Soquel's Pseudo-KYA Sunk

KYAA/1200 in Soquel (Santa Cruz County) has dropped its oldies music format, which has been replaced with foreign-language programming.

The change was made at midnight Wednesday morning (June 15).

The licensee of KYAA, People's Radio of Sand City (population: 270), is owned by Joe Rosa, a San Jose realtor who is prominent in the Portuguese-American community. Mr. Rosa formerly owned KATD/95.3 in Los Gatos (it's now Empire Broadcasting's KRTY) and Pittsburg-Concord's KATD/990 (which he switched from KKIS), where KYAA afternoon DJ Jim "Vossenova" Vossen served as his general manager.

Vossenova carried KYAA through its waning Oldies hours, spinning gold and taking calls from listeners. (He identified the new format for me as "East Indian" and the language as Hindi in a conversation on Thursday afternoon.)

KYAA had created a buzz among local nostalgia radio fiends (population: me) by calling itself "KYA" and using several of the dearly departed 1260/KYA's Top 40-era jingles. In addition to Vossenova, the station used ABC's syndicated "Good Time Rock'N'Roll" via satellite for the bulk of its programming, including DJs Dave Michaels and Ron Foster.