Viewers will find an increasingly varied schedule of programs for the community, better audio for the channel's broadcasts of Saratoga government meetings and a colorful multimedia community bulletin board that includes video, audio and graphic elements.

"We're trying to bring the station into the digital age," said Carolyn De Los Santos, director of KSAR and producer of its sister channel, KEDU 26, which provides educational programming for West Valley College. "I feel in the last year we've really made progress."

KSAR is distributed over AT&T cable to Saratoga subscribers and offers its services and the use of its facilities—including a complete sound stage, professional lighting, a master control room and editing rooms—to local individuals and nonprofit organizations.

De Los Santos has been trying to bring improvements to the station since she arrived more than a year ago. During that time, she and her staff, part-timers Scott Brown and Wendy Reed, along with the Saratoga Community Access Cable TV Foundation board of directors, have been able to make significant improvements. But, De Los Santos said, they're not done yet.

Her vision is for KSAR to serve the community the best way it can—carefully adding that it will never rival television networks or major cable stations, and that it doesn't intend to. However, she said, she wants to get more digital video cameras to provide better pictures for its coverage of government meetings and other community events, as well as some full-time staffers to handle the engineering, editing and marketing components of putting programs together.

She is enthusiastic about all kinds of new ideas, hers and others'. The station this month will start showing a weekly half-hour talk show, Sit Down with Stan, featuring guests who will be interviewed by new West Valley College chancellor Stan Arterberry. De Los Santos splits her job between working for the city and working for the college, and she hopes the program will help bring the college and the community together.

A new router and automatic tape playback equipment has allowed the station to try out all-day programming on Saturdays, when the station isn't staffed. As the kinks are worked out, they hope to offer such programming on a regular basis, De Los Santos said.

"The weekends are what we're going to try to have a little fun with," she said.

Its weekend programs could include projects similar to ones she's already working on—coverage of community events like the Foothill Club's Memorial Day visit to Madronia Cemetery and a documentary, in conjunction with the Saratoga Historical Museum, about Saratoga's pioneers.

And, as a result of Sept. 11, which closed the West Valley College campus, where the station is located, KSAR has established an emergency operations center at the civic theater. The center, which can run off a generator, will allow the station to broadcast important community information in the event of an emergency, De Los Santos said, either over channel 15 or through its partner radio station, AM 1610.

But making all of these ideas reality will cost money—more than the station's entire $100,000 yearly budget, she said. The station's operating costs are generally split between the city and the college, but De Los Santos is hoping to attract a broader cross section of contributors from the local community who can appreciate the value of community cable access.

"If we're able to achieve support, then we're able to offer more," she said. "We'd like to be able to do more, but we're looking at big dollars."