WHRB

WHRB is a commercial FM radio station in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It broadcasts at 95.3 MHz and is operated by students at Harvard College.

History

WHRB was one of America's first college radio stations, initially signing on as a carrier current station on December 2, 1940. After acquiring funding from The Harvard Crimson the station's first call sign was WHCN (Harvard Crimson Network). It broke from the Crimson in 1943 and adopted the call sign WHRV (Harvard Radio Voice). Harvard Radio Broadcasting Co., Inc., the non-profit corporation that owns the station, was formed February 1, 1951, and the current call sign adopted.

In order to reach audiences beyond Harvard's campus, the corporation acquired a commercial FM broadcast license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and began regular broadcasting on May 17, 1957 at 107.1 MHz (at that time called "megacycles"). A few years later, the station changed frequency to 95.3 MHz, where it has remained since. The broadcast area expanded considerably in 1995 when the main transmitter was relocated from atop Holyoke Center (now called the Smith Campus Center) in Harvard Square to its present location atop One Financial Center in downtown Boston (an auxiliary antenna still sits on the Smith Campus Center). Broadcasts went global when internet retransmission of its programs began on November 18, 1999. In 2009, WHRB made available for download the first stand-alone college radio station iPhone "app".