Some radio stations start with a business plan. Wildmountain Radio started with a church youth group, a stack of soldering irons, and a handful of amateur radio operators willing to teach teenagers how broadcasting actually works.
Built By Teenagers, Guided By Radio Amateurs
Wildmountain Radio began as a project of the Reformed church community of Wildberg, in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. According to the project's own account, the church ran two radio-building days where young people, working under the guidance of licensed amateur radio operators, assembled their own FM transmission equipment from scratch. The goal, in the organizers' own words, was to let participants "experience firsthand how much effort goes into producing a radio broadcast," treating the technical build as the actual lesson rather than a side activity.
A Real License From Switzerland's Communications Regulator
The project was not just a classroom exercise. Switzerland's Federal Office of Communications, BAKOM, granted a genuine license for a temporary FM local station under the name "Wild Mountain Radio," which broadcast at 97.7 MHz with 100 watts from an omnidirectional antenna over the weekend of September 24 to 25, 2015. That the regulator treated a youth church project as a legitimate broadcaster, professional Rohde & Schwarz studio gear and all, says something about how seriously the organizers approached the technical side.
Reviving a Frequency Silent Since 1992
The most striking part of the project came next. The same amateur operators also secured a license to transmit on medium wave at 1566 kHz, the exact frequency once used by Landessender Sarnen, a Swiss national radio transmitter that ran from 1973 to 1992. That original station was a so-called Springbrunnensender, or "fountain transmitter," a network of antennas that beamed its signal straight up at the ionosphere so it would reflect back down over long distances at night, the way water from a fountain falls back after hitting a ceiling. It operated from inside a civil defense bunker near Sarnen and went silent when its era of national shortwave and mediumwave broadcasting ended. Wildmountain Radio put that dormant frequency back on the air, even briefly, as a working transmitter.
A Small Station With a Big Technical Story
What makes Wildmountain Radio worth knowing is not a giant audience or a famous lineup, it is the fact that a handful of Swiss teenagers and their amateur radio mentors managed to both build a licensed FM station from parts and put a piece of Swiss broadcasting history, a frequency silent since 1992, back on the air. Few community radio projects anywhere manage both in the same weekend.
Tune in to Wildmountain Radio on Radio Shuffle for eclectic music and Swiss local culture from the youth-built station that brought a dead frequency back to life.