.
Wesleyan University-Philippines
(WU-P) is making its presence felt in the community it serves in a unique
way with airing of its own radio station, DWUP-FM, Radio Wesleyan, at 89.7
MHz.
The low-powered, educational
radio station supports the university's missions of scholarship, service
and character by providing hands-on training to Mass Communication and
Electronics and Communications Engineering students, disseminating useful
information to the community from the university's academic endeavors,
and airing of programs that cater to the spiritual needs of the listeners.
It will eventually be used for distance education.
The setting up of a Wesleyan
radio station took all of three decades to realize.
In the early 1970s, the College
of Technology under Dean Celestino Lucero managed to assemble an AM transmitter
out of electronic parts donated by Clark Air Base in Pampanga. With the
call letters DZWC -- the last two letters standing for "Wesleyan College"
-- the low-powered station went on test broadcast for a few weeks before
a confluence of events prevented the project from fully taking off.
First, a strong typhoon brought down the station's antenna. Unable to broadcast,
the station failed to apply for a new radio frequency when the distance
between the frequencies of all Philippine radio stations were reduced from
10 Hertz to 9 Hertz. The final blow came when the prime mover of the project
-- Dean Lucero -- unexpectedly died.
Flash forward to 2004. WU-P
President Guillermo T. Maglaya, who was then barely a few months in office
as officer-in-charge, showed keen interest upon learning of the long unrealized
dream of Wesleyan to put up a radio station. Upon his suggestion, the College
of Arts and Sciences through Ramon R. Valmonte, Mass Communication professor,
submitted to him a new proposal for a university radio station that would
serve, among others, as a training station for Mass Communication students.
The proposal, dated July 26, 2004, was subsequently discussed and approved
by the WU-P Board of Trustees. With Atty. Maglaya quietly doing most of
the leg work, the DWUP-FM broadcast studio and tower at the fifth floor
of the Computer Science Building were completed six months later to everyone's
surprise. On February 7, 2005 the station began its test broadcast -- 30
years after the idea for a Radio Wesleyan was first conceived.
Radio Wesleyan, a unit under
the Office of the University President, was formally inaugurated on July
1, 2005, coinciding with the commemoration of the 59th founding anniversary
of Wesleyan University-Philippines and the installation of Atty. Maglaya
as the University's fourth president.
On July 8, 2005, Radio Wesleyan's
extension studio inside the Mass Communication Laboratory at the third
floor of Mañacop Building started to operate, enabling the station
to broadcast programs from two sites within the University campus and bolstering
its broadcast training capabilities.
With DWUP-FM, Wesleyan University-Philippines
became the first school in Central Luzon to own and operate its own radio
station.
Telephone number:
+63
(44) 4637401
E-mail address: dwup@radiowesleyan.info
Postal address: 5th
Floor Computer Science Building, Wesleyan University-Philippines, Cabanatuan
City 3100, Philippines
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