Programming

The weekly grid, Eastern time

The station runs from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm Eastern. Outside those hours the stream is off; that has been the arrangement since late 2016 and it is a bandwidth decision rather than an editorial one.

Sunday

Weekdays and Saturday

Notes on the schedule

All shows are pre-recorded unless a broadcast is announced as live. Scheduling can change without notice to accommodate live broadcasts from remote locations — festivals, halls and club dates take priority over the grid, and a remote will displace whatever was due to run.

Times are Eastern. If you are listening from outside North America, the practical advice is to use the OnDemand archive rather than trying to catch broadcasts live.

How a schedule like this gets built

Programming a volunteer station is a scheduling problem before it is an editorial one. Every host records in their own time, most of them have jobs, and none of them can be moved to a different slot without a conversation. The grid that results is less a plan than an accumulation: slots were filled as people offered to fill them, and the shape settled over years rather than being designed.

What that produces is a week with a genuine rhythm. Sunday is the flagship day, carrying the live broadcast and the programmes with the largest audiences. Weekday evenings each get one new show, which keeps something fresh on the air five nights a week without asking any host for more than an hour. Daytime belongs to replays, and that is deliberate: a large part of the audience listens at work, and the daytime hours reach people who could never catch an evening broadcast.

The gaps matter too. Wednesday and Friday carry no new evening show, which gives hosts a week that is not relentless and gives the schedule room to absorb a remote or a missed recording without a hole appearing. A grid with no slack in it breaks the first time somebody is ill.