WHRC-FM: America's Smallest Commercial FM Radio Station (early 1980s)

This is a look (and listen) into a unique little FM radio station that Peter Hunn and his wife put on the air on a hill outside Port Henry, New York. Having long dreamed of being a broadcaster, he scraped together the $30,000 needed to acquire land, fill his Datsun/Nissan hatchback with second-hand broadcast equipment, build a studio/transmitter building from a 20' x 24' two-car garage kit, and debuted the 818 watt signal on 92.1 mHz during the fall of 1982. The soft rock (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) and variety (6 p.m. - 10 p.m.) programming formatted station produced a surprisingly good mono signal throughout the Lake Champlain Valley. Hunn had previously served as morning personality (as Peter Davis) at WMGK(FM) in Philadelphia, WNLC New London, Connecticut (where he was named 1976 Billboard magazine air-personality of the year), and as Peter Knight at several Providence, Rhode Island AMs, including WPRO. After selling WHRC-FM for $210,000 in 1985, he earned a Masters degree at Central Missouri University, bought a defunct daytimer in suburban Syracuse, New York, revitalized it as WZZZ, and then sold the AM at a profit in 1995. Local radio was alive and well prior to the Internet era. This video provides a glimpse of how much fun and rewarding that brand of media ownership was for young radio entrepreneurs. Hunn served on the Communication Studies faculty at SUNY Oswego from 1995-2021, and as Career & Technical Education administrator with OCM BOCES in Syracuse from 2005-2022. Often asked if he misses the radio business, Hunn reflects that he misses it the way it was, but not the way it is.