Broadcast area St. James, Michigan Frequency 100.1 FM MHz | Branding "WVBI" First air date June, 2015 | |
City Beaver Island, Michigan Slogan "The Voice of Beaver Island" | ||
WVBI-LP is a Variety formatted broadcast radio station licensed to Beaver Island, Michigan, serving St. James, Michigan. WVBI-LP is owned and operated by the Preservation Association of Beaver Island, which also operates the Beaver Island Community Center.
Contents
Programming
With some breaks for special music programs, the station airs "The Cottage Mix" from 6am to 10pm, 7 days a week with hourly news during weekday drive times and at noon and 3pm. The Cottage Mix consists of "Pop, Oldies, Country, Celtic, Beaver Island Favorites and a little bit of jazz". From 10pm to 6am, 7 nights a week, WVBI-LP airs "Jazz Night Watch", featuring various styles of Jazz music.
On Saturdays starting at 6am the station broadcasts "Inside Europe", "Living Planet", and "WorldLink", all from Deutsche Welle. It repeats the first two of these programs at the same time Sunday morning and broadcasts "Interfaith Voices" at 8am. On most Saturday mornings WVBI presents a locally produced countdown show it calls "The Top Ten + Five" and repeats the program Wednesday evenings at 7pm. The station has special music programming on the weekends. On Saturday evenings at 5:00 p.m. it presents a live locally produced country music show called Country Classics hosted by Sheri Timsak. This is followed at 7:00 p.m. by the Retro Album Chart Show hosted by Titus Jennings and at 9:00 p.m. by Rockin' the Boat with Mark Beltaire, which runs until 11:00 p.m. That's followed by two hours of classic rock in a special Saturday Night Classic Rock Cottage Mix.
On Sunday mornings starting at 9:00 a.m. the station provides a chill soundtrack with its Sunday Morning Cottage mix, which includes smooth jazz, some soul and pop with killer jazz licks and more. That runs until 1:00 p.m. when the Milwaukee Symphony takes to the air on the WFMT radio network from PRX. That's followed at 3:00 p.m. by the station's signature Cottage Mix. Sunday evening at 5pm WVBI presents another live locally produced show called Sunday Night Oldies hosted by Phil Becker. That's followed at 7:00 p.m. by "The International Americana Music Show", "Celtic Connections" at 8:00 p.m., and "Full Moon Hacksaw" at 9:00 p.m. all are from Public Radio Exchange (PRX). On Friday nights at 11pm WVBI presents "The Midnight Special", hosted by Beaver Island seasonal resident Rich Warren, from the WFMT Radio Network.
The station also presents occasional locally produced radio theater programs, special news programs and coverage of community events.
Technical Facilities
The station recently relocated its transmitter to a site on The Kings Highway fairly near the geographic center of the island. The station uses a two-bay circularly polarized antenna driven by a Nautel VS-300LP transmitter. Program audio is delivered to the transmitter site on a two hop Ubiquiti NanoBridge link using a Barrix audio over IP encoder/decoder pair.