WXYC 89.3 FMWXYC 89.3 FM

WXYC has been student-run since 1977, licensed not to the University of North Carolina but to Student Educational Broadcasting, a non-profit the students had to invent after the FCC refused to hand a licence to their own student government. It runs 1,100 watts out of the union building on the Chapel Hill campus, reaching roughly nine hundred square miles of North Carolina, and in November 1994 it became the first station anywhere to rebroadcast its own signal over the internet.

There are no genre blocks: every set is assembled from a library of tens of thousands of CDs and LPs by one of about 150 DJs, a third of them alumni who never quite left. Orange County Special, folk and traditional American music, dates back to 1977, New Science Experience mixes house and techno live, and Thursday Night Feature has spent three hours on bagpipes and three on songs about chickens.