HomeMy WebLinkAboutDusty Moves WTAW Transcript, WTAW First 100 YearsProject HOLD
WTAW Interview
Chris Dusterhoff | WTAW Head Engineer
Tom Turbiville | WTAW Radio Host
Laura Quezada | Transcriber
00:00:00 Dick Bolin (DB)
College Station, Texas, April 24th, 1947, Dick Bolin talking. Here's the latest news from the
Associated Press…
[Unintelligible news broadcaster speaking]
00:00:11 Speaker 2
Aggies win 74-72! Here's your ri…
00:00:16 Speaker 3
…1620 WTAW.
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00:00:19 Tom Turbiville (TT)
This is WTAW, the First 100 Years, I'm Tom Turbiville. Engineering is not just an important part
of radio, heck, it is the way that radio happens. The real father of WTAW, Dr. Frank Bolton, was
an engineering prof at A&M, and his students built the first radio station that was called W5AC,
and in 1922 became WTAW. In 1994, WTAW made a big move, literally, from its location at the
Galleria building in Bryan to the top floor of the Crystal Park Plaza building in College Station.
It was soon after that, that WTAW changed from its longtime frequency, 1150 AM to 1620 AM.
The guy who headed up that move is still, nearly 30 years later, WTAW's head engineer, Chris
Dusterhoff.
00:01:11 Chris Dusterhoff (CD)
Up until the year 2000, the AM band ended at 1610, and if you have an old radio, you might
have stopped at 1610. Starting in the 90s is when they started making the radios go up into the
1700s. And so, we were concerned at that time that, “hey, we're going to move a pretty popular
radio station off of an 1150 signal that people can get to this 1620 that people might not be able
to get”. That was the fear when we were doing it, but we were going from 1000 watts to 10,000
watts, but it was quite the project, obviously, to build a radio station from the ground up.
00:01:45 (TT)
To the listener, it was a seamless change. To the engineers and the staff, it was a mighty
undertaking, which you'll hear more about on this series of WTAW, the First 100 Years.