Pacifica Network would like to recognize and congratulate KDVS in Davis, California for 51 years of freeform college and community radio. KDVS, which operates from UC Davis, celebrated its 51st birthday on February 1.

KDVS is a student-run, community, independent, freeform radio station broadcasting on the web and at 90.3 FM in the Sacramento Valley, broadcasting 24/7 year-round. Its program schedule consists of a variety of music genre programs, public affairs and sports. View the jam-packed, interactive schedule here.

KDVS continues to this day its original mission: “to provide the university with a laboratory for learning broadcast, production and managerial skills, and to provide its listening audience with diverse, challenging, noncommercial, freeform radio.”

Beginning its broadcast on February 1, 1964 as KCD, the station originally operated from a laundry room. You can read further into the station’s enduring and fascinating history here, including when the station aired a live call-in with Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969, or that time in 1986 when the station’s staff posed nude for the centerfold of its fall program guide.

Currently, KDVS produces KDViationS, a free quarterly zine that features news, music, commentary, interviews, art, writing and much more. The station also operates a student-run record label, KDVS Recordings, as well as two nonprofit organizations: Common Frequency and Radio Engineering Research Group at UC Davis, both of which contribute to “the understanding and proliferation of independent media and non-commercial broadcasting.”

Congratulations again to KDVS! Here’s to many more years of freeform, alternative radio.

See related articles from last year’s 50th birthday, courtesy of UC Davis’s student-run publication The Aggie:
http://www.theaggie.org/2014/04/18/kdvs-fundraiser-2014-celebrates-50th-anniversary/
http://www.theaggie.org/2014/02/06/news-in-brief-kdvs-celebrates-its-50th-anniversary/