It’s a better name than Vega (i didn’t mind that either). I don’t think anyone really knew what Vega meant, which is partly why i think that failed.
I recall back in 2001 when DMG first announced Nova as the brand for 96.9 in Sydney… the execs at 2Day and Mix etc were apparently convinced it was a “fake” name and that the real name would be revealed when the station went to air.
I think Nova was successful because it was so different.
The station names for both NOVA & VEGA come from stars in constellations in the sky, they were chosen to be different from other radio station names & related to the ether or aether of where the radio waves travel, with the definition being “a medium that in the wave theory of light & electromagnetic radiation permeates all space and transmits transverse waves (Radio Waves)”.
The “fake” name thought came about because prior to going on air, NOVA had a code name so the real name was kept secret. Funnily enough though they only reversed the letters & the code name was AVON.
The transmitters at Gore Hill, still to this day have the code name label on the front of them, dating back to the initial install, before the real name was announced, so no other techs visiting the site could let the name slip, the 96.9 transmitters were only known to being installed to be the transmitters for AVON.
The VEGA transmitters had the same code name & labeling, to keep VEGA secret, but it was known by then that AVON was just NOVA backwards & they were for the sister station.
DMG also wanted to be different in their NOVA station call-signs, with all of them being the local airport code, i.e. NOVA 96.9 Sydney is 2SYD FM & the international airport code for Mascot is SYD, same in other states.
And also related back to DMG regional STAR network.
That was actually a DMG system earlier than Nova. All the new/s39 FM regional licences they got in the late 90’s used the local airport code aswell.
The Story I was told by somebody up the chain was staff were asked to put forward names they liked… I cant remember the guys name who come up with Nova but I remember he was a production guy
I also thought Nova came about because it meant “new”.
Must be very old based on the frequencies of the radio stations on the dial. In the Brisbane area 4IP is still at 1440 and 4QR was on 940kHz (Kc) - so before 1948 or so.
1938 the expert reckoned. Cool little find in a relative’s estate.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Racing Radio
ABC Radio Sydney aired a 2 hour radio special looking back at the 100 years of 2SB/2BL/702 last week, featuring archive audio and interviews with former presenters and managers.
It’s available now to listen back for anyone interested.
This was great to listen to, but there needs to be a small correction.
As far as I remember, parliament wasn’t broadcast on Radio National after 1988. It was broadcast on some standby transmitters (e.g. 1593 Melbourne, 630 Sydney, 1440 Canberra, 1458 Newcastle, 1539 Adelaide, 936 Brisbane, 585 Perth) and for awhile these frequencies carried Radio National at other times. These had the callsign 2PB, 3PB etc.
I can’t remember if Brisbane and Perth started at the same time or later on.
At some point, the PB stations stopped rebroadcasting Radio National, and shut down when they weren’t broadcasting parliament. I don’t remember if this was when they changed frequencies in Melbourne and Adelaide or before that. In Melbourne and Adelaide, the PB stations changed to the frequency formerly occupied by a commercial AM station that had converted to FM (the second such station in both cases).
In 1994 News Radio was launched and filled the time on the PB stations when they weren’t broadcasting parliament.
News Radio Canberra later moved to FM, replaced by SBS Radio. In Melbourne and Adelaide, the former PB frequencies were later reallocated to narrowcasters. The other News Radio stations remained on the former standby frequencies which became permanent.
MORE ABOUT THE STANDBY TRANSMMITTERS
ABC used to have some standby transmitters which they’d fire up occasionally and broadcast random music, ABC promotions etc. I remember picking up Melbourne on 1593 KHz.
One Thursday evening-early Friday morning in late 1988, the standby transmission ended but then they carried Radio national. At some point they announced that these were parliamentary broadcast stations (or was it the Parliamentary Broadcast Network or Service) and they listed the frequencies.
Many of these frequencies are used by News Radio to this day.
For awhile after that, ABC had test transmissions on different frequencies (I only know about 1611 in Melbourne). 1611 is used by an X band station now.
MORE ABOUT THE CHANGE I FREQUENCIES
In the early-mid 1990’s, two commercial AM stations in each state capital (one in Brisbane) and Newcastle converted to FM. The PB stations moved to the second such vacated frequency in Melbourne and Adelaide but remained on the standby frequencies in other locations. In these other locations, the second commercial station converted after 1990 or not at all. 2PB Canberra moved to FM at a later date.
Credit to WRTH 1991 and Wikipedia which I used to check some info.
Yes. The ABC 1988-89 annual report says that parliament broadcasts were moved from RN in November 1988 and transferred to the back-up network of transmitters that formed the PB stations.
In 1989, RN began a parliamentary program called Ring The Bells, but it is unclear what this actually entailed.
So RN did broadcast parliament for a time. I stand corrected.
Presumably it would have been an overview of what happened in parliament that day.
I thought you were correct, u said RN didn’t broadcast parliament after 1988. That was true
This is from one of my old emails from an American friend in “the business” speaking about his day at his radio station when Challenger exploded:
** Anyone else working that day have a story to share?
I was in the production studio doing some pre-production and carting for my afternoon shift. The studio was just a short walk down the hall from the newsroom, and I had the door open. Through one side of the glass, I could see the guy currently on the air at the time. Behind me was the open door to the hallway. The place was pretty empty save for the two of us.
I remember I was rewinding the reel-to-reel, cueing something up on a turntable (remember those?) and in the background din you could hear the news machines - two little serial data printers (AP and UPI) - chugging away with the usual news headlines, sports scores, weather, and whatnot.
All of a sudden, I hear four bells go off on the AP machine. Remember, four bells were usually not a big deal - could have been a weather alert about how blisteringly cold it was, or the snow flurries we’d had that morning…so I didn’t even think twice about it.
After a couple of seconds, eight more bells went off. I thought that maybe someone famous or important had died, so I said to myself, “As soon as this tape is ready, I’ll go check that out”. Before I had a chance to start the tape, TEN bells went off.
My heart dropped immediately because I knew ten bells meant something BAD. Who died? Had a plane crashed? The last thing on my mind was the Space Shuttle. Without hesitating, I bolted into the newsroom to rip the paper off the machine.
The first (four bell) bulletin merely said, “THERE APPEARS TO BE A PROBLEM WITH THE LAUNCH OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE ‘CHALLENGER’. MORE…”. The next one (eight bells) said, “THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER APPEARS TO HAVE EXPLODED A MINUTE AFTER LAUNCH. MORE…”. I felt like I’d been hit in the stomach. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
The ten-bell bulletin was still coming across. It read something along the lines of, “THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER HAS BLOWN TO PIECES A MINUTE AFTER LAUNCH…”. Before I could read any further, my eye caught a piece of copy that had been sitting in the recycling bin from the early morning’s newscasts.
It said, “NASA hopes to launch the Space Shuttle ‘Challenger’ today after days of delays. Below-freezing temperatures are not expected to cause a problem…”. I remembered that the launch had already been postponed for days for a variety of reasons: a loose bolt, a loose door…I remembered thinking the day before, “I hope this thing launches OK”.
We interrupted the (top 40) music to go to the wall-to-wall coverage we were getting off the Net News feed (United Stations at the time) and the on-air guy and I just stared at each other in disbelief as we listened to the news flow out of the monitor speakers. I remember just feeling sick to my stomach. We wheeled the TV in from the jock lounge to watch the coverage on TV.
The thing that sticks with me about that day was the weird, “out-of-body” feeling I had all day that day (I’ve felt the same way only five other times: when John Lennon was killed, when Reagan was shot, on 9/11 and when both my parents died). I still had to go on the air - albeit just to “host” the Net News continuous coverage - so I was stuck in the studio until 7PM. People came in and out the front door looking stunned. We all sat around the studio and talked about it, sort of like a group therapy.
Everyone hung around until night to see Reagan’s statement. Many of us had tears welling up in our eyes as we listened, and the reality what had happened started to sink in. On the air, we’d gone back to mostly music, but kept it to a somber, slow mood.
Just writing about it now, it feels like yesterday.
As a side note…does it seem to anyone else that the shock of Challenger somehow took some of the sting off the Columbia accident? I remember being shocked and saddened that day…but not to the extent of the Challenger explosion.**
One of the reasons Vega failed was that the music content was a ‘dogs breakfast’ - all over the place.
I think the Music/Program manager at the time must have also been somewhat “Vaguer” on how they wanted to market & promote the music format & its target audience.
Suffice to say that the black long sleeve Vega T-Shirt I was gifted lasted much longer than the ‘Vega’ name did. And I can confidently say I did wear the shirt a lot out in public re promoting the station.
I think Tony Squires (now at FOX) was a presenter on that station and he co-hosted with a female (can’t remember who), he would say things like she was vague and he was Vega / Vauger.
His female co-presenter was the late Rebecca Wilson.
I thought it may have been her, wasn’t sure… thanks!
They did actually call the Squires/Wilson show “Vague and Vega [sic]” for a while, from memory. 
In retrospect, I guess they were thinking that something approximating a “commercial equivalent of BBC Radio 2” by trying to intersperse intelligent talk with (original tagline) “40 years of music” - but we all know the result of that, execution wasn’t brilliant. I’m not even sure Triple M had started too much with the blokey talkback (Spoonman et al) then so the idea of “talk on FM” was still pretty foreign.
Whether their target audience could find Vega is another matter, too - I wonder if branding it the same way as Nova initially, as “nine-five-three” (in Sydney) meant some of their audience thought it was an AM station - a whole one kHz next to 2UE, haha.
It never felt like it picked up in interest until they went Classic Rock [at a time when Triple M were sorta trying to shuffle off the dinosaur rock for the umpteenth time]… of course transplanting the Magic FM from London to create Smooth did wonders, at least for a bit.
