with an L-shaped desk loaded with all of the necessary equipment and microphones. From behind the desk you can see the Santa Ana Mountains over the tree tops through a panoramic window. On the thick magenta carpet sit many small stacks of blues CDs.
An antenna is planted on the roof of the building, broadcasting Dr. Barry’s blues with a power of 50 watts. Just for a little comparison, the nearest station broadcasting on the same frequency — San Diego’s KGB-FM (101.5) — puts out a signal with 60,000 watts of power (more than 1,000 times stronger).
Listeners can hear KOCI pretty clearly throughout most of Costa Mesa, but even on the Balboa Peninsula, less than a couple of miles from the station, the signal is weak and broken up by interference from competing stations.
Three men run KOCI. Two have day jobs and one is retired. Jorgensen is a lawyer in Riverside, about a 90-minute drive away. When he’s in town doing a radio show he often stays at the home of one of his partners, Brian Helvey, who lives close to the station office in Costa Mesa near the Back Bay.
Helvey first came up with the idea to start a community radio station. He initiated the long application process with the FCC to get a low-power broadcasting permit almost a decade ago and then bankrolled the start-up expenses with $15,000 of his own money when the permit was finally granted this year.
Among the three men, Helvey is the only one without a radio background, but he was drawn to the station by the prospect of performing a community service.
