Thank you - I knew it was around the time 973 went to air. And I remember the early days they were very much a tight Top 40 somewhere between B105 and Triple J at the time. Lots of dance music and marketing themselves as a South Bank station.
I still have old tapes of songs I taped off 94.9. The signal into where I was living in the North of Brisbane was definitely a lot better than the 106.9 signal that preceded it!
Well, for the first nearly 12 months it was operating at lower power than what it is/was… those transmitters Harris HT10’s were replaced and they ended up at Port Pirie and lived out their lives on Magic 105.9
Im pretty sure River’s FM arrays is still the biggest and most complex antenna system in Australia… It was at the time anyway.
Q FM suffered from being on a “Brisbane frequency” between 2 strong signals and would get harmonic interference.
Was River 949 on the air before then? I went to the Gold Coast in early August 2001 for a holiday and vaguely remember listening to it (easily receivable on high floors in Surfers Paradise).
The audio looks like it was on SoundCloud but is no longer there. Still comes up in Google searches.
Yes and No
94.9 was onair playing the Wild FM Music database… Basically a carbon copy of what was on 97.3 FM when wild was onair … which had a lot of people wondering
It was off and on there for a bit due to an interference issue with both services onair at once which basically kept it offair until launch date.
My earliest memory of River94.9 was when they were promoting themselves as “The Riverlution”. It was definitely a more up-beat CHR station back then.
Found a mention of this documentary in an old Radioinfo article from 2010, and now found the documentary itself.
The History of Ipswich Radio - a River 949 94.9fm Presentation 4IP, Qfm, star 106.9
Some news reports from very rainy opening of QFM
Great to watch. I do remember at the time they made a lot of fuss about how modern the technology and facilities were at the time. State of the art.
I got motivated and restored this from a Windows media V2 file using AI to HD in 50fps
Enjoy!
Say, whatever happened to Bardot? Boy did that get old fast! Almost as bad as Titanic and Leo.
Max Rowley was a giant of radio and then TV voiceovers. Plenty of later well-known radio announcers went through his Media Academy. I recall it was located Sydney’s northern beaches area, Bilgola or thereabouts. Vale Max you legend.
There’s another station with time pips - ABC Hobart.
Vale to Bob Rogers, one of the true greats in Australian radio broadcasting. What a career, what a legend. Rest easy Mr Rogers.
I don’t think we’ll ever see anyone else last 78 years in radio. What a career indeed. Vale Bob.
Me either, thats an awesome run!
Just under an hour of 2DayFM from the early morning in circa 1986:
For reference it was on top of a recording of The Brigand of Kandhar on Nine.
Thanks so much for this recording. I have tried to reach out to Frankster but to no avail. So if anyone has some old tapes lying around, please share them here.
(I am Gen Why and didn’t get to hear it the first time round. Incidentally, 1986 was the year I came to this place).
Former Adelaide radio station 5DN profiled in Seven News’ flashback segment