In early April 2023, I had the fortuitous coincidence that a good friend and colleague had moved to Sitka, in the southeast Alaska panhandle and was involved with the local NPR/community radio station in town: KCAW “Raven Radio”. 

Right about that time the station had lost their Operations Director, and their General Manager (the esteemed Becky Meiers) was leaving for three weeks of long overdue and well-deserved vacation. KCAW is a small shop, and while the GM was pretty technically inclined, nobody else still on staff was. Fortunately, KCAW is a CoastAlaska member station, and they have an extensive remote support/operations schema already in-place.

So they recommended hiring me to come out for the week before Becky left…which coincided with their semi-annual pledge drive…and then I would handle a bunch of technical tasks remotely from home afterwards for the weeks she was out. 

Naturally, I was excited to be trusted with a pretty large responsibility, but also to scratch another state off my personal list; and one I had thought I’d have to accept I’d never make it to! After Alaska, that just leaves Hawaii (which will be tough), Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Idaho as states I haven’t visited. Everywhere else I’ve at least driven through, or actually spent time in. I don’t count wandering through an airport as a “visit”. :-) 

It is a bit of a journey to get there, of course. Alaska Airlines is the main, if not only, way to reach most of Southeast Alaska. And almost every flight goes through Seattle/Tacoma first, then lands at Ketchikan before going on various “milk runs” to Juneau, Sitka, Wrangell, etc. 

Besides being the rainiest city in America, and home to the infamous “bridge to nowhere” (which actually wasn’t nearly as ridiculous as its detractors tried to make it seem) Ketchikan is more or less the southernmost “city” in Alaska, so it’s a logical launchpoint. 

It’s also longer than I thought to get there. For some reason I had it in my head that SE Alaska wasn’t all that far from Seattle and Vancouver. I was dead wrong. It’s longer to fly from Seattle to Ketchikan than it is to fly from Seattle to San Francisco. And Sitka is another 45 minutes in the air after Ketchikan!

And as I would quickly learn, the weather is highly variable in Sitka. It doesn’t snow all that much; the ocean moderates temperatures too much and it doesn’t usually get much colder than mid-30’s nor more warmer than mid-50’s. But on any given day it can be clear skies and sunny, then cloudy, then really cloud, then pouring rain, then foggy, then a bit of snow, then more rain, then sunny again, then more clouds and fog, etc etc etc. And this changes on an hour-by-hour basis. I see why some folks go nuts from Seasonal Affective Disorder because it’s definitely more rain than sun here (not quite as rainy as Ketchikan, but Seattle ain’t got nothin’ on Sitka rain-wise).

After a full day of flying from Boston, I collapsed and awoke the next day to a delicious brunch at Beak, the cafe on the first floor of the historic Cable House. Owned by KCAW, they occupy the second floor entirely, and have a merch salesroom and “Studio Xeno” on the first floor, too.

After a quick but thorough tour on Sunday and a lot of note-taking, the pledge drive began early Monday morning and we were off to the races. I shant bore you with details of the drive; if you’ve been through one pledge drive you’ve been through ’em all. Although there was one bit of heroic action I was able to provide: at one point on Thursday, the FM signal just “disappeared” for no obvious reason. Becky was on the air, so she couldn’t leave to troubleshoot. Instead she tossed me the keys to her car and the transmitter site (across the harbor) and asked me to check it out. Good thing she’d given me a tour of the transmitter room on Wednesday!

Turns out that day was when a particular power strip had decided to give up the ghost, and took down the Moseley Starlink 950MHz STL receiver (among other things). A quick trip back to grab a replacement and we were up and running in less than an hour!

Anyways, here’s a bunch of really nice pics I was able to take throughout the week.