He added that the transmittal of the station’s signal over three different frequencies does not affect listenership.

“We’ve spent the last six years advertising it,” said 23-year-old Pineda, a senior majoring in anthropology.

FIU also has its own iPhone application through which people can listen to the station online.

“If they don’t want to jump from one station to another, they can stream in online and listen in the car, too,” said Pineda, of West Kendall.

WRGP and WVUM each have about 90 students who volunteer at the stations as engineers, production and music directors, and DJs. Only students in managerial positions get paid for their work.

Each station has an array of specialty shows during which a specific genre of music is played. The shows are usually pitched by a station DJ and must be approved by an executive board before they air.

Jackson Parodi, program director at WVUM, started his own show that focuses on music from video games.

From 7 to 8 p.m. every Monday listeners call in to The Warp Zone show to request a song from a video game. The most popular request, said Parodi, is music from The Legend of Zelda, a Japanese game originally released in 1986 where the protagonist’s goal is to rescue Princess Zelda.

Stiff, the station’s general manager, started her own show, The New Folk, featuring folk music from 7 to 8 p.m. Tuesdays.

On WRGP, even the long blocks of night airtime are filled with shows.

Dead City Radio, influenced by a William Burroughs album, airs from 2 to 4 a.m. Wednesdays and Fridays.

Students put together different segments, such as fragments from a Frank Sinatra song, and make it into a flowing sound that aims to evoke a feeling.

“We are going for the whole sound-collage, post-apocalyptic feel with Dead City Radio,” Pineda said.

Hector Mojena, programming director at the station and a senior majoring in English, also started his own specialty show, Audio Nasties.

Aired from midnight to 1 a.m. Mondays, 21-year-old Mojena, known to his listeners as “DJ Count Goldblum,” plays segments from old horror films and narrates his original stories while the fragments are playing.

With about 55 shows, WRGP also airs programs that focus on up-and-coming musical genres, such as Assistant Music Director Christopher Quintana’s new show Kick Drum.

From 4 to 5 p.m. Mondays, Quintana plays a genre of music consisting of beats and instrumentals from modern-day rap songs mixed with lyrics from famous 1960s or 1970s tracks.

“It has the vibe and sound of hip-hop instrumentals but also a sample of older artists,” he said.

According to DJs at WVUM, WRGP and MDC Radio, these specialty shows allow them to teach the listener about new music.

And that type of a disc jockey is “slowly disappearing” from most radio stations, said Pineda.

“It’s turning into commercial radio where they pretty much play what’s on the playlist,” he said. “An actual DJ who doesn’t have these constraints can play songs from the album that other people haven’t heard. That’s what John Peel did and that’s what most broadcast DJs did. They would play the hit and then they would play a cut off the album that nobody had ever heard. It teaches people.”

British disc jockey, radio presenter, producer and journalist John Peel, whose full name is John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, was a BBC Radio 1 broadcaster known for his eclectic musical taste.

“We have to bring that back to the listener,” said Pineda of the John Peel-style radio presenters. “We are trying to keep the disc jockey alive here long after they have put their headphones down.”