—David Menconi, Down on Copperline
On the one hand, Orange County’s community radio station WHUP, 104.7-FM in Hillsborough, is a modern enterprise. Founded in the wake of the U.S. Congress’ 2010 Local Community Radio Act, it’s a low-power station that nevertheless has enough technically sophisticated broadcast gear for station manager Bob Burtman to quip that WHUP is “a technology company masquerading as a radio station.”
On the other hand, however, WHUP is a throwback to the way radio stations used to be. Which is to say that if you give it a listen, you can’t help concluding that there’s no place other than Hillsborough it could possibly originate from.
“All radio stations used to be fundamentally local, whether AM or FM,” says Burtman, who is also WHUP’s co-founder and board president. “They all had local character, flavor and deejays. But that’s been weeded out of most broadcast media, leaving a giant black hole that was easy for us to slide into with local content, personality, flavor, character and authenticity. Our objective is also to spotlight good work being done in Hillsborough, Orange County and the Triangle.”
Operating out of an upstairs space at 117 W. King St., WHUP has been on the air since October of 2015, broadcasting at 24 watts over the air and online at whupfm.org. In addition to being intensely local, the programming schedule is eclectic with programs devoted to garage rock, jazz, country, alternative rock, swing, ambient, soul, electronic, spoken-word and more. Countless local musicians have played the station’s “Pass the Hat” Friday-evening live series, too.
Among the voices heard on the station are deejay/collector Ken Friedman, curator of the “Tobacco A-Go-Go” series and one of the foremost authorities in the Southeast on 1960s-vintage garage-band rock; Hillsborough’s 2017-2018 Poet Laureate William “Endlesswill” Davis; and the late beach-music Hall of Fame legend Ed “Charlie Brown” Weiss, whose shows are archived on the station’s website.
“We have an eclectic mix of host-driven programs conceived and curated by hosts and deejays without any interference from management,” says Burtman. “Every program is archived online like a podcast, too, so you can listen on your own schedule anytime you want. It’s an on-demand world and we’ve been that way from our first day.”
WHUP has an existing volunteer base of around 100 people in on-the-air roles and various behind-the-scenes support capacities. They do two over-the-air fund-raisers per year, spring and fall, getting most of their $30,000 annual budget from individual donations, events like this past October’s Big WHUP Bingo Night (which raised over $6,000), underwriting and grants.
Where lots of non-profits struggled during the big pandemic shutdown of 2020-21, WHUP weathered it well enough to be able to split its bi-annual fund-raiser proceeds with local service-industry workers and musicians on a 50-50 basis. The station’s financial position is solid enough that they’re in the process of hiring WHUP’s first actual paid employee, volunteer coordinator.
“We’ve always been super-conservative financially,” says Burtman. “We could have done this sooner, but there would have been an element of risk we’re just not willing to take. So we held off. We’ve doubled our bank balance the last three years, which I think is a testament to our operating strategy. It seems like our mission is working, so how can we make it better?
“Local is where the niche is,” he adds, “local music and people. Beyond our three-county local area, we have listeners from 30-plus states and 20-plus countries. WHUP attracts listeners from the outside who are looking for something authentic. In an increasingly homogenous and divisive world, everybody’s desperate for something different and that works. So we try to provide it.”
