It was less than two years ago that Fred Richards encountered Arnie Arnesen at his front door. Now he’s helping bring her to yours every weekday morning.
Before you start peering through the blinds, tune your FM dial to WNHN 94.7, where you’ll find Arnesen and a host of other local personalities taking over the airwaves as a new hyperlocal radio station blends tunes and talk in hopes of grabbing the ear of the greater Concord area.
“It’s about getting the message out,” Brian Beihl, the station’s co–manager, said. “The main aim of the board of directors for the station is to get both talk programming and entertainment programming out that fills the gaps in the local airwaves. Our aim is to have provide other voices, and that includes liberal voices.”
Those voices have also included the staff of The Insider, as guests on Thursday night’s Granite State of Mind show Nov. 29. Is there any more convincing proof that these guys are tapped into what’s happening in Concord?
Beihl and Richards – the station’s program manager – are part of the driving force behind 94.7, which began broadcasting a little more than a year ago after the transmitter for WCNH and that station’s equipment came up for sale. In one turn through the calendar the station has already amassed a stable of more local programming than NHPR – 94.7 boasts 10 locally–made shows – and continues to carve out a niche for itself, with upcoming additions including State House Watch, a talk show based around action in the Legislature, and Sounds of the Scene, a Wednesday evening program looking to plug into the burgeoning Concord music scene.
Those shows are prime examples of the station’s mission, which is to provide programming for, by and about the greater Concord area.
“We want to make this kind of a happening place,” Beihl said. “We want it to be a place where people live and breathe the music. It’s more than just what goes out over the radio; we want it to be vital.”
That vitality will have grown from humble beginnings. When it became known that the frequency and transmitter were for sale in the summer of 2011, Richards was paid a surprise visit by Arnesen, to whom he had introduced himself a year earlier. She touted the potential sale as a great opportunity, and it didn’t take long before the wheels were turning.
Finding studio space turned out to be equally serendipitous. Richards was leaving an Intown Concord meeting when a real estate agent pointed out a vacant space on the second floor of 26 Pleasant St. that used to be a radio station and was once the home of WEVO. The space had been empty for 15 years, but was still largely intact as a studio and ultimately allowed WNHN to avoid having to build its own studio somewhere else.
All it took was some cosmetic work on the walls and computer networking and the station was up and running – unmanned at the time – with jazz programming in November 2011. Shows began being broadcast from the studio in January 2012, and Arnesen’s show debuted in March.
The reach of the station’s signal is small by design. Classified as a low–power FM station, WNHN can be heard as far west as Contoocook Village, north to Canterbury, east to Northwood and south to the Hooksett tolls. Low–power stations were created by FCC in order to ensure communities would have adequate local content.
“We’re hyperlocal and short range and the FCC wants to keep it that way, so inpidual communities have stations,” Beihl said. “We’re a non-profit organization, and we can’t do electioneering, but we can talk about issues. And we can take a position on an issue.”
Aside from Arnesen’s show, there are a handful of music–based programs on the station, including Voices in Jazz with Frank Wilner and a two–hour show featuring Bobby Dee, a popular regional DJ and owner of Bobby Dee’s Records and Audio Repair in Pembroke who has re–cut some of his old shows.
Programming with a focus on Concord and the surrounding area continues to take flight, too. Granite State of Mind is a Thursday night talk show sarcastically dubbed “trainwreck radio” by personable hosts Dave Cummings and Rob Azevedo, featuring guests from a handful of local businesses and media outlets, and the upcoming State House Watch and Sounds of the Scene will also spotlight the capital city.
Sounds of the Scene, in particular, is an exciting venture, Richards said. The program, to be hosted by musicians Lucas Gallo and Eric Reingold, will highlight the burgeoning music scene in Concord with a calendar of upcoming weekend events – hence the Wednesday night slot – and will also feature live interviews with local bands, who will play some tunes in studio.
The station will also bring recording equipment to local venues to record live shows for broadcast on the following Wednesday’s show.
“They are both active musicians who are wired into the scene, both locally and regionally,” Richards said of Gallo and Reingold. “We hope to showcase recordings of local bands and regional bands to the greater Concord area.”
As a non-profit, the staff is understandably small and entirely volunteer. Each show includes a producer, though many of the shows are recorded elsewhere and sent in to the station via FTP.
Such is the nature of a business that has shifted almost entirely to computer–based operation. The closet that 15 years ago would have housed a network of wires and other broadcast equipment now features a solitary computer, which flings the signal to a transmitter on Little Pond Road.
That allows the station to play music in the overnight hours without anyone on site, though technical difficulties often go unresolved until someone is alerted and heads down to make repairs.
The library of music is also digital, as the station has collected records, burned them to CD and then ripped the files to MP3 format (or simply burned existing CDs to MP3). Richards said the station’s MP3 library is larger than 10,000 files.
There is hope in the future that listeners will be able to go online and browse the digital list in order to make electronic requests, though that will require some work – Richard said thousands of songs are not yet tagged correctly in the computer, an issue that could take “many months” of volunteer hours to correct.
Those volunteer hours are thin, and funding remains tied almost entirely to underwriting. Both Beihl and Richards said the hope in the coming year is to start a public campaign in order to garner more attention and money so the station can continue to blossom and fulfill its original mission.
“It’s what low–power FM is all about,” Beihl said. “To be in touch with the local community, and to have that community involvement.”
