SFU radio celebrates 40 years
Contact:
Deanne Beattie, CJSF, 604.291.5940; cjsfpr@sfu.ca
Marianne Meadahl, PAMR, 604.291.4323
Forty years after it began as a small music club on campus, CJSF Radio is celebrating it accomplishments with a reunion of its radio folk.
The reunion, which will also mark four years since the station started broadcasting on FM, is on Tuesday, Feb. 13, 7 p.m. in the CJSF offices at SFU Burnaby. It will feature speakers, story-swapping and tours of CJSF’s facilities.
Brian Antonson, the station’s original manager, and now associate dean of broadcast and media communications at BCIT, will be among attendees. He says the station has come a long way since its start in a janitor’s closet under a staircase just west of the rotunda.
“We began with an old audio console once owned by Vancouver broadcasting legend Jack Cullen, one microphone, a couple of turntables, an amplifier that didn't work, and two speakers, one for the control room, one for our ‘listeners’," he recalls.
“Someone fixed the amplifier so we could deliver sound. We borrowed a table and chair and set up a rudimentary control room and ran speaker wire out the door to a point just inside the door leading into the rotunda.
“And on a misty morning of indeterminate date, we turned on the amp, hit some music on the turntable, and promptly scared the hell out of the unsuspecting students in the rotunda.”
Antonson worked at CKNW and CJOB in Winnipeg before joining BCIT in 1977. He also managed CFVR in Abbotsford in the early '90s.
CJSF debuted on the FM dial at 90.1 FM in 2003 and the next year received the Standard Radio Award of Excellence in Campus and Community Broadcasting, given annually by the National Campus and Community Radio Association.