KALW (91.7 MHz) is an educational FM public radio station, licensed to the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), which serves the San Francisco Bay Area. Its studios are located at Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School off Mansell Avenue in San Francisco, and its transmitter tower is on Twin Peaks. KALW programming is also webcast with live streaming audio. Programming KALW is an independently operated National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate, carrying content from NPR, American Public Media, Public Radio International and the BBC World Service. KALW also produces its own local news, music and interview shows, including the live weekday call-in program Your Call, the evening news magazine Crosscurrents, and the weekly two-hour live variety program West Coast Live!, which was broadcast each Saturday morning, and ceased production in December 2018. National shows produced at the station include Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller. As a part of its affiliation with the San Francisco Unified School District, KALW carries broadcasts of its monthly board meetings plus daily listings of school lunch menus, which are occasionally read by celebrities who have come to the station for interview shows. History In the late 1930s, San Francisco was a major center for radio development for the western United States. In 1939, General Electric established a powerful shortwave station in conjunction with the opening of the Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco Bay at Treasure Island. In August 1940, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) gave a demonstration of the then new technology of frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting at the National Association of Broadcasters convention being held in the city. In May 1940, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that effective January 1, 1941 it was establishing a broadcast band for FM stations, operating on 40 channels spanning 42–50 MHz, with the first five channels reserved for educational stations. That same month the San Francisco Unified School District filed an application to construct a new educational FM station, operating on 42.1 MHz with 1,000 watts. The original station application, filed May 24, 1940, specified use of General Electric transmitters, but this was changed in January 1941 to specify an RCA FM-1-B transmitter. KALW was constructed at Samuel Gompers Trades School and began test transmissions on March 10, 1941, becoming the first FM station to operate on the U.S. west coast, and the second U.S. educational station to begin broadcasting on the FM