Brooklyn, NY has been a hotbed of pirate radio activity for quite some time. The borough is home to many ethnic and religious communities that are not well served by the region’s major broadcasters, leading some to take to the airwaves to serve local needs without a license. As Prof. John Anderson of DIYmedia.net explained […]
The Blackwater Estuary is in the English county of Essex. Despite its closeness to Colchester, England’s oldest town, it is a remote and lonely stretch of water, just down the coast from the busy seaside resort of Clacton on Sea. The small village of Bradwell is an ideal location for a nuclear power station, forlorn […]
Long-time Radio Survivor readers know that I’ve been tracking one of the stranger vestiges of analog television in the US: channel 6 low-power TV stations that can be heard at the far left end of the FM dial. I’ve called them “back door” stations, while others in the radio industry call them “FrankenFMs.” Since low-power […]
I am so looking forward to Penny Lane’s new documentary on John Romulus Brinkley, coming here to San Francisco in early July. Titled Nuts! it chronicles “Doctor” Brinkley’s rise as the Depression era midwestern mega-quack who championed the grafting of goat glands into the gonads of his patients. To promulgate this astoundingly bad cure for male sexual […]
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 […]
I dropped by Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley the other day to be interviewed about my new book on digital/Internet radio. After the conversation, my interlocutor Brian Edwards-Tiekert took me upstairs and I had the pleasure of meeting the operation’s General Manager, Quincy McCoy. I’ve heard nothing but good things about McCoy, and meeting him […]
Editor’s Note: Fred Krock is a retired broadcaster who worked in commercial broadcasting in San Francisco and New York City. An electrical engineer, he got his start in radio at KZSU at Stanford University in 1950. Fred offered to share his memories of KZSU and radio in the Bay Area from that time, and we […]
Are you ready? Drum roll… It’s time for my 100th radio station field trip post. Eight years after my first radio station field trip, I’ve traveled to various pockets of the United States (covering 14 states, plus District of Columbia) and Ireland in order to feast my eyes on a wide range of radio stations, […]
While visiting New York City in February, I was glad to be able to visit Hunter College’s college radio station WHCS on the morning of Saturday, February 20. The station’s President and General Manager Sarah Settineri escorted me to the station (security on college campuses in New York City is pretty intense) and filled me […]
The long-standing punk rock magazine Maximum RockNRoll has launched a crowfunding campaign to create the ultimate punk archive. The organization has been documenting punk rock since 1977 by producting a radio show, releasing records, putting on shows, and publishing a monthly magazine, which began in 1982. It’s hard to overstate the massive cultural impact punk […]
