The concept for the stations was developed by Howard Anderson. At the time, Anderson was the vice president of marketing of the Desert Inn. He recognized that residents of Southern California represented a large portion of Las Vegas tourism, that travellers heading to Vegas on I-15 were a captive audience for advertising local casinos and hotels (as an alternative to prohibitively expensive ad time in Los Angeles itself), and that there were little to no radio stations along the corridor. While his plans were briefly stalled by the death of Desert Inn owner Howard Hughes, Anderson began to actively pursue the establishment of his highway radio stations in 1978. He scouted two transmitter sites; Calico Peaks near Yermo, California, and Clark Mountain near Mountain Pass, California, which he believed would provide sufficient coverage of the route.