The Cheese has been running on a low-power signal out of the Hutt Valley for close to two decades, built on a premise almost defiantly simple: play the music Generation X grew up on, and keep doing it every single day.
Started in Wainuiomata, Now Broadcasting From Lower Hutt
According to the station's own history, The Cheese first went to air on July 1, 2006, as a low-power FM station broadcasting on 88.4 MHz out of Wainuiomata, a small valley community east of Lower Hutt near Wellington. It has since settled on 87.7 MHz from Lower Hutt itself, still running as an LPFM operation licensed with APRA and PPNZ, broadcasting 24 hours a day both over the air and online.
A Station Built Around One Specific Audience
The Cheese states its mission plainly on its own site: music for Generation X. Rather than chase a broad demographic with a general hits format, it draws from six decades of music with a heavy emphasis on 1980s and 90s pop, rock, and alternative hits, the exact stretch of chart music that defined adolescence for New Zealanders now in their 40s and 50s. Shows like The Eighties Lunchbox and Breakfast with Alan Coffey give that focus a consistent daily shape rather than treating it as an occasional theme.
Small Signal, Real Community Presence
What The Cheese lacks in transmitter power it makes up for in local rootedness. The station describes itself as "a small but local Radio Station with a dedicated team of people" and runs a "What's Happening in the Hutt" section covering community events, positioning itself as a genuine neighborhood fixture rather than a syndicated feed with a local-sounding name. That kind of hyper-local, low-power model has a long history in New Zealand radio, where LPFM licenses have let small operators like this one carve out a niche that national commercial stations have no reason to serve.
Why Nostalgia Radio Still Works
Generation X-targeted stations exist because that decade of music, MTV-era pop, alternative rock, and 80s synth hooks, still carries enormous recall value for the listeners who grew up with it, and a dedicated station gives them a place to hear it without wading through a modern hits format built for a younger audience. For the Hutt Valley specifically, The Cheese functions as both a soundtrack and a community bulletin board rolled into one small, persistent FM signal.
Tune in to The Cheese on Radio Shuffle for 80s and 90s hits and community radio broadcasting out of New Zealand's Hutt Valley.