Today 93.1 FM carries tropical music and Spanish adult contemporary hits to the New York area as WPAT-FM's Amor 93.1. Long before any of that, the same frequency belonged to Edwin Howard Armstrong, the engineer who invented wide-band FM broadcasting itself, and used it to prove his own technology worked.
The Inventor's Own Test Frequency
Armstrong built an experimental station in Alpine, New Jersey to demonstrate FM to the public, and when the FCC reassigned FM's original low-band frequencies in the late 1940s, his companion station W2XEA moved to the new high band under the call sign KE2XCC, broadcasting on what would become 93.1 MHz. That station stayed on air until March 1954, signing off about a month after Armstrong's death, closing out the very frequency he had used to prove his own invention worked in the real world.
A New Station Picks Up Where the Inventor Left Off
Three years after Armstrong's station went dark, WPAT-FM signed on in March 1957 as the FM sister of WPAT AM, taking over the same 93.1 MHz spot on the dial that had once carried the inventor's test broadcasts, according to the station's Wikipedia history. The new station had nothing to do with Armstrong's engineering demonstrations, it existed to make money on commercial radio, but it inherited a frequency with a genuinely unusual pedigree.
Nearly Four Decades of Beautiful Music
WPAT-FM spent almost forty years running a beautiful music format, built around quarter-hour sweeps of instrumental covers of popular songs and Broadway standards, only gradually adding vocal tracks and soft rock by the 1980s. Ownership passed from Capital Cities to Park Communications in the mid-1980s after regulators forced a sale tied to Capital Cities' purchase of ABC, but the mellow instrumental format itself stayed remarkably stable through those changes in ownership.
A Complete Reinvention in 1996
That stability ended in January 1996, when Spanish Broadcasting System bought the station and flipped it to Spanish-language adult contemporary overnight, ending English programming for good. The format kept evolving from there, first as Suave 93.1, then Amor 93.1 in 1998, before settling into the tropical music format the station runs today from studios in Midtown Manhattan, with its transmitter mounted on the Empire State Building.
One Frequency, Two Very Different Missions
93.1 MHz has now carried an inventor's proof of concept, decades of elevator-friendly instrumentals, and a modern tropical dance format built for a Spanish-speaking New York audience, three completely unrelated missions sharing the same spot on the dial. Amor 93.1 does not advertise the frequency's origins, and most of its listeners tuning in for bachata and salsa have no reason to know them, but the number itself has been on the air, in one form or another, since the birth of FM radio.