Alumni
WMXM—-the max in music
When I was general manager of WMXM in 1986 we were on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Over 80 students from every imaginable social group were involved with the 300-watt “MX Missile,” which boasted two studios and a record library bursting with promotional albums. We regularly organized campus-wide parties featuring live bands, and each year we sent a delegation to the Loyola Radio Conference. Of course, the station’s success was the hard work of the students who came before me. I was just carrying the torch.
But interest in the station began to wane over the next decade. “When I came to the College it was quite a shock to see a radio station less powerful then my high school station,” says Daniel Faber ’94, who did a show for four years. “I never felt like I had any listeners. The station was on haphazardly and if I remember correctly, the antenna was not in a maximum position to reach the surrounding area…it did not seem like the College put a lot of resources into the station. So, between a bad frequency, low support, and a generally apathetic student body, the station was way under its potential.”
By the time Derek Lambert ’03 arrived at the station in 1994 the transmitter was down and students were broadcasting off the 23-watt exciter—if at all. At some point Studio B, where we used to record promos and do the news, was converted to faculty mailboxes. “It’s sad but these things are cyclical,” says Lambert, who serves as co-advisor of the station and assistant director of annual giving.
Indeed, the station’s history has been marked by benign neglect from the administration, uneven funding, purges, student apathy, equipment failures, and burst pipes. Yet somehow it has endured through changes in technology from LP’s to CD’s to digital MP3’s to webcasting.
Recently the station with “The Max in Music” has been on the air from 9 a.m. to 3 a.m. at a full 300 watts of stereo power, thanks to the hard work of several students and support from the administration, including President Stephen Schutt and Dean of Students Beth Tyler.
“The radio station is one of the areas where we think the College has been pennywise and pound foolish,” says Tyler. “That’s not the way to gain student interest or commitment.”
The resurgence gained momentum in 2001, when station member Brian Monahan ’02 arranged a meeting with the executive board and Associate Dean of the College Tom Balazs. No one else showed, and Monahan was given the keys to the station. He cleaned house and cold-called engineers until he found one willing to come to the College. “He said some of our equipment was worth a lot of money because it was very rare and very old,” says Monahan. The engineer moved the antenna and brought back some signal strength.
Monahan had help from Lambert, who had a background in engineering. Balazs gave the station some funds, and that summer Monahan purchased equipment to do play-by-play announcing. In fall 2002 they broadcast a Forester football game against longtime rivals St. Norbert’s—from Wisconsin. “People were so happy to be able to hear the game,” says Lambert. That same year someone purged the music library, throwing out 12,000 station CDs.
After a steam pipe exploded last October during construction of the Mohr Student Center and Stuart Commons, taking out the station’s computer, exciter, and transmitter, the station recovered and recently installed a new transmitter and antenna that expanded the listening radius to five miles. “In some ways it’s a blessing in disguise, because it really needs a new one,” says WMXM co-advisor David Park, assistant professor of communications.