It's not the roster of more than 100 broadcasters (announcers, producers, reporters, contributors - almost all of them volunteers and most of them under 25) in a market where everyone else is operating on bare bones, staff-wise. Nor even the eight-year process that began with trial broadcasts in 1995, has endured money crises and has yet to completely see off a court challenge from a rival bidder for the permanent licence. No, the oddest thing about FBi is that it is not being run by blokes. The top three positions at the station - president of the board, general manager and program manager - are held by women. And just over half the staff are women.



"We'd like to have more boys, but there weren't enough good ones about," joked board president Cass Wilkinson. FBi, which next week begins two months of test broadcasts before its full launch on August 29, will be primarily a music station, but according to Ms Wilkinson it has as its brief "emerging culture . . . an organic expression of things that were most new" in Sydney.

So it will have about 30 programs a week covering music, the arts, popular culture and that catch-all, "youth issues", all relating to Sydney. Its music will be programmed by the announcers rather than a music programmer. It will not be slick and centralised. And while it may often sound great, sometimes it may be awful. If you're thinking this sounds like the old Double J, the ABC's once-radical alternative Sydney station that has been superseded by the heavily formatted national youth network JJJ, you wouldn't be alone.

For many Sydney music fans, musicians and record companies, FBi has the promise of bringing some of that old Double J spirit back and becoming as much a thorn in the side of the establishment as Melbourne's 3RRR and 3PBS. But Ms Wilkinson is keen to play down the anti-JJJ angle. "We don't think of ourselves as a repudiation of JJJ, but something that needs to exist alongside it," she said.

While it would also target 15- to 30-year-olds, FBi would not be assuming youth meant a narrow range of modern hits and nothing else, said the program manager, Meagan Loader. "It's about contextualising music: where their listening's been and where it could go. It's attitude, not age."