About
“When I first started at Pratt in 1988, the station was a low power AM one that reached the campus & neighborhood just fine - though the sound quality was terrible. Janelle Genovese (sp?) was the GM at the time, and the station had a great low-tech, grass-roots sort of feel. The shows were pretty well put together, and folks respectful of the power to “reach the masses”.
Then there was a burglary - somone ripped off all the early 70’s era equipment (yay!), and a new Student Activities director was really pro-radio, and we had a huge budget. The manager at the time, Dan Fries, put the budget to good use getting 2 entire studios worth of equipment - which at the analog-pre-digital, pre-streaming time was substantial. Each studio had 2 turntables, 2 serious CD changers, old-school “Cart Machines” (8-track like awful tape players) for promos, and a massive mixing board, mic’s, etc….
At the same time he initiated a search for an available FM spot, and things looked promising for “the bottom of the dial” at 87.5FM. While waiting, we engineered the whopping 10 watt FM stereo transmitter / system and had it ready. (The antenna is likely still bolted to the railing on the roof of Willoughby) And waited. And waited…. all the while broadcasting on the old AM frequency (can’t for the life of me remember the number - 640AM perhaps…?). It cost a lot of money and took a whole school year, but then he announced we could go live with our station!
You can imagine how appealing it was to college DJ’s to be broadcasting all over NYC, so the schedule went 24/7 with a lot of great shows - and a few rotten ones. I had a pretty good time slot Thursday nights, and mixed all sorts of obtuse crap, and some normal college-radio fare too. And tried mixing hip-hop but never got beyond bridging beats and really simple transforming.
Anyhow - the fall of ‘90 is when I think this was, and things looked great. For a little while. I got more involved with promotion, music, and general mgmt. stuff, and always cringed when some chucklehead would be swearing, talking about the keg party on the “11th floor” or other inane chatter… as we were ‘official’ now and had to follow FCC reg’s.
At least, I thought we were legit!
Turns out Dan was a bit of a swashbucklin’ type, and never got permission for us to broadcast! One night he came into the station (Willoughby Hall first floor) white as a ghost and pulled the plug.
Some electronics geek on Staten Island had threatened us with reporting to the FCC that we were illegally broadcasting, but Dan thought nothing of it. Until the Pratt Board of Directors received a nasty letter from the FCC saying if we did not cease and desist broadcasting IMMEDIATELY, the school would be fined $100,000.
Dan was expelled.
The station died.
My wife (the then GM) and I tried to resurrect the station as a campus-only ‘leaky cable’ system, which uses a low-power signal that radiates perhaps 100 feet max from the cable - so it’d be run around campus, down hallways, up elevator shafts, and so on.
Never worked out too well, as I couldn’t get the damned cable across Willoughby Avenue! Some sort of hoo-ha permitting that sort of thing, so we gave up.
So the short-lived glory days were perhaps 3-4 months, where we were heard all over the 5 boroughs. We had a great time anyhow, promoting shows - including bands like Fishbone, They Might be Giants (Pratt Alumni themselves!), Swirlies, 24-7 Spies, and so on. The Student Union was indeed rockin, and usually full to max. capacity at these events.
That’s all I can remember as of now…”
-Former Pratt Radio Employee
Today the radio station is located in its new home in Chapel Hall and broadcasts on the internet 24/7 via prattradio.com.
