Gaydar Radio

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Gaydar Radio

Broadcast area	United Kingdom
Frequency	DAB: 11B DRg London 11B NOW Sussex Coast Sky Digital: 0158
Format	House, dance and pop music; gay-oriented news and entertainment
Owner	QSoft Consulting
Website	www.gaydarradio.com

LGBT Portal

Gaydar Radio is a British digital radio station for gay men, lesbians and gay friendly people. It is available on DAB multiplexes in London and Brighton, across the UK on Sky Digital Channel 0158, and also online. It broadcasts 24 hours a day, with live programming from 4am to midnight.

1 Format
2 History
3 Presenters
4 Ex presenters
5 Footnotes
6 See also

[edit] Format

The station plays a mix of dance and mainstream pop music, interspersed with chat and news, with frequent bulletins devoted to news about the gay community.

The music becomes more club-orientated during the late evenings and also at the weekend when Club Nation presents some of the best DJs mixing the best feel good music. This music policy also gets the station a huge following from the straight community.^{[citation needed]}

The station encourages interaction between presenters and listeners via the Gaydar website's chatrooms. It has a reach of 339,400 (Ipsos/Rajar July 2007) listeners a week in the UK, plus another 2.1 million listening online around the world.^[1] However, the station currently broadcasts few commercials.

Gaydar Radio is based in Twickenham in South West London, in a building called Queen's House, a name that provides a frequent source of amusement for the presenters.

In October 2007 the station relaunched it's website as part of GaydarNation and the following month launched GaydarRadio Jukebox offering music downloads of its most popular tracks and exclusive mixes.

Breakfast, co-presented by Neil Sexton and Debbie Ryan, it features the daily competition with The West End Wendies and The Coming Out Story. Also regular correspondents share the latest news and events from their corner of Gay UK. Two other popular features of the show are the weekly breakfast cereal, Tales from Gaydar Towers, — a little bit of fact and a great deal of fiction about the day to day life behind the scenes at Gaydar Towers.

Mid-mording, former Blue Peter presenter Stuart Miles hosts a three hour daily request show.
Afternoon, Simon Le Vans presents "Your Choice" a three hour request show from 2pm every weekday.
Drivetime, Phil Marriot hosts the drivetime show which broadcasts live from Profile Bar in Soho each weekday from 5pm.

Recent recruits to the station include self-described "sexual terrorist" Richard Newman who presents with Lea Walker from Big Brother fame, Alex Duffy from Chiltern Radio and Debbie Ryan from Fox FM.

[edit] History

Gaydar Radio started as an internet-only station, being an offshoot of the gay dating website Gaydar. It moved onto Sky Digital and later DAB in London, replacing Purple Radio, a now defunct gay radio station. According to the first station director Jamie Crick, the entire station was originally played off a PC on a table propped up with a gay clubbing directory. In 2006 the station won Best Radio Station at the BT Digital Music Awards. At the 2007 Sony Radio Academy Awards (the UK Broadcasting "Oscars"), Gaydar Radio went on to win Digital Terrestrial Station of the Year.^[2] It also collected the same award at the 2007 Commercial Radio 'Arquiva' Awards.