M94.5: live radio from Munich

Hooold...

Dusting off the needle…

M94.5

Amateurs, in the good sense.

Munich students on DAB+, indie by day, anything by night.

Germany had no training radio at all until 1996, when Bavaria set up its Aus- und Fortbildungskanäle and put students on real transmitters instead of a classroom console. M94.5 went out over Munich's cable network on 30 June that year and onto the airwaves the day after, staffed from the start by students drawn from every university in the city, rotating through a teaching newsroom a semester at a time. Since 2018 it has sat alongside the television channel afk TV under the Mediaschool Bayern label.

The frequency in the name is long gone — the station went to DAB+, the web and Twitch — but most of the programme goes out live. Nights belong to Black Box, which changes genre daily: indie, then metal, punk and hardcore, then singer-songwriters, then soul, disco and funk. Daytime keeps an indie-leaning rotation running between the student magazines and the news.

More like this

United StatesCambridge

UncertainFM

Lockdown habit that stuck.

PortugalBraga

RUM – Rádio Universitária do Minho

Braga's own frequency.

United StatesSan Francisco

Covers

Nobody here wrote a thing.

United StatesLos Angeles

KXLU 88.9 FM

Still not housebroken.

GermanyBerlin

radioeins

Licence fees, well spent.

Czech RepublicBrno

Radio R

Anyone with a radio itch.

FranceParis

3615 Radio

Windows 98 never left here.

GermanyNuremberg

Radio Z

Left of the dial, left of centre.

PortugalCoimbra

Rádio Universidade de Coimbra

The country's only radio school.

PortugalPorto

Engenharia Rádio

Eighty shows, no professionals.

United StatesRaleigh

WKNC 88.1 HD-1

Nobody here is a professional.

rock

New ZealandPalmerston North

Radio Control 99.4FM

The hosts still choose the records.

South AfricaBarrydale

Big Indie Giant Radio

Bring a song, not a beat.

United KingdomLerwick

60 North Radio

Weather permitting, always on.

United StatesRolla

KMNR 89.7 FM

Sixty years, zero format.

United KingdomLeeds

Leeds Student Radio

Best in the country, twice.

United StatesWilliamsburg

WCWM 90.9 FM

Unpaid, unformatted, unbothered.

United StatesSaint Paul

WMCN 91.7 FM

Macalester's loudest classroom.

United StatesReno

KWNK 97.7 FM

The Biggest Little signal.

LithuaniaVilnius

Beveik Radijas

Where new rock still gets played.

Munich, Germany

M94.5

Amateurs, in the good sense.

Munich students on DAB+, indie by day, anything by night.

Germany had no training radio at all until 1996, when Bavaria set up its Aus- und Fortbildungskanäle and put students on real transmitters instead of a classroom console. M94.5 went out over Munich's cable network on 30 June that year and onto the airwaves the day after, staffed from the start by students drawn from every university in the city, rotating through a teaching newsroom a semester at a time. Since 2018 it has sat alongside the television channel afk TV under the Mediaschool Bayern label.

The frequency in the name is long gone — the station went to DAB+, the web and Twitch — but most of the programme goes out live. Nights belong to Black Box, which changes genre daily: indie, then metal, punk and hardcore, then singer-songwriters, then soul, disco and funk. Daytime keeps an indie-leaning rotation running between the student magazines and the news.