Radio Te Aroha 88FM streams oldies and variety music live from Te Aroha, a small town at the foot of the Kaimai Range in New Zealand's Waikato region. Press play on Radio Shuffle and it streams instantly, free, with no account or app download required.
Run by a theatre society in a town named for love
Radio Te Aroha is owned and operated by the Te Aroha Dramatic Society, a community group that has also run the town's Te Aroha Little Theatre for more than 70 years, according to the station's own about page. The station runs entirely on volunteers and exists mainly to give free airtime to local not-for-profits, clubs, schools and churches, a mission that fits a town whose very name, short for Te Aroha-a-uta, is usually translated as "love flowing inland."
The station went on air locally in February 2022 on 88FM, reaching listeners within roughly five to eight kilometres of the town centre, and it also partners with Waikato Civil Defence and the New Zealand MetService to broadcast hazard alerts, giving the frequency a practical role beyond music and local notices.
The town with the Southern Hemisphere's only soda geyser
Te Aroha sits at the foot of its namesake mountain, the highest point in the Kaimai Range, and has drawn visitors to its mineral springs since well before European settlement, according to Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. A short-lived gold rush arrived in 1880, but it was the hot soda-water geyser in the town's domain, the only one of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, that gave Te Aroha its lasting identity as a spa town once a bathhouse opened there in 1883.
Listen free on Radio Shuffle
Radio Te Aroha 88FM streams around the clock, and Radio Shuffle carries the feed live with nothing to install and no subscription required. Press play for oldies and variety from a small Waikato town with a geyser all its own.