Jeff Zycinski, the head of radio at BBC Scotland, would love to have five more stations under the control of his office at Pacific Quay in Glasgow.

The affable controller laughingly admits as much - but that time is yet to come.

However, he has shown The Herald the detailed plans for what is as close as he can get, right now, to such expansive dreams: five new content streams to be available from the BBC website.

Five new radio stations they are not: but the Radio Scotland Zones, launched today and going live on May 6, are more than extended podcasts, they are a "marker" for what the station wishes to achieve in the future.

But there are major changes, too, for the station proper. Along with a new Sunday business programme, a rejigged morning schedule, a doubling of its news investigations and an extra half-hour of features, Zycinski is putting into place a series of moves that, he hopes, will change the face of BBC Radio Scotland, which is being listened to by one million Scots a week.

The BBC is calling it a new era for the station: the zones will add nearly 24 hours of content a week on top of the traditional signal.

The changes come, Zycinski admits, after a painful period of cost-cutting at the station - 22 posts were removed, and savings of £1m made. Now in his post for more than two years, he said that one of the main inspirations behind the new changes is emotion - a "guilt factor": due to the expense of the building of the £188m Pacific Quay, the BBC's new hi-tech, hi-definition headquarters beside the Clyde.

"There is a guilt factor for me, but not everyone shares it," he says. "We are here at Pacific Quay, when I first walked in I thought: this is impressive, this is huge. But one question the audience must be asking is: you've spent millions on this, what are we getting back in terms of programming?

"Although it's easy to say that new technology will allow us to do a lot of things, sometimes that is hard to deliver. We are making sure we can deliver. So, OK, we are making more savings, being more efficient - but also providing more news, more investigations, drama, comedy and online content."

Zycinski, a Glasgow native - born in Glasgow's Easterhouse in 1963, the seventh son of a Polish sailor who settled in Scotland after the Second World War - is only joking (he insists) when he says he would like to run more radio stations. His new zones are, he says, supplements to his main radio station, much like how a glossy Saturday magazine relates to a daily newspaper.

And, at first, they are glossy - the award-winning folk singer Julie Fowlis will present the first zone, Celtic, which will transmit for five-and-a-half hours from 12.30am on Tuesday May 6. Glasgow indie band The Fratellis have also been signed up to present a New Music Zone.

The Arts, Classical and Jazz Zone will be the home for music performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and one of the first transmissions will be a new documentary containing the last interview with jazz pianist Oscar Peterson.

The zones will transmit on the radio first, in the following order during the week - Celtic on Monday; History on Tuesday; New Music on Wednesday; the Arts, Classical and Jazz on Thursday and Comedy on Friday.

They will then be available as a continuous loop for seven days via the BBC Radio Scotland website.

"The easiest comparison that I can make to the zones is supplements in newspapers," Zycinski says.

"It's really a marker for the future for what we are able to do online - initially in these five zones, each of them aimed at slightly different audiences.

And, as time evolves, we hope to expand on those. It's really based on how many people are coming to our website, and we are seeing a phenomenal growth in that area, 44% year-on-year.

"As more audio devices come along through which people can access different audiostreams, such as internet radios and iPhones, we have to get to the point that we are there, ready for the audiences when they come."

The controller says the zones are likely to expand in the future. It seems that more and more of the Radio Scotland brand will be funnelled through the internet, rather than the traditional radio.

"I think people's expectations for internet content are different. They are prepared to take risks.

"But I don't want to raise too much expectations, these zones are initially mainly re-formatting of existing content. I keep calling it a marker for the future, it will grow in the future rather than this being the end result."

There will be more audible change: the radio station's musical signature, its "audio profile", has been in place for 18 years and is a little dated. That has been changed too - Zycinski adds: "The real test is: can you whistle it?"

Zycinski joined the BBC in 1992 working as senior producer in Selkirk, and later moved to the BBC in Inverness - where he now lives - to launch the Tom Morton morning programme, moving on to become editor of topical programmes in Glasgow.

He launched the lunchtime Lesley Riddoch programme and the Gary Robertson mid-morning programme in autumn 2000.

Zycinski looks to the Scottish Broadcasting Commission, launched by First Minister Alex Salmond last year, to help map the future of broadcasting north of the border, with interest but also frustration. Radio, he believes, has been somewhat ignored so far by the commission.

"When the Scottish Broadcasting Commission was launched Alex Salmond mentioned radio, but it seems to have fallen by the wayside," he says.

"There is a sense of that. I would welcome more talk about radio. I would welcome the debate about network commissions for television extended to network commissions for radio, for Radio 3 and 4 and all that. I look forward to that being part of the debate."

He said that the often fractious debate over programming for networks beyond BBC Scotland is highly relevant to radio.

"We make a lot of programmes for the networks: our biggest customers, if you call it that, are Radio 3 and Radio 4," he says. "We don't do nearly enough for Radio 2, for Radio 1 we do Vic Galloway's show, and we don't do much for Radio 5 Live.

"We've created a very fertile independent radio sector in Scotland, and that is not often reported. We have grown it from four companies to more than 30 companies - we have 30 suppliers at the moment. 17% of our output goes to independents, and I am sure they would like that to be more."

There will be new drama in the schedule - including work by Alexander McCall Smith, Morna Pearson, Louise Ironside and David Greig.

Meanwhile, the Morning Extra slot will move to 10am, increased by half an hour, which will contain more investigations.

Fred MacAulay will shift from 10am to 11.30am and a following half-hour slot of features will have "no more repeats".

Zycinski is optimistic that the audience will follow these changes. "If we don't get it right until 11 in the morning, nothing you can do after that will bring them back," he says.

"It's the same reason why we are investing in more drama, we are investing in investigations: because we ought to.

"I come from a news background, and I get frustrated when we follow the news agenda rather than set it.

"One of the advantages that newspapers have is that they can break exclusives - and we are the same: when we get it right, it becomes a story that can set the agenda for the entire week."