Flip the dial to Harvard Radio WHRB 95.3 FM in Eliot, Winthrop or any other brick House on the river and it will most likely just come up static.

The station's transmitter is perched atop the Prudential Center--the tallest building in downtown Boston--but even so, the signal often gets fuzzy inside the University's brick walls. Asa result, many Harvard students cannot even hear the music broadcast from the basement of Pennypacker Hall by their own classmates.

"Radio in general has a pretty low profile on campus," says WHRB president Eric J. Aiese '02. "People don't listen to the radio like people do in the real world, yet at the same time we're pushing the whole Harvard aspect to get people to tune in."

Gregory A. Dorsainville '02, the station's general manager, is heading up one of WHRB's latest projects to encourage more Harvard students to listen. The station is producing a compilation compact disc of Harvard music--the greatest hits of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, the Mozart Society Orchestra, a handful of Harvard a cappella groups and the Kuumba singers--that Dorsainville hopes to send to incoming students the summer before their first year at Harvard.

And to supplement the effort, the station is enlisting the help of a penguin to win over Harvard listeners. The WHRB board (or 'whirrbees' as they call themselves) voted recently to change the WHRB mascot from a chicken to a penguin.

"We thought a penguin might be more versatile," Aiese says. "A penguin's classier."

The plan is for the new mascot--tentatively named Herbie--to make appearances in front of the Science Center or at sports events to promote WHRB's ongoing 60th anniversary concert series.

And the station's compers agree that a push to increase the WHRB profile is necessary.