The first iteration of the website.
asahidenpa first began as a single radio show I would host in my dorm room at Mary Baldwin University. Since MBU does not have its own radio station, I decided to start this project on my own. I coded a website for it on Neocities—a free static website host created in tribute to the defunct Geocities—and found a free host for the radio stream which I embedded on the website.
At first, asahidenpa didn't even have a scheduled timeslot; I would notify listeners via RSS feed when I was about to broadcast. Eventually, it began airing twice a week on Tuesday and Saturday nights, then just Saturdays, and finally just Tuesdays. When asahidenpa returns from its hiatus, I may end up moving it back to Saturdays at an earlier time of the day.
The first iteration of the website.
After a year of just broadcasting by myself, I decided to make the radio project collaborative for Mary Baldwin students as a makeshift, unofficial college radio station known as "WMBU Radio". I found some people to help me run the station, and there were a few of us airing our own shows throughout the week on the station throughout the spring 2023 semester. The service we initially used was called Zeno Tools, and it allowed anyone with the password to connect to the stream and broadcast from the comfort of their own dorm room—this was especially convenient as there was no studio space on Mary Baldwin's campus.
It was just after that semester that the free radio service I had been hosting the station on started employing "freemium" tactics that made it inconvenient to keep the station on there without paying a ridiculous amount of money ($90/month just to not have a bunch of ads littering the stream). As a result, I switched to a paid service called Streamerr that, while super cheap, gets the job done and doesn't inconvenience listeners. It also has more versatile auto-DJ and scheduling tools than Zeno did, which is a huge plus. I also found out around this time that there was another WMBU Radio that existed in Mississippi, so I changed the station name to "Wave MBU Radio".
The closest thing Wave MBU ever had to a logo, used as the avatar for the Instagram page.
I left Mary Baldwin University without graduating, moved away from Staunton, and began attending Blue Ridge Community College in fall 2023. With my distance from Mary Baldwin, combined with the health problems of both of us who were running the station, 2023-24 proved to be a difficult year for the station. I had initially intended on returning to Mary Baldwin, but now I most likely will not return due to the cost. I wanted to keep running the station as I believe Mary Baldwin deserves their own radio station, but I've come to realize that I am not the right person to be running a college radio station for a school I no longer attend.
Thus, when asahidenpa returns from its hiatus, it will be on a new radio station website that I am going to create. It will be very similar to Wave MBU in terms of its DIY style and collaborative nature, but it will be completely independent from any educational institution. I haven't done this yet, but I will put out a feeler soon for the Wave MBU station, to see if anyone else at Mary Baldwin would like to take over the project. I would be more than glad to help out with the technical portion, but I think a Mary Baldwin radio station definitely needs to be run by current Mary Baldwin students.