KALW

KALW Public Media is a non-commercial FM radio station that serves the San Francisco Bay Area. It broadcasts on 91.7 MHz and is an independent, non-profit organization. The station is a community public station, meaning it involves volunteers in creating news, music programs, and live events.

KALW is one of the oldest educational FM stations in the United States. It is a Class B1 FM station with an effective radiated power of 1,900 watts. The station's transmitter and tower are located on Twin Peaks.

Programming

KALW is a local radio station that brings in shows from big networks like National Public Radio and BBC World Service. It also makes its own news, music, and talk shows, such as the live weekday call-in program Your Call and the morning news magazine Crosscurrents.

On weekdays, you can hear popular shows like Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Evenings and weekends have special shows about topics like science, culture, and stories from around the world.

KALW also shares meetings from the local school board and sometimes reads school lunch menus. Since 2021, KALW has hosted live events with talks, concerts, and movie screenings.

History

In the late 1930s, San Francisco was an important place for developing radio. In 1939, a big radio show opened on an island in San Francisco Bay. In 1940, a new way to send radio signals called FM broadcasting was shown for the first time.

KALW started in 1941 at a school and was the first FM station on the West Coast. It began with lessons for students. Later, it changed its frequency a few times because of new rules.

KALW helped start one of the first non-commercial TV stations in 1954. In the 1970s, it broadcast news in Chinese and covered local sports games. In 2006, the station's antenna had a problem, but it kept broadcasting with help from another station. In 2011 and again in 2021, the city of San Francisco celebrated KALW's birthdays.

In the late 1990s, some workers at KALW made a complaint to radio authorities about how the station was run. After several years, the authorities looked into it and decided the station could keep its license but had to pay a smaller fine. The station showed how it helped the community, and the school district said it couldn’t pay the bigger fine because of budget cuts.