How WDFH came to be . . . or decades
in the life of a lonely individual

Marc at 2...learning the tricks of the trade on an Ampex 600 reel-to-reel tape recorder

WDFH-FM is the result of an effort spanning more than 20 years.  Marc Sophos started the station in 1968, when he was ten.  From then until 1982, it could be heard only around the block as an ultra-low-power station.  In 1982, Marc persuaded the local cable company to carry WDFH's signal as background audio for some of the system's data (bulletin board) channels, and the station continued to operate on cable until December, 1993, ultimately reaching about 14,000 cable subscriber homes.  However, his goal was always to establish WDFH as a legitimate FM station.

The early days . . .

Marc's effort to achieve this goal started in early 1973 when, as a ninth grade student at Dobbs Ferry High School, he decided that he wanted to expand his tiny around-the-block station in ways that he couldn't afford.  He approached the Dobbs Ferry High School administration with the idea of starting a school-based station, to be called WDFH.

He assembled a group of friends to assist him and enlisted the enthusiastic support of no fewer than four faculty advisors, including the high school’s principal.  After more than a year of research, meetings, and presentations, the Dobbs Ferry Board of Education granted the group's request and allocated money for the station — no small feat, considering that the school budget was rejected by voters that year and the district had to go on an austerity budget, cutting funding for all extracurricular activities.  But the School Board was so strongly convinced of the proposed station’s great value to the school system and the community that it re-allocated the station to the science budget, ensuring that it wouldn’t be cut.

The exhilaration over the School Board’s approval didn’t last very long.  The radio station group hired a communications consulting engineer to conduct a frequency search shortly after the money for the station was allocated, and the resulting report revealed that because of Dobbs Ferry's proximity to New York City, with its crowded radio dial, no AM or FM frequency was available.  (Dobbs Ferry is just 18 miles north of the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan, where most of NYC's major FM stations have their transmitters.)  This was a crushing blow, as it meant that despite all of the local support and the need for a radio station to serve the community, the FCC would not allow it.  Extremely disappointed but nevertheless persevering, Marc's high school group spent another very intense year investigating alternative technologies and time-sharing with other stations, but nothing worked out, and in the spring of 1975, all possibilities having been exhausted, Marc declared the effort over and returned the remaining money to the School Board.  At that time, his home station — which he had continued to operate during this period and at which he was beginning to develop programming ideas for the proposed high school station — adopted the call letters WDFH.

Moving toward FM

During the following years, while home from college breaks (he was studying Telecommunication at Michigan State University), Marc continued to build up the studio facilities and make improvements in the programming, despite the fact that WDFH could still be heard only around the block.  But then, in 1980, Dobbs Ferry was wired up for cable TV, and Marc immediately saw an opportunity to have his station heard on cable.  This would enable WDFH to be heard in thousands of homes without having to obtain FCC approval.  It took two years to reach an agreement with the cable company, but as mentioned above, the connection was made in 1982, and for the first time WDFH could be heard over a relatively widespread area.

The elusive FM dream remained, however.   During his years at Michigan State in the late 1970s and continuing into the early 1980s, Marc spoke with many consulting engineers all over the country, seeking any possible solution that would allow the establishment of a new station in Westchester County.  Unfortunately, none of the engineers held out any hope: they told him not to waste his time trying to establish a new station so close to New York City, stating that despite the apparent need for such a station, the effort was doomed to be unsuccessful and would end up costing more than buying an existing station.  (They were only half right, as things turned out.)  But Marc was driven by his belief that in spite of their huge coverage areas, the powerful NYC stations did little to serve the local needs of the suburban communities, which therefore are seriously underserved by local media.

Success?

His persistence eventually paid off: in 1984, Marc located a consulting engineer in Massachusetts who specialized in noncommercial FM allocations.  Following another frequency search, Marc and this new engineer developed an idea about how a new station could be squeezed onto the crowded FM dial.  This would require the relocation of the station from Dobbs Ferry ten miles up the river to Ossining, home of the world-famous Sing Sing Prison.   A detailed frequency availability study confirmed that a new station could be located there, so Marc formed the Westchester Council for Public Broadcasting (WCPB) (now Hudson Valley Community Radio, Inc.), a not-for-profit organization, and filed the necessary application with the FCC in April 1984.  After being stalled in Washington for more than eight years — during which time Marc worked in commercial radio and at National Public Radio, and went to law school — the FCC application was finally granted in 1992.  WCPB’s tax-exempt status (under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code) was granted by the IRS in May 1995, and after nearly three years of construction efforts, WDFH-FM 90.3 had its FM debut on a very hot July 15, 1995, amidst a big party with 40 or more revelers packed into WDFH’s two small studios in Ossining.

That cloud on the horizon starts to blot out the sun . . .

Once again, the celebratory mood was to be short lived.  WDFH unexpectedly and abruptly lost its lease at the original Ossining location of its studios and transmitter and was forced off the air in November 1996, after just 15 months of broadcast service to the community.  We had to dismantle and put into storage the studios and transmission equipment, including the tower, that had taken us more than two painstaking and difficult years to construct.  Needless to say, the financial and emotional impacts were staggering.

We worked feverishly to get the station back on the air.  Under the new federal Telecommunication Act of 1996, the license of a station that goes off the air for a year, for whatever reason, is automatically canceled, with no possibility of appeal — another aspect of that wonderful law.  In our case, there would have been no way to re-apply, so we were looking at a total loss.   However, we were able to secure a new tower site in June 1997 and immediately started work to secure the necessary zoning and FCC approvals, which came in the fall.  In the end, we came within three days of that crucial deadline, but we returned to the air with limited programming in late October 1997, with major support from AT&T Corporation, the owner of the tower site.

While WDFH's signal had been limited from the original Ossining site, this forced relocation made things much worse.  We believe that only about 10,000 people can hear the signal from the new site.  (The FCC's estimate is higher, but it's based on technical assumptions that don't apply in our case.)

New studios and an ill-fated alliance with Mercy College

In the spring of 1998 we approached Mercy College with the idea of forming an alliance between the station and the college.  Under the alliance, Mercy would provide a base level of financing for the station as well as space for the studios.  The station would in return provide benefits for the college, including both direct benefits, such as providing station internships for Mercy students and a unparalleled recruiting tool for the college, and indirect benefits, such as providing public forums in which Mercy professors could be featured on the air as experts in their fields, thus helping to enhance the visibility and reputation of the college in general.  Moreover, having a legitimate, licensed FM station on campus would attract more interested and better qualified students to the college’s Journalism and Media program, which already provided instruction in TV (and to a lesser extent, radio) production and print journalism.  The alliance would therefore help to build the credibility and seriousness of the program at the college.  It seemed like a wonderfully symbiotic relationship.

This long-awaited alliance was finally formed when the contract between the college and WDFH was signed in December 2000.

After designing and building an extensive new studio complex on campus (see photos),we started broadcasting from the new studios on September 2, 2003.  Our staff of community volunteers grew, we increased our training capacity significantly, and selected Mercy College students worked at the station as interns, building their resumes as they got serious, substantive experience in on-air work, news and public affairs, editing and production, in-studio interviews and performances by musicians, web site development, and marketing and promotion.

To address our longstanding signal limitations, we started in September 2001 to work on an expansion.  This project has, in typical WDFH fashion, been a roller coaster.

The latest chapter: the alliance ends, but the signal is finally expanding... a lot!

In 2004, Mercy abruptly discovered that it was facing very serious financial problems and, in the face of declining enrollment, began cutting programs and laying off faculty and staff.  In 2006, the alliance between WDFH and Mercy ended. 

This is requiring WDFH to relocate its studios once again... and thus begins another transitionary period.

However, the good news is that our long-awaited signal expansion is imminent.  The FCC granted our application in December 2007, and we are working to complete the project in the spring of 2008.  With the new signal, about 400,000 residents of the lower Hudson valley will be able to receive WDFH.  More about the signal expansion...

Press coverage

Much has been written about WDFH over the years.  For a listing of articles, click here.

FAQ: What does "WDFH" stand for?

Listeners often ask us what the call letters WDFH stand for.  As mentioned above, the first thing they stood for was "Dobbs Ferry High," after the unsuccessful high school station effort that marked the beginning of Marc's 20 year quest to get a new FM license for a station to serve the northern suburbs of New York City.  Later, in the late 1970s, a group of WDFH volunteers from the neighboring village of Hastings-on-Hudson, unhappy that their village wasn't represented in the call letters, appropriated the "H" for their own purposes.  More recently, in the late 1980s, one of our volunteers, Patrick Collins, decided — on the air, no less — that WDFH stood for "Wild Dogs From Hell."  (This occurred during one of the more infamous broadcasts of Pat's program with the inimitable Nick Sarames.)  The moniker stuck, and though it's not official, it comes as close as anything else.  So take your pick.