WFIU
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| City | Bloomington, Indiana |
|---|---|
| Broadcast area | Areas around Indiana surrounding Bloomington, Terre Haute, Columbus, French Lick/West Baden, Greensburg, and Kokomo |
| Branding | WFIU |
| Frequency | 103.7 MHz, plus translators (also on HD Radio) |
| First air date | 1950 |
| Format | Classical music, jazz, and news and information |
| ERP | 29,000 watts |
| HAAT | 197 meters |
| Class | B |
| Facility ID | 68269 |
| Callsign meaning | W F Indiana University |
| Owner | Indiana University |
| Webcast | Listen Live |
| Website | indianapublicmedia.org/radio/ |
WFIU is a public radio FM station broadcasting from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The station is a member station of NPR, Public Radio International and American Public Media. Its program schedule consists of classical music, jazz, and news and information, with specialty programming on the weekends. WFIU's broadcast signal, and those of its translators, reaches portions of central, western, and southern Indiana.
WFIU broadcasts in the HD Radio format.
WFIU began broadcasting on September 30, 1950, building upon efforts by IU to produce radio programming since 1937. Originally broadcasting on 90.9 FM, WFIU moved to 103.7 FM in 1951. 103.7 had been WSUA-FM, a commercial station, between 1948 and 1950. The owners of WSUA donated the 103.7 transmitter to Indiana University after their station went out of business.
This move was required to prevent interference with the audio channel of WFBM-TV (now WRTV) Channel 6 in nearby Indianapolis, which was the CBS affiliate for central Indiana at the time. The poor-quality tuners of early TVs weren't selective enough to prevent the strong 90.9 signal emanating from the IU campus in central Bloomington from overriding the much-weaker Channel 6, which transmitted from about 50 miles away.
This makes WFIU one of the very few public stations in the U.S. to transmit on a frequency other than those between 88.1 and 91.9 MHz, the FCC's reserved part of the FM band for non-commercial use.
WFIU transmitted with an Effective Radiated Power (ERP) of 75,000 watts from the center of the IU campus until 1971. It moved to the tower of sister-station WTIU Channel 30 on the south side of Bloomington that year. The move not only increased its range, even with a lower ERP, but it cured another problem. Inexpensive FM radios in central Bloomington picked up the station all over the FM dial when it transmitted from campus. The move to the Channel 30 tower fixed that.
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