07/05/2025
Station Artifact Spotlight: The original Cable FM transmitter (only a husk remains).. from our website "The Cable FM operation was initiated in 1984 and was heard on the North Shore Viacom Cablevision system on 107.1 FM and "Data Channel" 27A. Milwaukee did not even have cable back then, but the Suburbs did. The FM required a convertor- which nobody had, but the Data Channel (which scrolled stock market quotes- and nobody cared about back then), was just another channel that everyone could get. We knew for a fact that this combo of Modern Rock and Wall Street blew a few minds! The cable head-end was fed with a pair of hi-fi (equalized) phone lines from Ciske's Living Room/Studio in Riverwest. The station operated 24-7 from a pile of pre-produced shows on cassette tapes, played on a stack of 4 auto-reverse Walkmans that cascaded to each other. "Big Daddy" Dean Hock designed and wire-wrapped the control electronics that drove that little beast. It worked great for a long time, but the Walkmans were just not designed for that type of continuous duty. The music was some of the coolest of the day, supplied mostly from Mort d' Hump's Rockpool connection.",
