Ludlow's New Radio Station Answers to Six Towns, Not One

Inside the Ludlow Community Center this fall, past the room where Select Board meetings get recorded for cable access, a new studio has been taking shape. Wall board went up. Cables got run. A volunteer engineer who drives in from Shrewsbury has been sourcing a mixing console, mics, and a broadcast desk piece by piece, buying most of it new thanks to grant money and pulling the rest from the used market. By the time anyone hears a signal on 93.3 FM, the room will have been under construction for the better part of a year.

The station is called WLUD, and it belongs to Okemo Valley TV, the nonprofit that has run the town's public access channels since 2001. What makes WLUD worth paying attention to isn't the frequency number or even the fact that a town this size is getting its own radio station. It's who gets a say in it. When Okemo Valley TV holds board elections, the ballot isn't restricted to Ludlow. Anyone age 14 or older living in Ludlow, Andover, Cavendish, Reading, Plymouth, or Mount Holly can vote. That's not a marketing footprint. That's the actual governance structure of the station, and it means WLUD was built from the start as valley-wide infrastructure, not a Ludlow project that other towns happen to pick up on their radios.

A License With a Deadline Attached

Low power FM stations don't get built on their own schedule. The FCC grants a construction permit with a hard date attached, and Okemo Valley TV's clock started when the agency approved its application last year. The station's own timeline has moved more than once since then. Early updates pointed to online streaming by the end of 2025 and full FM broadcast by the end of 2026. By this September, Mountain Times was reporting the on-air launch as "the coming winter," and the station's website now states the harder deadline plainly: WLUD has to be broadcasting on 93.3 FM by or before March 2027, with the online stream arriving first as a dry run.

That kind of slippage isn't a red flag. It's what happens when an all-volunteer crew is building a studio, training future hosts, and sourcing gear on the same timeline as a building renovation, all without a payroll behind it. The March 2027 date is the one that matters because it's the one the FCC will actually enforce.

Two Platforms, One Small Staff

The two platforms share a building, a board, and in several cases the same people. That overlap is the part of this story that doesn't show up in a press release headline.

The Same Names, Different Hats

Wendell Perkins is board president of both Okemo Valley TV and WLUD Radio, which tells you the station isn't spinning up a separate identity so much as adding a new department to an existing one. Carmine Iannace, the volunteer building out the studio's technical side, was reappointed to the board this past August for another year. Two Ludlow residents, Melissa Phipps and Nick Arduini, joined the board in that same election, alongside Michelle Stinson's reelection.

At the top, the station just changed hands. Patrick Cody, who led Okemo Valley TV for nearly all of its 25 years, stepped back from the executive director role in May and handed it to B.J. Finnell, a broadcaster with an Emmy and an Associated Press award who spent years working for CBS, NBC, and ABC before landing in the Okemo Valley. Cody didn't leave. He's staying on in an advisory capacity specifically to help finish the WLUD launch, the project he spent the last stretch of his tenure pushing toward reality. Finnell, for his part, framed the moment as continuity rather than a fresh start, telling the station's community that he was "honored to continue that tradition while helping launch WLUD Radio as a new local voice for the region."

The volunteer bench shows up again in the producer awards Okemo Valley TV handed out at its June 30 reopening. Pat Moore took Producer of the Year for turning out fifteen different programs in a single year. Julia McGuire and Connor Southworth won the youth award for a segment on the Ludlow Harvest Fair. Shawn Kershaw took the Community Impact award for a show called "To Whom It May Concern." Jillian Getman and John Bannon picked up the debut award for covering the Reading Fall Festival, and Phill Gatenby was recognized for a piece on Vermont's covered bridges. None of these are radio credits yet. But they're the same pool of people the station will lean on once WLUD needs hosts, DJs, and programming to fill a broadcast day, and the station has said as much on its own blog, actively recruiting from that same volunteer list for radio roles.

What $25 Buys Right Now

The renovation that made room for WLUD's studio needed roughly $90,000. As of this spring, grants from the Vermont Arts Council, the Marro Trust, the Windham Foundation, and Vermont Mutual Insurance's charitable giving program had covered about $70,000 of it, alongside support from the Town of Ludlow and the Ludlow Rotary Club specifically for the studio build-out. The gap has been closing since. Perkins has said the board is matching community donations dollar for dollar to help close what's left.

For residents who want in without swinging a hammer or running cable, the station created a $25 add-on to its regular membership called the WLUD Founder's Club, timed to launch alongside the studio work. It's a small entry point, but it's also the clearest signal that this station is being paid for by the same valley it's meant to serve, in twenty-five dollar increments as much as five-figure grants.

None of the content is waiting for the FM switch to flip. Early WLUD programming is already up as podcasts on YouTube and Apple Podcasts, a way for the volunteer team to get comfortable with the workflow before the pressure of a live broadcast day arrives. That's the useful thing to know if you're curious now rather than in March 2027: you don't have to wait for the tower.

If you want to hear what six towns' worth of volunteers sound like when they finally get a signal, keep an eye on okemovalley.tv for the streaming launch date. And if you'd rather be part of building something in this valley than just listening to it, Mary W Davis Realtor & Associates has been showing up for local projects like this one since 1958, and we're glad to point you toward how to get involved.