August 18, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 3 min read · Radio & Broadcasting
Listeners tuning into 92.3FM 2YYY hear more or less the same kind of warm, local, slightly chaotic community radio they'd have heard decades ago. What's changed almost completely is everything behind the scenes, and having been around for a meaningful chunk of that transition, it's worth pausing to appreciate just how far it's come.
The Physical Era
When I first got involved, a meaningful part of running a segment meant physically handling media — cart machines loaded with short jingles and station IDs, CDs for music, and in the older archives, actual cassette tapes of past interviews and segments, carefully labelled and just as easily lost or chewed up by a tired tape deck. Scheduling meant a printed sheet on the wall. Missing a cue meant dead air, because there was no instant backup queued up and ready to go.
The Slow Digital Shift
Digital audio files crept in gradually rather than all at once — a station laptop here, a digital playout system there, still running alongside the old physical gear for years because replacing everything at once was neither affordable nor, frankly, necessary. I remember the genuine relief the first time a scheduled segment played automatically off a digital queue instead of needing someone physically present to swap a disc at exactly the right second.
Where We've Landed
These days, scheduling happens on a shared digital system, archives of old segments live in the cloud instead of a shelf of unlabelled cassettes, and I can record a segment from home if I'm not able to make it into the studio, then have it slotted into the schedule remotely. None of that was remotely possible when I started. It would have sounded like genuine science fiction to the volunteers who ran the station decades before me, working entirely with physical media and a lot of careful, manual scheduling.
What Hasn't Changed at All
The actual content, and the actual spirit of the thing, is remarkably consistent across that whole span. Local voices, talking about local things, for a local audience, with all the warmth and occasional chaos that comes with volunteers rather than paid professionals running the show. The technology made the production smoother. It didn't change what community radio is actually for, which is a station genuinely run by and for the community it serves, rather than a syndicated feed with a local name slapped on top.
Why That Distinction Still Matters in 2026
In an era of algorithm-driven everything, there's something quietly valuable about a station where a real local person decided what goes to air, based on what actually matters to actual listeners in this actual town. The cloud scheduling and digital archives are genuinely useful improvements. They're tools in service of something that hasn't fundamentally changed — actual humans, talking to their actual neighbours, about things that actually matter locally.
What I'd Tell Anyone Thinking About Volunteering
If you've ever thought about getting involved with community radio, the technical barrier to entry has genuinely never been lower. You don't need to understand cart machines or splice tape anymore — most of what trips people up now is confidence, not equipment. The equipment side, I promise, is the easy part these days. Everything else — finding your voice, getting comfortable with dead air, learning to recover gracefully when something goes wrong — that part takes time no matter what decade you started in.