We first reported back on May 16, that plans were in the works for college radio station KFKX 90.1 FM at Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska to leave the air. Well, the day has come this Thursday, June 30th. Over the weekend, alumni came back to celebrate the station (see video here) and prior to […]
It’s been particularly exciting for me to visit some of the new low power FM (LPFM) community radio stations that are in development thanks to the Local Community Radio Act. After an all-day field trip from Washington, D.C. to Culpeper, Virginia (to see the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center), […]
I hope you caught this week’s Radio Survivor Podcast (episode #51), in which I talk about the history of carrier current college radio. Dating back to 1936, college radio carrier current stations starting popping up on campuses in earnest throughout the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond. At one point there were rumored to be […]
After visiting WCUA at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. on February 24, I made my way to Georgetown in order to check out college radio station WGTB at Georgetown University. Since it’s a bit more difficult to get to via the Metro system, I opted for a long walk to campus, with a break mid-way […]
Thanks to Matthew Lasar for pointing out that this year marks the 80th anniversary of carrier current broadcasting on college campuses. According to Louis Bloch’s 1980 tome, Gas Pipe Networks, the first carrier current college radio station launched at Brown University in 1936. The technology caught on and by the late 1970s there were purportedly […]
I own a lot of books about the history of radio. Unique among them is Louis M. Bloch Jr.’s charming and strange volume titled The Gas Pipe Networks: A History of College Radio, 1936-1946. Every now and then I open its pages and am transported to a distant world of struggling collegiate stations. The tome chronicles lads and […]
It’s summertime in college radio, which means that many stations are working with skeleton crews or are off-the-air (or off-the-net) for a few months. This became all the more clear to me this week, as my attempts to visit a few Southern California college radio stations were thwarted due to post-graduation closures. For many stations, […]
Editor’s Note: This is part two of Fred Krock’s three-part series on San Francisco Bay Area radio in the early 1950s. In part one he gave an overview of what the radio dial sounded like then. Fred got his start at Stanford University’s station in Palo Alto, which is where the story picks up. When […]
The next stop on my radio journey is to college radio station WCUA at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. After arriving in D.C. on Wednesday, February 24, 2016, I took the Metro to the university’s stop at Brookland. Rain was in the forecast, but I enjoyed my walk to the edge of campus […]
On Saturday July 2 Australia will hold national elections for all 226 members of its Parliament. Supporters of community radio across the country are taking advantage of this attention to demand the restoration of $1.4 million in cuts to the service. Almost 49,000 Australians have added their names to a #keepcommunityradio petition page. The petition reads in […]
