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WAAF (WAAF 107.3 FM, simulcast on WKAF 97.7 FM) is in the Worcester, Massachusetts market, but by the mid-1980s WAAF had begun to direct most of its attention to the Boston radio market. ==Origins== The station that became WAAF was actually a distant cousin of an AM station from the early 1930s, WAAB in Boston. Owned by the Shepard Broadcasting Company, WAAB was moved to Worcester in mid-December 1942 and broadcast at 1440 kHz. () Shepard was a pioneer in FM broadcasting, putting the first FM network on the air in December 1940, when two Shepard FMs, greater Boston's W1XOJ and New Hampshire's W1XER, were linked up. () While W1XOJ was presented as a Boston station, it was in fact located in Paxton, near Worcester. The University of Massachusetts Amherst was a target audience as well. In fact, WAAF was an extremely popular station from Framingham, located on the Boston-Worcester Turnpike (Rt. 9) to Amherst/Northampton. By 1951, the station was operating under the call letters of WGTR, at 99.1 MHz, owned by Thomas S. Lee Broadcasting, which had purchased the Shepard stations in the late 1940s. (Radio-TV Annual, 1952 edition, p. 1268) Subsequently, the WGTR call letters, and the station itself, seemed to disappear, and only WTAG, owned by the Worcester Telegram and Gazette newspaper, operated an FM in Worcester during the remainder of the 1950s. The station which took the call letters of WAAB-FM did not go on the air till the autumn of 1961, operating at the 107.3 dial position and owned by Bernard E. Waterman. (Radio-TV Annual, 1962, edition, p. 411, p. 695) When Chicago's WAAF changed format and call letters in the summer of 1967, the WAAF call letters were selected and given to what had been WAAB-FM. The new WAAF broadcast a beautiful music format, which was still the most popular FM format at that time. But WAAF switched to its long-running rock music format three years later, in 1970. WAAF still broadcasts from the same Paxton site that pioneering FM W1XOJ used back in the 1930s and early 40s. For more on the early history of WAAF/W1XOJ see FM broadcasting in the USA and History of radio. For an excellent history of FM Broadcasting, see ''Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America'', by Christopher Sterling and Michael Keith (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Radio station WXOJ-LP 103.3FM "Valley Free Radio" in Northampton, Massachusetts is a low power station whose call letters pay tribute to WAAF's ancestral origins. The FCC reissued (W1XOJ ) as an amateur radio club call sign to Kurt R. Jackson on March 14, 2003. Jackson uses the call sign on a network of simulcast amateur radio repeaters throughout New England, which he named the Yankee Network, a reference to the regional broadcasting network established by Shepard Broadcasting in 1928 that came to include the original WAAB. On August 12, 2009 WAAF became the longest active running rock radio station in Massachusetts, when rival station WBCN signed off analog radio to make room for an all sports talk formatted station. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「WAAF (FM) history」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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