WABE

History

WABE has always been operated by the city school system. The license was donated to the school board by the Rich's Foundation on September 8, 1948. It went on the air five days later as Georgia's first educational radio station. It also may well have been the first-ever noncommercial radio station in the Southern U.S., at least on the FM broadcast band. Its first radio studios were located in two rooms of the former Atlanta City Hall. The station moved, along with television station WETV (channel 30, now WPBA), into facilities in northeast Atlanta in 1958, where both stations remain to this day.

The school board used WABE strictly as a medium for educational (i.e., in-school) broadcasts until sometime in the early 1970s, when classical music broadcasts (and likely evening broadcasts also) premiered on the station. It was a charter member of NPR in 1971, and saw enough promise in the fledgling venture to cut educational programming to six hours a day. In 1974, it significantly boosted its transmission power to 30,000 watts. By 1982, the educational programs heard during school hours moved, thanks to the development of subcarrier technologies, to subchannels, leaving the main FM frequency free to broadcast music and news shows for adults.

The station finally expanded its hours to around-the-clock service and built a much more powerful transmitter on Stone Mountain allowing it to expand its power to a full 100,000 watts. It remained on Stone Mountain until 2004, when transmission moved to the TV tower next to sister station WPBA in the DeKalb County portion of East Atlanta. The short tower atop one of the highest points in metro Atlanta was and still is that of WGTV, the GPTV (now GPB TV) station for the area. WPBA had to leave when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) forced all television stations to go digital, and the tower was not strong enough to hold four antennae — the other being NOAA Weather Radio station KEC80. (A larger tower was out of the question, as it is scenic and within state-owned Stone Mountain Park.)

Since that time, WABE has grown steadily in listeners served, mainly because Atlanta is one of the nation's fastest-growing metropolitan areas, and the fastest-growing of the largest 15 or so media markets, now ranked seventh in potential radio listeners by Arbitron.

Programming

Well into the 2010s, WABE continued to air classical music during the day. As a result, many NPR programs that became mainstays after the network's rapid programming expansion in the 1980s, such as The Diane Rehm Show, Talk of the Nation, Here and Now, On Point, The Story with Dick Gordon and the BBC World Service were not heard in Atlanta until WABE launched an all-NPR news stream on its third HD subcarrier. Starting in 2015, in apparent response to WRAS picking up NPR news programming supplied by GPB Radio, WABE dropped daytime classical programming in favor of locally-based news programming.

However, WABE does air Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Fresh Air and Marketplace on its analog signal, during the morning and afternoon drive-time hours, and Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, Mountain Stage, Only a Game and This American Life are heard on weekends. A full-time classical HD station is also available, as is Ahora, a Spanish-language channel, and all three channels stream live on the Internet.

Tell Me More and The Takeaway air on WABE's HD news channel, as well as on the analog signal of jazz station WCLK.

The station broadcasts the following HD Radio subchannels:

Local Weekday Hosts

Steve Goss — joined WABE after 28 years at Peach 94.9 FM (WPCH, later WLTM) as local host of Morning Edition.

Lois Reitzes — longtime host of the morning classical-music program "Second Cup Concert" and of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra broadcasts. She came to WABE in 1979 from WFIU-FM in Bloomington, Indiana. Reitzes served as a classical-music host for WFIU while working toward a double major in piano and musicology at Indiana University. Reitzes is also an accomplished pianist.

Denis O'Hayer — the former political reporter for WXIA-TV and longtime news anchor at NewsRadio 640 WGST in Atlanta - anchors the afternoon drive time news block of The World, All Things Considered, and Marketplace.

Robert Hubert — a veteran of over two decades on WABE's staff, Hubert hosts the evening classical-music program Nocturne and serves as the station's music librarian. He also hosts Atlanta Music Scene, heard on Monday evenings during his regular program. On the weekends, Hubert can be heard on Concert90 and Aubade.

WABE reporters include: Jim Burress, Martha Dalton, Michell Eloy, Lisa George, John Lorinc, Rose Scott, Jonathan Shapiro and Michelle Wirth.

Local specialty program hosts

Herman H. Johnson — a legendary Atlanta broadcaster in his own right, he has hosted the Saturday-night Jazz Classics show since the late 1970s. Johnson, known only by his first initial (he has admitted on the air that his actual first name is Herman), for many years was a disc jockey on WAOK-AM, one of Atlanta's heritage African-American stations. The program's theme is a rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic by jazz artist and Episcopal clergyman Tom Vaughn.

Trivia

WABE's call sign was WPBA-FM for much of April 1984, at the same time WETV's call sign was changed to WPBA. The radio station's call sign was changed back in May because of confusion.

During the 1980s and 1990s the station's afternoon classical program was called Kaleidoscope, hosted by Jonathan Phelps.

In the Telltale Games video game series The Walking Dead, the character Carley is a reporter for WABE.