WRVU

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WRVU is the college radio station of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. It is a 10,000 watt radio station found at 91.1 FM in Nashville. The station is run by student volunteers from VU, although many of its disc jockeys are Vanderbilt alumni or community volunteers. As with most student-operated college stations, its general focus is to play independent-label music. From the 1970s until very recently (with the sign-on of WRFN-LP), WRVU was practically the only widely accessible outlet for the area's underground music acts to have their recordings get airtime.

[edit] History

Vanderbilt's first radio station, and hence WRVU's progenitor, can be traced to the early 1950s, at which time it was called WVU. The station eventually became known as WRVU and started to broadcast beyond Vanderbilt campus in the early 1970s. Prior to that time, WRVU had been a carrier current station, broadcasting its signal through the university's steam tunnels to small transmitters in each dorm. The transmitter emitted its signal to be received at 580 kHz on the AM band.

Prior to moving to VU's Sarratt Student Center in the fall of 1973, WRVU for many years broadcast from studios in one of the towers of Neely Auditorium. It was there, in December 1971, that University officials got FCC approval to begin broadcasting as a non-profit educational station at 91.1 on the FM band. The quest to move to FM had taken almost two years of effort; VU placed the transmitter on top of the Oxford House building.

The VU student government body operates the station as one unit of the student communications division, which is subsidized by a student activity fee, charged to each student's tuition bill every semester.

[edit] Programming

Students and others broadcast numerous shows every week on WRVU; most are one to two hours in length. Some of them in recent years included "Vandy Days", a show with a focus on electronic and indie music, hosted by DJs "Dan and Gosha." Shows on WRVU often sport eccentric or wry names such as "Stop Hitting Yourself."

WRVU is probably the only FM station in the Nashville market that signs off in the overnight hours; that is, does not broadcast 24 hours per day. In fact, when a student announcer fails to show up for his or her program slot, the preceding announcer is required, by station policy, to shut off the transmitter. This means that often, WRVU is silent for long periods of time during the day, especially during late mornings (when most potential announcers are attending classes) and during the summer or the Christmas/New Year break, when the station broadcasts a limited schedule, depending on the number of students/alumni/others on hand. Prior to the 1990s, WRVU did not broadcast at all during the summer or holidays.