About KNOM
 
 
[A picture of the Keller Broadcast Center]  

KNOM is an award-winning, educationally oriented public service radio station in Nome, Alaska. Owned by the Catholic Bishop of Northern Alaska, KNOM serves small, isolated Eskimo and Indian villages in Western Alaska. 

The radio station is noncommercial, supported entirely by individual donations, and is partly staffed by full-time volunteers. Programming is a blend of inspiration, news, music, education and companionship. 

 

There are not enough priests, sisters and lay volunteers to serve the religious needs of the dozens of remote Eskimo and Indian villages scattered throughout vast western Alaska.  Further, the area is rife with poverty, and social ills of every kind.  KNOM is on the air to address those needs, broadcasting inspiration, news, music, information and companionship to thousands of bush Alaskans. KNOM AM broadcasts with 25,000 Watts daytime and 14, 000 at night from a remote site about three miles from town, along the shore of the Bering Sea, on clear channel 780 kHz. 

It has fulltime listeners throughout Alaska's Seward Penninsula, around Norton Sound, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and deep into the Russian Far East.  It can be heard easily from the Aleutian Islands to the Arctic coast. 

The station is extremely popular. Although most listeners are able to hear at least one other station, a 2001 audience measurement survey by Eastlan and Associates indicated that between 79% and 100% of adult villagers listen to KNOM every day.

KNOM has received listener reports from many other parts of the world, including Tokyo and New Zealand, although the signal was only first heard in the Lower 48 states by a radio hobbyist in 2007. 

For its public service, KNOM has won an extraordinary number of state and national awards. Among them, the National Association of Broadcasters' Marconi Religious Station of the Year Award in 1992 and 2003, NAB's Crystal Award for Excellence in Local Achievement in 1987, 2000, 2003, and 2005, and the national Gabriel Radio Station of the Year Award in 1979, 1984, 1987, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. 

On the air in 1993, KNOM FM is an 88 watt station at 96.1 MHz that serves just the city of Nome, simulcasting the AM signal in compact disc-quality stereo 99% of the time. Both stations operate 24 hours per day. 

Click here for detailed highlights of KNOM's history
Click here for a bibliography of articles on KNOM
Click here for a list of KNOM's awards
Click here for Sounds of KNOM in RealAudio format
 




 
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