You’re not one of The Bacon Boys perchance? I know Pete Brandtman was one of them. He is still with 2ST!
I got into DXing somewhat in 1994; Power FM was the most distant station I could reliably receive from Oatley on my cheap boombox, and so I listened quite frequently in the 90s. I was only in primary school then so it seemed exotic to be listening to a South Coast station.
Nah I predate the Bacon Boys by quite a few years. Power FM launched in October 1991, Pete Brandtman and Dave Brown (Bacon Boys) were on Breakfast in the late 90’s.
Pete’s still there, Brownie works on the Central Coast nowadays.
Is this the same ‘Brownie’ that’s been on the Central Coast/Newcastle dials for years (at least since the early 2000s?) I’ve never made that connection. Small radio world if so.
I wasn’t listening in '91; didn’t really explore the dial beyond the Sydney stations until '94. To be fair I was only 5 in 1991. In 1994 Power FM thrashed songs like ‘American Life In The Summertime’. My memory is that the ‘Bacon Boys’ were on by then but can’t be sure. I did prefer Maroon and Milly on i98…
I remember listening to the opening broadcast of Power fm and the very first song, the Power by Snap. Like @dxnerd I also lived in Oatley and was able to receive the station through my old hifi with a very long wire fm antenna up the wall. The launch day happened to coincide with school holidays so that is how I caught it. The good old days before Rhema CC caused CCI.
@Barry who was your co host, and is she still in radio?
Like most radio these days Power fm is nowhere as good as it was back in the early to mid nighties, when they had that one #1 survey before the launch of i98 and Wave fm. Grant / ARN using the same playlist across Wave and Power fm certainty does not help either.
Belinda Peake is another one I remember from Power. Not sure if she was the female co-host?
from SEN (Radio) post, my comment is more relevant to Radio History:
I used to listen to:
Radio Moscow
Radio Sweden
BBC World Service
Radio Nederland
Voice of America
AFRTS (US Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, they had live coverage of baseball and NFL)
HCJB Quito Ecuador
Radio Australia
Radio Canada International
Spanish Foreign Radio
Even mainstream publications such as the Age Green Guide used to have a short wave column which reviews stations and mentions their frequencies and times in UTC/GMT. Shortwave peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I only briefly dabbled in shortwave, this was my favourite station
KYOI Superrock
Yes that was the only one I ever recall receiving too. It was pretty good.
Another good column was written by Arthur Cushen in Electronics Australia(I think). Once for an experiment I made a crystal set with a short coil so it tuned shortwave and I was easily able to hear Radio Australia, VOA and Radio Peking via a crystal earpiece. Lots of RF needed to do that.
Mid 1970’s for me - crystal set led to ham radio which lead to being a broadcasting tech. All ancient history now.
A brief ident from KYOI - video has most of the stations I regularly received.
After a long hiatus, i’m scratching the heads once again on how tf can guys at DMG/RGCapital/Macquarie could form an ultra-big regional radio network that would later be collectively known as LocalWorks… only to be swallowed up by MMM.
Even when checking the RadioWest network (LocalWorks member for Southwestern Australia/Southern WA)
Let’s see:
Some of the Perth guys (6PR/6IX/6KY/6TZ/6PM) began expanding outside the metropolitan by building local transmitters:
6IX - 6WB/MD
6PR - 6TZ and later CI
6PM - 6AM/KG/GE (incidentally reunited somehow, thanks SCA buying Redwave)
6KY - 6NA
And then i got this: TZ, CI and NA broken off from their metropolitan parents, only to found themselves came together, and became sister of GWN as GWN Radio (until GWN sold off radio division in 1988)
WB and MD done the same, and coupled with WB - BY - SE, creating the Rainbow Radio Network.
GE later went independent, later switched to FM and merged into WAFM - later RedFM and Hit.
AM and KG also independent too.
Then someone else acquired Rainbow, GWN Radio, AM and KG, and merged these branches into a single RadioWest network (that was 1995, right?), and Radiowest later became a member of LocalWorks network… only to be swallowed by Triple (A)M in 2016.
Just surprising that didn’t know why DMG/RG/Macquarie could group a lot of heritage AM stations across Australia into a regional radio programming service… that, only to be “nationalised” by (A)MMM.
Hope @myfriend #myfriends here could help anyway…
edit: it’s sad that i could now only embed once… i had collected a lot of rare stuff from google T^T
welcome back myfriend @theduytv
here is a 6VA version of the Rainbow logo from 1985, then again in 1993…
man i downloaded these from google just to put it on the post, but it said that i only allowed for 1 media per post @myfriend…
‘Rainbow Radio’ is an appropriate slogan for an Albany station:
i literally laughed hard after seeing this @myfriend
Apparently today marks the 75th anniversary of the first ABC news broadcast, although I was always of the impression that ABC carried a news service during WWII and was probably the main source of radio news during the war?
From what I’ve read the ABC act was passed in 1946 that declared that ABC should set up an “independent” news service with its own sources - ‘secure its news for broadcasting purposes within the Commonwealth by its own staff, and abroad through such overseas news agencies and other overseas sources as it desired’
So it was 1 June 1947 when ABC’s independent news came into being. Prior, a lot of the news came from newspapers with only a limited number of ABC journalists.
At a previous anniversary the news opened with “ABC Independent News 40 years old today”.
This Saturday (4th June) will mark 2ST’s 50th Birthday. The Nowra-based station launched on 1000 kHz (later 999 kHz from Nov 1978) & then launched its Southern Highlands (Bowral) translator on 1215 kHz in 1979, which later converted to FM in 1999. Their main AM service converted to FM in February 2021.
Eagle FM didn’t came on the air until January 1997, about 3 years after Kix 106 became Canberra FM.
Yep, definitely '97 as I remember promos on 2GN at the end of '96, foreshadowing the launch of the new FM station. It went something along the lines of ‘finally…the wait is over, a new FM station for Goulburn’.
