KOAC is one of the oldest radio stations in Oregon. It was first licensed, with the sequentially assigned
call letters KFDJ, to Oregon Agricultural College (now
Oregon State University) on December 7, 1922. It made its debut broadcast on January 23, 1923. Its call sign became KOAC — the last three letters being the initials of Oregon Agricultural College — in late 1925. KOAC was one of a number of AM stations started by universities in the early days of radio as a way to experiment in the new medium and train future broadcasters. Unlike most early radio stations that had to share a frequency with other stations, KOAC was eventually able to have a frequency to itself full-time. In the 1930s, it was powered at 1,000 watts. In 1932, the station's management was transferred from Oregon State College to the
Oregon State Board of Higher Education's General Extension Division. However, the state headquarters and network studios remained at the university's campus in Corvallis. The first broadcasts by KOAC were made from the original campus studio in Kearny Hall in 1923. From 1928 to 2006, KOAC's studios were on campus in Covell Hall, where OSU faculty and students broadcast educational programs and later live news programs across the state. Starting in the 1950s, the board signed on a number of
simulcast radio stations in Portland, Eugene and other communities. It also began a sister network of television stations fronted by KOAC-TV (channel 7, which signed on in 1957). This group became known as Oregon Educational Broadcasting, with KOAC AM-TV as
flagship stations. OEB evolved into the Oregon Educational and Public Broadcasting Service (OEPBS) in 1971. The radio and TV studios remained on the Corvallis campus until 1981. The network was then spun-off from the Board of Higher Education and became a separate state agency known as
Oregon Public Broadcasting. At that time, the satellite stations in Portland, KOAP-FM-TV (now
KOPB-FM-
TV), became the flagship stations. ==References==