105.5 WDHA has spent more than sixty years broadcasting from Morris County, but it did not start out as a rock station at all. It signed on playing nothing but classical music, and the road from there to becoming "The Rock of New Jersey" runs through one of the most unlikely format shifts in the state's radio history.
Eighteen Hours of Classical Music a Day
WDHA-FM signed on February 22, 1961, broadcasting nonstop classical music 18 hours a day from atop Shongum Mountain at 3,000 watts, according to the station's Wikipedia entry. The call letters stand for Drexel Hill Associates, named for the Pennsylvania hometown of founder Peter Arnow, a detail that has stuck with the station through six decades of format changes.
A Stereo Pioneer From the Very Start
Within its first year on air, WDHA became one of the first stereo radio stations in the United States, adopting a technology that was still new to most broadcasters in the early 1960s. That early willingness to chase new technology carried through the rest of the station's history, showing up again decades later in a much bigger way.
From Classical to Rock, Then a First for the World
Through the 1970s the station drifted from classical and adult pop toward soft rock and then album rock, and by 1984 WDHA had become the world's first radio station to play a compact disc on the air, per the same Wikipedia record. That milestone came just two years after Sony and Philips brought CDs to the consumer market, putting a Morris County, New Jersey station ahead of far larger operations in adopting the format.
Four Owners, One Growing Signal
Drexel Hill Associates held the station until 1991, when Signal Communications and New Jersey Broadcast Partners took over, followed by Greater Media in 2001, before Beasley Broadcast Group bought WDHA in 2016 as part of a $240 million deal. Each ownership change came with the station already established as an album rock outlet, meaning the format that eventually became "The Rock of New Jersey" long outlasted any single owner.
Still Topping Its Local Market
Today WDHA broadcasts from studios in Cedar Knolls and consistently ranks as the top local station in Nielsen's Morristown market ratings, a position built on the mainstream rock format the station settled into after its classical and soft rock years. Sixty-plus years after signing on with nothing but classical music, the station that once introduced New Jersey to stereo FM and compact discs now introduces it to whatever rock is charting next.