WUTC (FM)

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WUTC-FM 88.1 is a public radio station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the United States. Since going on the air circa 1979 or very early 1980, it has been owned and operated by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and broadcasts from Cadek Hall on the UTC campus. The station is a member of National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and American Public Media, and broadcasts a variety of modern music, including jazz, rock and related genres. Depending on weather conditions, WUTC can be heard as far to the southeast as the northwestern suburbs of metro Atlanta, where it often fades back and forth with WJSP-FM, a Georgia Public Broadcasting relay also located on that frequency, 88.1 FM.

Until about 1988, WUTC relayed programming from University of Tennessee at Knoxville station WUOT-FM; afterward, WUTC became independent and opened Chattanooga studios. Also, in the late 1990s, WUTC became the exclusive home of several NPR programs, such as "All Things Considered" from WSMC-FM, which cancelled them because of scheduling conflicts with its mandatory Seventh-day Adventist religious programming on Friday evenings and Saturdays. Many would contend that WUTC, with an audience primarily composed of upwardly mobile, politically and culturally liberal urbanites, is a more appropriate location for those programs anyway than WSMC, which mainly appeals to an older, conservative, and religious (that station features a higher-than-usual amount of sacred music, for instance) suburban constituency.

Chattanooga thus follows the lead of some other markets in the U.S. by having one public station devote its programming entirely (or almost so) to classical music and related genres, and one or more stations to news, public affairs, and other music genres not otherwise viable on commercial radio outlets.

[edit] External links

• WUTC official website
• WUTC department at UTC
• Query the FCC's FM station database for WUTC