User:Bkwilcox/sandbox

KCMU began in mid-1971 at the University of Washington, Seattle WA USA. It was started by four University of Washington undergraduates named John Kean, Cliff Noonan, Victoria ("Tory") Fiedler, and Brent Wilcox. The station known as KUOW-FM (on 94.9 MHz), was then partially an instructional radio station, became an NPR affiliate station, and featured arts and culture programming, current affairs, and classical music. It had then made some cutbacks that had removed many of the opportunities for student involvement in the station. These four students became a small committee and convinced the UW Communications School Department to sponsor the creation of a new small radio station that could be dedicated for student involvement in all phases of its broadcasts. They asked the school to provide space and a tiny budget with which they bought "turntables, tape cartridges, and a few other items like plywood." They built their own broadcast console cabinets, and assembled a rather impressive array of used equipment to put together the infrastructure needed to get on the air. They carefully and successfully petitioned the UW Board of Regents and the FCC for a frequency and a small power license. They arranged for antenna placement on one of the nearby high rise dormitories with a tower they raised themselves with mounting help from the campus engineers. Ultimately they raised their own antenna, one of the few items they were able to purchase with UW support, on a cold winter day. The 10-watt signal "barely reached the Ave" (the commercial heart of Seattle's University District) but did reach most of the campus. The transmitter was actually not a transmitter by definition but an "exciter" which normally would be used to drive a high power radio system. But it did create the licensed power of ten watts.

https://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/archive.html