CU Boulder's Radio 1190 Returns to Denver Airwaves

Radio 1190 is the little station that could. And then couldn't. And now can again.

A University of Colorado Boulder project, Radio 1190 debuted on the AM dial in 1998, and a series of translators subsequently extended the reach of its eclectic music mix and vibrant news-and-information programming into the Denver metro area. But the outlet went off the air during the pandemic, and by the time it returned, troubles with the translator network resulted in a cut-off beyond Boulder for pretty much everyone other than online listeners.

Now, however, Radio 1190 is back in the Mile High City, and in a better location. The station bowed at 92.9 FM on February 13, and its position cheers Josh Shepperd, a CU Boulder assistant professor who became the station's faculty director last September. "You find most educational signals under 91.5 or even under 90," he says. "So it's a very good signal, and with awareness, the likelihood of us reaching people in Denver is really high."

Better yet, Radio 1190's sounds provide an excitingly weird alternative to most of the material regularly offered up by other area broadcasters.

"You can go all over the Denver dial, and everywhere, the playlists are so tight," notes Iris Berkeley, Radio 1190's general manager. "Everything is so algorithmic, and a lot of it is being beamed in from station clusters in God knows what other city. But we want to be the opposite of that. Other than the FCC regulations, we don't really have any rules about what gets aired.

"It's not our job to be the taste police. Our job is to give you all the tastes — and it's just such magic."

Appropriately enough, Radio 1190's history could hardly be quirkier. CU got its first station, dubbed KUCB, in 1978. But instead of sending its signal through the air via a tower, it used carrier current that wormed into the school's dorms through the electrical system — and because the sound was so lousy, few students bothered to listen to it. "Some of the programming was a little self-congratulatory, because usually it seemed like nobody was listening," a onetime KUCB staffer-turned-Radio 1190 DJ told Westword. "I remember getting calls a couple of times, and I was so surprised."

In the early '90s, certain elements within the school administration wanted to pull the plug, but energetic lobbying kept KUCB alive and in 1994, students voted to establish a fund to buy a broadcast-worthy station. Over the next few years, around $320,000 in student fees was earmarked for this purpose, yet the prices of radio stations had escalated so quickly that the amount fell far short of what was needed. Fortunately, Jacor, the predecessor of corporate radio behemoth iHeart, entered the picture. At the time, Jacor wanted to buy KTCL-FM, but Federal Communications Commission regulations forbade it from doing so until it unloaded one of the eight properties already in its portfolio. So in exchange for some good publicity and a nice tax deduction, Jacor gave CU-Boulder KHOW2-AM/1190, a station that had been idle for some time.

The gift led to debate over whether the station should continue to be a music-intensive, student-run broadcaster like KUCB or a comparatively stuffy public-relations arm of the university. In the end, the student station won out — but because its impact was limited by Radio 1190's relative lack of power (it was originally licensed to broadcast at just 5,000 watts during the daytime and 110 at night), only a relative handful of radio lovers outside the campus were able to discover it.

Over the next twenty-plus years, Radio 1190 garnered increasing prestige (and numerous Westword Best of Denver awards), as well as a growing Denver audience able to tune in thanks to those translators. But in 2020, trouble arose in the form of a global pandemic.
"One of the worst places that you could try to avoid getting COVID is a little locked room where you're breathing into a microphone someone else just used," Berkeley says of the station headquarters, hidden deep within CU's University Memorial Center. "So we suspended some operations and went online only, as CU Boulder as a whole did in many ways.

"we took the opportunity to do some station modernization and get some ducks in a row. As part of that, we went off the AM for almost a year," from the spring of 2022 until February 2023, she notes. "After that, we set about getting our translators back. We'd had several translators operating over the years in Denver, but by the time of the pandemic, we didn't have any translators and were only on 1190 AM."

Why? Berkeley doesn't go into detail, but Radio 1190's website asserts that "the station lost control of its FM translators due to unethical business practices by an area translator lessor."

In searching for a new translator, the Radio 1190 crew was given a big assist by KGNU, Boulder's iconic public-radio station. According to Berkeley, sources within KGNU learned that Denver Open Media, a nonprofit that touts itself as providing "media by, for and of the people of Denver," had decided to give up the license for KOMF-LP, a low-power station at 92.9 FM. "They just refocused their operations and were looking for somebody who aligned with their values to take it," Berkeley says, "and fortunately, it was a good match for us."

With assistance from College of Media, Communications and Information, the academic arm that replaced the university's journalism school in 2015, CU Boulder purchased 92.9, including a broadcast facility on the TAXI by Zeppelin campus in RiNo, for Radio 1190. Faculty director Shepperd declines to say how much it cost, but maintains that "it was for a reasonable market rate. We paid a value for it as a university that was on the generous side."

That CU Boulder was willing to make such an investment might seem foolhardy, given all the predictions that radio is dying. But Shepperd, a media expert who serves as director for several Library of Congress projects and penned the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's official history, believes such doomsayers are trying to bury a platform that still has a lot of life in it.

"If you look globally, radio is still the most used medium in the world, because digital isn't available everywhere to the extent that it is in this country," he says. "And something like 88 percent of Americans still listen to terrestrial radio, AM or FM, at least once a week. That means about 300 million Americans still use radio." He adds that "television and social media are based on the industrial practices of radio; they still use the radio model. Radio, is, in fact, central to the public imagination, and Radio 1190 provides CU with the ability to really highlight the diversity and resources of the university — but more importantly, the creativity of the students."

That's of key importance to Berkeley, in part because she followed the same path currently being taken by the station's approximately 150 student volunteers, of which around 85 serve as DJs. "I've been affiliated with Radio 1190 since we went on the AM airwaves for the first time in 1998," she says. "At the time, I was an undergraduate. I graduated in 2001 with a couple of degrees with CU Boulder, then returned to Colorado in 2019. I am now general manager, but I worked as acting GM for about a year." She jokes that many of her charges seem to think her actual title is "station mom."

If that's true, Berkeley is one cool mother. She fills a two-hour Radio 1190 slot on Thursdays that's a variation on Modern Jetset, a radio show branded as "a round-the-world trip from soul to synthpop, reggae to R&B, Latin to lounge, and more" that's syndicated to more than sixty stations — dozens in the U.S., as well as outlets in England, France and New Zealand.
Students have access to a similarly wide range of material. "We've got about 20,000 CDs lining the main lounge area of our station, in the basement of the UMC," Berkeley says. "Today, we tell people that if they want to get played on 1190, they have to send us digital files. But they can also send us CDs and vinyl records — and we've got everything from the late '80s and early '90s to today. The CDs all have little notes inside the cover about which songs you can't play because they have swears in them."

As a result, she continues, "we've got students coming in and playing music older than they are — stuff that I played when I was in their shoes in the late '90s. For some reason, everybody really likes Fiona Apple's Tidal right now, and that came out my freshman year. You'll hear somebody playing that next to Tune-Yards next to Chappell Roan — although we try to go easy on the Chappell Roan, because you can hear that other places. But the nice thing about our little basement lair is that genre means nothing and time means nothing. These students do an amazing job of cultivating a vibe and telling a story that kind of transcends all of that. Hard left turns are welcome, and we're all hanging on for the ride. I mean, if I don't hear Sun Ra at least once a day, I'm kind of sad."

Such a sonically idiosyncratic menu is rare in radio today. But to Berkeley, that's the charm of Radio 1190: "What we're doing here is creating a space for students that's a content-creation lab. You get to experiment in real time and share it with about 3.5 million potential listeners, if you think of the geography of both our AM and FM listening areas. That's nothing to sneeze at."

A handful of Radio 1190 veterans have gone on to careers in the broadcasting field, including Indie 102.3's Alisha Sweeney and Dana Meyers. But, Berkeley contends, "even if you don't go into radio, no matter what you do and no matter what you want to be when you quote-unquote 'grow up,' what you can learn and experience and develop as a student at Radio 1190 is going to serve you well. At the very least, you'll never have stage fright again. You'll be able to think on your feet, you'll be able to speak extemporaneously, you'll have a production ethic, and you'll do whatever you do with polish and a sense of flair and a sense of fun. That's what radio teaches you."

Right now, the folks at Radio 1190 are brainstorming ways to let Denver residents know they're back; a so-called "Radio Prom," featuring a meet-and-greet with station personnel, is scheduled for April 16 at Boulder's Junkyard Social Club, and more events should get a roll-out soon. Berkeley is confident that residents of the Mile High City who find their way to 92.9 FM will like what they hear.

"What we're doing just doesn't exist anymore," she says. "Everything you hear on the radio today is being chosen by demographics, by focus groups — and we want to push back against that a little bit. We want to inject some humanity back into radio. We want to be your best friend on the dial."