ORANGE community radio station FM107.5 is on air 24 hours a day with local and satellite broadcasts and the local presenters are all volunteers.
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They bring a variety of skills, abilities, experiences, talents, backgrounds and community networks to the broadcasts.
Community broadcasting is now Australia’s third media sector with more than 440 fully-licensed community radio stations.
Like Orange’s FM107.5, they fulfil a broad but largely unacknowledged role, particularly as a source of local content.
Orange Community Broadcasters’ volunteers are essential to the operations of FM107.5, which relies on them on a daily and weekly basis.
The volunteers contribute about 200 hours a week and more than 10,000 hours a year supporting community radio in Orange and district and they do an excellent job.
Community radio stations like FM107.5 play a major role in sharpening the broadcast skills of inspiring successful media careers.
The Orange station has also been recognised nationally for its training program for volunteer presenters and was a finalist in the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia’s Voxies awards for excellence in training.
Ilse Kittler is one of the FM107.5 volunteers and she’s just returned to the airwaves on Saturdays between 4pm and 5pm after taking a small break.
Mrs Kittler became involved after asking another program presenter whether the station had a German program and when he said no, she decided it was about time that happened and put up her hand.
The station took her under its wing and other presenters showed her how everything worked and soon she was doing her German Program, something she has now done for the past seven years.
Her program has become so popular she makes a copy on compact disc and sends it to friends in Germany and the United States and in Lismore, Sydney and Melbourne.
Mrs Kittler plays mostly all different kinds of German music from operetta to folk and modern and mixes that with some local country singers.
She gets the German newspaper Die Woche sent to her and she passes on news items from it.
She also has lots of books that she takes interesting stories and poems out of in both English and German so the program is a big variety of many different things.
She prepares the material for her programs with a pen and paper because she doesn’t own a computer.
Mrs Kittler’s family was involved in a health food business in Orange and she helped in the shop, which resulted in her getting to know a lot of German people.
“They listen and tell their friends and they tell other people and so I now have listeners in places like Forbes, Parkes, Cowra, Wellington and Bathurst,” she said.
Station 107.5 FM, run entirely by volunteers, operates from studios in Kite St and broadcasts a huge variety of programs 24 hours a day.
It offers central west people access to a more diverse range of music, information and views than they get from the commercial stations.
The station prides itself on providing locally-produced content relevant to the daily lives of people.