South Africa, July 3 -- "There are many firsts in our history. Algoa FM has always had an appetite for early adoption, new technology, and innovation," says managing director Alfie Jay, who has been with the station since soon after its inception.

Algoa FM was the first SABC radio station to be privatised - on October 7, 1996, when Umoya Communications won the bid to buy the business.

This was a decade after the first Algoa broadcast on January 1, 1986, from the SABC studios in what is now the Nelson Mandela Bay metro.

In January 1991 it was one of the first music stations in the country to broadcast in stereo and changed its name to Algoa Stereo for a year to mark the change.

Another innovation was a transmitter split in April 1992, ...