KOAC Building, date unknown (6218699912)

KOAC (550 AM) is a

radio station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radi ...

licensed to

Corvallis, Oregon Corvallis ( ) is a city and the county seat of Benton County in central western Oregon, United States. It is the principal city of the Corvallis, Oregon Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Benton County. As of the 2020 Unite ...

. The station is owned by

Oregon Public Broadcasting Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) is the primary television and radio public broadcasting network for most of the U.S. state of Oregon as well as southern Washington. OPB consists of five full-power television stations, dozens of VHF or UHF tra ...

, and airs OPB's news and talk programming, consisting of

syndicated Syndication may refer to: * Broadcast syndication, where individual stations buy programs outside the network system * Print syndication, where individual newspapers or magazines license news articles, columns, or comic strips * Web syndication, ...

programming from

NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

American Public Media American Public Media (APM) is an American company that produces and distributes public radio programs in the United States, the second largest company of its type after NPR. Its non-profit parent, American Public Media Group, also owns and o ...

and

Public Radio Exchange The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) is a non-profit web-based platform for digital distribution, review, and licensing of radio programs. The organization is the largest on-demand catalogue of public radio programs available for broadcast and interne ...

, as well as locally produced offerings. Due to its transmitter power and location near the bottom of the AM dial, KOAC's covers most of Oregon's densely populated area during the day, providing at least secondary coverage from Portland to Roseburg. It is the only directional AM radio station in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

which uses a shunt-fed antenna.

History

KOAC is one of the oldest radio stations of its kind. It was first licensed, with the sequentially assigned call letters KFDJ, to the Oregon Agricultural College (later known as

Oregon State University Oregon State University (OSU) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant, research university in Corvallis, Oregon. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate-degree programs along with a variety of graduate and doctoral degree ...

) on December 7, 1922, and made its debut broadcast on January 23, 1923. It became KOAC in late 1925. The station was one of a number of AM stations signed on by universities in the early days of radio. Unlike most of its contemporaries, KOAC was eventually able to have a frequency to itself full-time. In 1932, the station's management was transferred from

to the

Oregon State Board of Higher Education The Oregon State Board of Higher Education was the statutory governing board for the Oregon University System from 1909 to 2015. The board was composed of eleven members appointed by the Governor of Oregon and confirmed by the Oregon State Senat ...

's General Extension Division. However, the state headquarters and network studios remained at the Corvallis campus.KOAC timeline
from the

website The first broadcasts by KOAC were made from the original campus studio in Kearny Hall in 1923. From 1928 to 2006, KOAC's studio was based on campus in Covell Hall, where OSU faculty and students broadcast educational programs and later live news programs across the state. Starting in the 1950s, the board signed on a number of satellite radio stations, as well as a sister network of television stations fronted by KOAC-TV (channel 7, which signed on in 1957). This group became known as Oregon Educational Broadcasting, which evolved into the Oregon Educational and Public Broadcasting Service in 1971. The state-wide radio and TV studios (KOAC-AM-TV) remained on the Corvallis campus as the network flagship until 1981. The network was then spun-off from the Board of Higher Education and became a separate state agency known as Oregon Public Broadcasting. At that time, its

Portland Portland most commonly refers to: * Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States * Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...

-based satellites, KOAP-FM-TV (now KOPB-FM- TV) became the flagship.

References

External links

FCC History Cards for KOACopb.org
OAC (AM) OAC NPR member stations Corvallis, Oregon Radio stations established in 1922 1922 establishments in Oregon {{Oregon-radio-station-stub