PBS FM started as a fix for a problem two Melbourne music lovers could not stop noticing. Felix Hoffman and Peter Jetson spent the mid to late 1970s frustrated by what they saw as the city's lack of quality, community driven radio, and by December 1976 had pulled together fifty people, described in the station's own account as a mix of "doctors, dentists, and technicians" alongside "punks and musos," to found what became the Progressive Broadcasting Service, according to PBS's own history page.
It took nearly three more years to get on air. PBS secured its broadcasting license in October 1978 and finally launched regular transmission at 4:30pm on 21 December 1979, from a studio inside the Prince of Wales hotel in St. Kilda, using a transmitter mounted on the roof of the Royal Women's Hospital in Carlton. The station moved to a Fitzroy Street studio in 1984, expanded to a full 24-hour schedule on 106.7 FM in 1987, and became one of the first Australian stations to broadcast online in 1997, picking up international listeners well before streaming was common practice for community radio.
Eighty specialist shows, four hundred volunteers
What has kept PBS distinct across more than four decades is its refusal to centralize taste. The station runs upward of 80 specialist music programs covering soul, jazz, blues, rock, hip hop, electronic, metal, and world music, each shaped by volunteer presenters who choose their own content based on genre or theme rather than following a shared playlist, according to the station's about page. More than 400 volunteers keep that structure running alongside a small paid staff, a model built for depth over breadth, letting individual presenters go deep on a single scene, label, or era rather than smoothing everything into a generalist format.
That approach earned recognition in 2019, when PBS marked its 40th anniversary with induction into the Music Victoria Hall of Fame. The station has since moved into new studios in the Collingwood Arts Precinct in 2021, still run largely by the same cooperative, volunteer-driven structure that first got fifty strangers organizing a radio station back in 1976.