Early years WJHU had its antecedents in the mid-1940s with an informal broadcast from Levering Hall on the
Homewood campus. In the early 1950s the
campus radio station moved into the basement of the Alumni Memorial Residences II (AMR II), where it would stay for the next thirty years. WJHU transmitted on the 830
AM frequency in the dormitories via
carrier current (a low-wattage transmission using the wiring in buildings). By the mid-1970s, the station operated with students running 3-hour shows on a 24/7 programming schedule. The station also carried away
Johns Hopkins lacrosse games with student announcers. A long-time goal of the station was to transition to being an actual broadcast station on
FM (which was the ostensible reason for requiring all staff to obtain a
U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 3rd class operator's license). Technical issues in 1975 led to suspension of broadcasting for much of the academic year and to questions among the staff concerning management. This in turn led in early 1976 to changes in management, programming, and use of facilities, as well as to increased attention from the university administration.
FM transition In 1977, the student managers of the station and the university administration agreed to push for an FCC license to broadcast on 88.1 FM. Official and budgetary support from the university administration made this possible, and final approval for a 10-watt station on 88.1 FM came from the FCC in 1978. WJHU-FM began broadcasting in 1979, featuring a mixed format with jazz in the early morning, classical during the day, specialty programming in the early evening during weekdays and Saturday/Sunday morning including 60's oldies (with radio announcer Michael Yockel), acoustic/folk music (No Strings Attached with radio announcer Gary Kenneth Bass), art-rock (with radio announcer Janet Sanford), bluegrass (with radio announcer Carol Burris) and Irish music (with radio announcer Myron Bretholz); rock till midnight (predominantly new wave), and its signature NAR ("Not Available Radio") progressive programming at night, along with short news programming. The signal extended off campus and the students hired for the first time a non-student to oversee the station full-time and ensure compliance with FCC rules and university expectations. The station operated twenty-four hours a day. Faced with FCC deregulation of low-wattage FM stations in the early 1980s, and in order to protect the frequency, the student managers decided to apply for a 25,000 watt license, which would extend the audience throughout the Baltimore and
Washington DC area. The station returned to the air in February 1985. WJHU became the area
National Public Radio affiliate, The station and frequency were sold by the university in early 2002 to Your Public Radio Corp., a locally based group of station talk hosts and listeners, and became
WYPR.
Revival of student radio on carrier-current In the early 1990s, students founded the alternative on-campus
carrier current AM radio station called WHAT radio and later renamed WHSR (standing for Hopkins Student Radio). Like the earlier WJHU-AM, this station transmitted within the dorms, but it also added Levering Hall and the Charles apartments. This effort ended in 2000. ==References==