Radio Grün Weiß takes its name from the green and white of the Styrian coat of arms, a fitting choice for a station that spent more than two decades expanding from one small Alpine town until it genuinely earned the right to claim the whole region as its own.
Upper Styria's First Local Station
The station signed on in spring 1998 from Proleb, broadcasting on 102.6 FM as the first local radio station in Upper Styria, according to the Austria-Forum. Within a year it had moved to a permanent studio in nearby Leoben, the town that remains its base today, and had grown to four active frequencies, a modest but steady expansion for a station built to serve a specific mountain region rather than chase a national audience.
Reaching Further Into the Valleys
Growth continued gradually rather than explosively over the following years. The station extended into the Ennstal valley in 2015, adding another distinct pocket of Styria to its coverage and building out the kind of hyperlocal footprint that larger national broadcasters rarely bother maintaining in smaller Alpine communities.
The Jump to Graz
The real turning point came in 2020. Radio Grün Weiß launched on 100.0 FM from Graz's Schlossberg on September 28, transmitting into the Styrian capital with 500 watts of power, according to Soundlarge.at. A second Graz-area transmitter followed in nearby Gratkorn on 95.0 FM. Together with additional frequencies awarded across the state, the expansion pushed the station's technical reach to roughly 650,000 people, by far the largest broadcast area increase in its history and a genuine leap from a regional Upper Styria outlet into a statewide one.
A New Slogan to Match
The station marked that shift with a rebrand around a new tagline, translating roughly to "our station, our Styria," a direct statement that Radio Grün Weiß no longer saw itself as an Upper Styria specialist but as a broadcaster for the entire state. That put it into direct competition with more than a dozen stations already active in the Graz radio market, a considerably more crowded field than the one it had operated in for its first twenty years.
Still Rooted in Leoben
Despite the statewide ambition, Radio Grün Weiß has kept its operational base in Leoben, the same Upper Styrian town it settled into a year after going on air in 1998. Its programming mix of Schlager, folk music and international oldies has stayed consistent throughout the expansion, giving listeners across the newly widened footprint the same format the station built its original Upper Styria audience on.