09/07/2024
It was a cold Thursday night exactly 44 years ago today, July 10, 1980. We were eagerly waiting for the stroke of midnight. At midnight we officially go to air as 92.3 E-O-N FM. It’s been a year of planning and a couple of months of test broadcasts. Our brilliant broadcast technician, Geoff Tomes fine-tuned the coat hanger, the transmitter and antenna direction to get the most coverage from a little over the measly ninety two megahertz allocated to the broadcast license. With Channel 0 now out of the way and transmitting on channel 10, it gave us a few extra watts to try and get the signal into the outer northern and western regions of 1980’s sprawling suburban Melbourne. Line of sight transmission is great in Melbourne because it is so flat, you can shoot a signal from Mt Dandenong right over Port Phillip Bay to Geelong and down the Mornington Peninsula to Portsea taking in all of suburbs in between. But north and west can be tricky. You need a bit more power when you swing the direction of the antenna to get to Kilmore and out to Melton. So, with the extra power we’re ready to flick the switch.
The studios on the top floor at the front of the three-level building at 43 Bank St in South Melbourne aren’t ready yet so we’ll make do with temporary studios at the rear of the building, and we do mean temporary or more like ‘makeshift’ with hessian bags hanging from the walls as sound proofing. There is some nervous talent from King St and Flinders Lane wondering if they made the right decision to take a gamble on their radio careers and roll the dice on the success of FM in Australia. After all Australia didn’t even make cars with FM radios.
FM was purely for audiophiles, home audio enthusiasts and classical broadcasting. There were a couple of community radio stations about but the restrictions the government put on the licenses made sure that use for business purposes was untenable. The success of commercial FM was purely a sales presentation with evidence gathered from overseas, mainly the American market with a population a hundred times ours that were tech savvy and consumed affordable electronics and upgraded to FM devises in the 1970’s. Bill Armstrong and Clyde Simpson found the investors and advertisers respectively. Trevor Smith found the talent. It’s not easy selling from the plan but Bill and Clyde sang like snake oil salesman to a catchy reggae tune by local Melbourne musician Joe Camilleri. Trevor knew the sound he was after, deep and clear dulcet tones that are relaxed and reverberate the bass and complement a static free broadcast. The decision not to waste the clean signal on the short length and cheap production of Top 40 ‘fodder’ and broadcast adult contemporary album tracks (at full length) lay purely with Trevor. Trevor also gave us the call sign, E-O-N or EON as it came to be known. “The beginning of a long, long time” or eons. The frequency sat well with the call sign too, as the number 3 stands for the Victorian state broadcast code, 3EON. The call sign is also the second, middle and second last letter of Melbourne (mElbOurNe). The banner (92.3EON.FM) also depicted that ninety-two point thre(e) is on FM.
As Telecom’s third peep signified midnight, 11th of July 1980 the first commercial FM radio station in Australia officially went air. EON was three weeks ahead of local FM competitor 3FOX on the 1st of August 1980 and after an unsuccessful launch on the 12th of July, 2MMM in Sydney went to air on the same day as 2DAY on the 2nd of August 1980.
Ex 3XY announcer Peter Grace opened the microphone and announced in the very laid back and deep style that Trevor Smith had envisaged, “It’s one past midnight and this is 92.3, E-O-N FM. I’m Peter Grace and this is the beginning of a long, long time. The first song is The Eagles’ ‘New Kid in Town’.” Then in crisp clean FM stereo, the full-length album version of The Eagles New Kid in Town gently sparked the VU meters to life. No static, no crackle and pop, no champagne, no fanfare. Just EON.FM.
