Slashdot Mirror
How Would You Start a Radio Station?
MurderINC asks: "For the past few months, I have been looking into starting up a radio station here. I am a student in a college town. The university here has around 10,000 students, but in my opinion, not a single decent radio station. There are a couple of country stations, a couple of 'today's hit music' stations geared towards the junior high audience and a few talk stations, but that's about it. I would LOVE to start a classic rock / alternative / hard rock station. I'm thinking this could probably be run right off of my Mandrake box (just load up a playlist and go with it). The problem consists of: I know very little about the FCC's regulations, the costs of the equipment, and what equipment I would need, and was hoping someone out there knew a lil' somethin somethin, or has done the same thing."
Yet another classic rock station. Count me out.
1. Start a radio station ...
2.
3. PROFIT!
Yes, it is that easy.
fp
Just head on down to your local book store, and grab a copy of "Starting Your own Classic Rock Station for Dummies"
Mod point free since 2001
Go rent "Pump Up the Volume" with Christian Slater
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
While I don't know from any first hand experience, I think the very first thing you would want to do is fine a good lawyer and sit down and have a very long talk about all the legalities, rules, and fees that you're looking to incur.
RFC2119
Something you may not think of, but will be important: invest in a good soundcard.
This is what the Tunetracker software on BeOS was made for. Check it out @ http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/
Usually you're permitted to broadcast any audio stream as long as you pay for the proper licence (which iirc is usually calculated by the estimated amount of listeners)
One thing is for sure, its not cheap...
You will have to buy the rights to rebroadcast the songs from the record companies, song writers, and publishers. You will also want to broadcast at 50k to 100k watts to cover a decent area. That is 50k to 100k per hour. You know your electric bill may be $100 per month. Imagine a radio station and several thousands of dollars in electricity per month. Also you will need some sort of advertisement so people know about your station and to pay the royalties and electric bill. So you need some sales/marketing people.
If you do decide to do this though, please don't be lame like other radio stations and between every song say your station call sign letters and FM frequency. Like we didn't hear yout he first million times you said it, ok?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
You gotta have rights to some spectrtum, that will be the hard part.
Also, you're probably talking $500k in hardware costs and stuff if you want to do it right. Not the kind of thing one does on a free Saturday afternoon.
You will probably not get a license. First, the FM band is too crowded, and secondly, FCC regs are very restrictive for newcomers. They are supposed to be public airwaves, but try to tell that to the FCC!
What about your university radio station? Can you become a jock there?
Hahaha!! Oh yes, let's start up a radio station -- I hear the FCC is handing out licenses like candy on halloween!
don't.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
The Prometheus Radio Project works with applicants for new Low Power FM stations, while also advocating for new laws that will actually allow for new community stations. They were a major advocate during the last fight for new FCC regulations allowing community stations, although sadly those regulations were gutted at the last moment by the National Association of Broadcasters.
What ever happened to pirate radio?
I guess that streaming music over the internet has taken much of the need away. But I wonder if you could setup an old style pirate radio station.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
Thanks to the National Assocation of Broadcasters, with powerful member organizations like Clear Channel, the laws regarding starting new stations, even low power stations that could easily technically exist, are very restrictive. Check out Cheap Channel Radio, the newest satiric competitor to Clear Channel, dedicated to keep you off the air.
Pirate Radio
I know the secrets of the video game champs
I can't decide whether this is really ambitious, or you're just stupid?
You're talking about running a real radio station, right? Not just an internet radio station. Unless you've got a whole lot of money to invest in all the equipment, fees and royalties, don't even think about it.
And what does your "mandrake box" have to do with this? I think Linux is the least of your concerns.
Alternatively, if you just want to have a good time talking on the radio, why not try to get a show on the local college station? Many colleges have free-format stations; you just have to sign up (but be forewarned; you'll probably get the last slot, the Saturday 5-7 AM). It's a good time, but a lot of work to do a regular show. You ought to give it a try before actually trying to run a real broadcast station.
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I think the 50kW is way off base. Given a good antenna (better than he'll probably have) sitting on top of a building, you can reach a good 20 mile radius on a lowly 30 watts. Watts, not kilo watts. My campus runs a radio station on 5 watts, and that's more than enough for the 2 mile long campus (and the tower that the radio is on is awefully short).
Going up on the scale of power, the campus's amateur radio club used a 2kW setup to talk to Mir a while back. We practically blew them out of the water (space, whatever). By the time we heard back from them, they were mighty pissed that we were stepping on other people's transmissions even with their antenna pointed as far away from us as they could.
Never you mind the stiffling laws of the FCC and the millions of dollars it takes these days to set up a commercial broadcast station....yes it DOES take at LEAST a million bux, which isn't much in a business world, but a lot in a "college student" world.
Getting a lawyer, and a group of investors is step one. Most people with money wont want to talk to you, mainly because you don't have money (unless you do, but then you wouldn't be asking, you'd already know to hire a professional consultant and a legal team)
So how do you get these people to talk to you? You could try to kidnap one of them, but you'd most likely go to jail for a very long time. A better solution is to socially engineer your ass into an elite private party and make your pitch on the covert op level.
Of course, the _RIGHT_ way to go about it is to get a degree in broadcasting, and perhaps elctrical engineering, get a job at a radio station for 10-20 years, build up a network of contacts and then pitch your idea to them, and offer to put the money up yourself.
Either way you decide to go, you're still going to have to suck ClearChannels cock for minimum wage and be forced to sell your station to them or risk lawsuits on behalf of the RIAA, who I suspect works for CC.
Anyways, it's a valiant idea, but it's not likely to happen. Being a student takes too much time. You'dprobably be best off calling the local radio stations and start up a popular movement to get the music you wanna hear played. The radio stations DO NOT care about music, they care about advertising revenue. If they think there is an audiance, they'll play 24 hour polka classics on 50 stations.
BTW, do you look to see if your school has a radio station? if they do you could probably volunteer to DJ a show once a week and play WHATEVER YA WANT! EVEN POLKA!
Anyways, that's it for my playing devils advocate, I swear I'm not jaded, the world really is going to hell!
CLEAR CHANNEL WILL OWN US ALL
-GuS
Q. What's it take to get a story posted on
The biggest thing is you have to deal with the FCC. remember, unless you want to be pirate radio. The reason stations have to say their name so much is because FCC requires it. You said you live in a college town and am student, but are you a student at the college? If so try to start the station on campus. Off campus it is harder to get a cheap station going. Do you want to FM or AM is another major concern. You will have to decide where you want your antenna to be. Remember, the larger the wattage the more elements you will need on your ant. system.
This is a big endevour dont take it lightly or want to get too big. It takes alot of money, alot of time, and alot of lawyers. Trust me I know first hand. I work at a small radio station.
...pirate. More fun, less cost (except for the cops stealing your rigs, but it's up to you to hide 'em properly).
And then we have shoutcast.
After which the lawyer will steal the idea and start his own radio station
Bar associations license attorneys in the U.S. and can take away the license of a lawyer who does something unprofessional such as stealing a client's idea for a business and then either competing with the client or shutting out the client with a government-granted monopoly.
Will I retire or break 10K?
At my school i've started a radio club. I am trying to broadcast a small station as well. First off there are 2 "things" on the FM band. Everything about 92Khz is considered Commercial Radio. Anything below is considered Educational FM (for college stations, schools, ect). I wish I knew how much a license costs. You will also need to look into a construction permit. You need to get clearance to set up at the place you want to set up before anything. I am probably going to talk to an FCC rep this weekend. As for BMI and ASCAP fees I don't know. I think ill try to play more independent stuff. Almost all non-major labels are really nice about letting you play stuff for free. You just need permission. Since were noncommercial FM i dunno how we would get revenue but than again were not working really...
My email addy is jodathmorr@comcast.net. Email me and we can prolly brainstorm or talk or something.
Good Luck! Don't get discouraged!
PS: The advantage of FM over Webcasting is that you will reach people that you wouldn't normally reach. People can't open up Winamp and stream music from their car wirelessly. They look through their FM dial. Plus CARP will kick your ass if you Webcast.
Here's the first place to look, its the e-filing page for the FCC, sign up for your call sign, register your antenna and so on...
Probably the only way you can start a radio station is to start a low power FM Pirate Radio Station. The reason for the tight control of the airwaves and spectrum is two fold.
1. Selling spectrum is source of revenue for the government. (That's why Digital Tuners in TV are now required by law, new spectrum=new revenue)
2. Controlling spectrum is a method of controlling what content reaches the masses (since FM radios are de facto standard).
If FM radio stations were to spring up and start playing non mainstream stuff and the masses liked it, what would that mean for the RIAA members? Consumers might start consuming from smaller labels and smaller local bands might start exposure and taking fans/money away from the mega-bands. It would be anarchy and thus not allowed my friend. Only the RIAA members are allowed to decide what is permissible and popular.
Control the revenue, control the content, and control the masses. About the only deviants allowed on FM are (very low power) College Stations and NPR.
I live in the Detroit area and there are a few pirate FM station that pop up from time to time. To my knowledge none have never gotten busted, but then again, they might be tranmitting from a boat in International waters.
Good Luck and Have Fun!
A group of students up at our university started a radio station a year or 2 back. Most of our equipment was donated thankfully (transmitter, first set of CD players, mixer board, mic, etc).
As for start up fees, I'm not sure. It sounds like Canada regulates radio differently. The process required applying to the CRTC and Industry Canada (CRTC giving us the okay to have a radio station with the content we specified in the application and Industry Canada saying it was okay to transmit without causing problems on that frequency). The station's budget per year is about $2000 (though I may be wrong, I'm just a DJ after all). Of course, there is a radio society that runs the station that has a membership fee that generates a small portion of that.
In response to a post mentioning "What are you going to do about running the station 24/7?", our radio station has a PC running a MP3 player that plays recorded shows when no one is at the station.
But I do agree with some of the other posters: do some more research. It's obvious you haven't.
Hope you have lots and lots of money and maybe a fed or two in your pocket. Licenses are VERY hard to get. You'll notice RARELY ever will a brand new station be created with a new freq. It's always a station getting bought out. They want the existing licenses instead of going through the god awful hassle of aquiring a brand new license.
If one of your local pop stations isn't doing so hot, this is the best way to get into the business. The cost for new broadcast equipment, building a tower, licensing with the FCC will be tremendous. You will never get backers to help you start from scratch. The first thing you need is money, then you need a licensed broadcastengineer without one, good luck holding on to your FCC license. Third a killer salesperson. If you can't start bringing in revenue quick a $10,000 a month electric bill on top of all your other expenses will kick your ass. Clear Channel helps cover these costs with Payola, or you could be ethical.
So how would you go about it as a pirate? A lot of posts are just bitching about the FCC and saying "Get a lawyer." C'mon guys, be a little more counterculture than that. What's the -technical- way you'd do it?
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
You don't have to be a Kreskin to see that *LPFM is dying. In the United States, applications for new low-power FM radio stations must be filed electronically within a five-day filing window. The FCC hasn't released any new filing window dates in 17 months. For all practical purposes, *LPFM is dead.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you're talking about a Web "radio station," there are inexpensive packages that you can use. Needless to say, you'll need a fast internet connection (ADSL isn't really fast enough, because they cheat you on the "send") if you plan to serve more than a couple of people at a time with any quality.
There are also commercial services that will take your streaming audio over a slower connection and refeed it into the net at much higher bandwidth. Naturally, these cost.
One big expense will be the licensing. Many broadcast stations dropped streaming audio from their Websites because they objected to having to pay duplicate fees for ASCAP, BMI, et. al. If you're reaching a large audience, these fees can be many thousands per month. Many small web-only "broadcasters" went off the air entirely, because they couldn't afford it anymore.
If you're talking about an over-the-air, straight-up broadcast station, be careful. You can build a low-power station for a few hundred bucks, but be warned that the FCC takes a dim view of unlicensed stations. You're limited to less than a watt (IIRC) unless you're willing to go through the (not inconsiderable) expense of filing for a license.
(THAT takes a lot longer, and costs more, than most people think. First, you have to find a frequency. Then you have to prove that you won't interfere with existing stations. Then you have to ... you get the idea.)
(Oh, and by the way ... your application can, and probably will be, challenged at least a dozen times. You'll have to fight each challenge, sometimes in court. If you start today, you may finally be on the air by 2005. If you're lucky)
(Again, speaking from experience.)
If you're talking about a station with some real power, the other poster here wasn't joking about the expense. Just filing the FCC paperwork costs a lot of money. The electric bill is very high (to get an idea, even for a modest 3,000/6,000 watt class "A" FM, it's the same as if you were to let every burner on your stove run wide open 24/7; for a 100,000 watt station, it *is* several thousand a month).
Then there are the maintenance costs (my area of specialty). Most people overlook this. They'll find an old, worn-down and struggling AM or FM and buy it, sinking their live savings into it. Aside from the electric bills, the aforementioned licensing fees, etc., etc., the first time the transmitter gets hit by lightning, they're looking at several thousand in expenses. I have actually known such people, and have seen them FAIL just for that reason.
(If it's an older tube transmitter, just replacing the tubes -- required at least once a year, possibly more often -- can cost thousands.)
It costs a lot more than most people think.
But if you're serious, find some friends who are willing to go in with you and see if you can purchase a struggling station (in this economy, there ARE a few!). You'll have to outbid Clear Channel[g], if they're interested in it, but you might get lucky. :)
If internet radio is good enough for you, I recommend you take a look at peercast (www.peercast.org). Peercast is peer2peer stream relay program based on the gnutella protocol. At the moment it can relay mp3 and ogg streams.
It has one big advantage over other streaming software: you only upload a few streams and do not have to worry about serving streams to all your listeners. Listeners automatically become relay points.
Jilles
it costs money to get the liscences to rebroadcast the kinds of songs you want.
And on a side note, isn't alternative/hard rock just the "edgy" version of top40?
Are you in Rexburg?
I think to be on the air you need at least a Class 3 commercial radio liscence from the FCC. I'm not sure but it may be easier if it is a lower power station.
To get a frequency, you'll also need to talk to the FCC, but if there are that few a stations there then it shouldn't be difficult.
You can start pretty small, 25 watts could cover the campus (if you are in Rexburg) but getting a sender centrally located would be hard. But the equipment could be had for under $10,000 I'm guessing with land leasing for (if rexburg) under $1000 a year.
Perhaps you can do shortwave?
After five years in radio, I've learned a couple things... One, do it cuz you love it. Two, if you're in it for the money, go do something else.
;) so idiot-proofing is important.
You need to consider lots of things. If you license the station through the school, you can get an educational FM frequency (88.7-91.9 MHz) which has VASTLY different rules and regs cuz it runs as a non-profit station. You need people and money to underwrite the station, of course, but as far as being one guy wanting to start a radio station, it'd be *really* nice to not have to deal with quite so much of the crap. And because you can only have underwriters and not advertisers, you don't have to deal with the absurd spot loads that plague radio today.
You can also look into Title 15 / LPFM stations if you want a really low wattage AM or FM station, respectively. A little tranny and upkeep on it is a pretty reasonable prospect. I don't know what the deal is with moving up to a full license is, though--you may not have much of an upgrade path outside the constraints of the low-wattage restrictions.
I'd be interested in hearing your ideas about the software you'd use to run the setup. Broadcast computers are some of the damndest pieces of hardware I've EVER worked with. It is truly a place where I don't think computers are yet up to par. They're flaky and not terribly idiot-proof. And some of the folks in broadcasting aren't the most smartest
I guess that's a roundabout way of saying "you probably don't want to fulfill full FCC licensure for FM broadcast." It's a crapload of money. You'll have to deal with spot production, traffic, reconciliation, discreps, make-goods, and more affidavits than you care to shake a stick at. You'll need a full-time engineer for the tranny, and at least a part-time notary public for said affidativts. Not to disourage you at all, but I'd shy away from the full kit and kaboodle!
You'd be better off driving a van around with speakers mounted on the roof while having your band in the back jamming while also having the van running from the fcc. Ahh...good ol' college years... :)
I looked into this last year, but dropped the idea once I put a cd player in my truck. You aren't going to be able to just start up a regular radio station, but the FCC did come up with some rules for low watt non-comercial radio broadcasting. The fees were fairly reasonable. Only somewhere in the neighboorhood of $90 per year, but you were limited to about 1w of power.FCC Just enough to go a mile or so. Equipment was pretty cheap. There are some all in one rigs that were only about $350. Just plug in your mp3 box and go. Check out this website.Pirate Radio They have some good info on equipment. The only thing that might hold you back would be the greedy music companies that want royalties everytime someone even thinks about one of their songs, much less plays them. A little legal advice or at bare minimum, legal mp3 copies (you actually own the cd's) of the music you're going to play is a must.
http://www.ramseyelectronics.com they sell amature and professional radio equipment. Ive bought three things from them so far, very satisfied.
I have an idea to make a radio station that plays every song once. It doesnt matter what kind of music it is, as long as each song is played no more then once time. And I'm not talking about once per day, or week, I'm talking about once it's played it's never played again. I think that would be sweet.
Answer: Like two porquipines fsck... very carefully.
...but how did it make it past the lameness filter?
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
My local college FM station puts out 100 watts, and i can usually pick it up at least 20 miles away. At night I can pick up 50kw AM stations from Chicago, which is about 800 miles away. i think most local commercial FM stations are around 5kw, since FM transmissions are line of site, broadcasting at super high power doesn't really increase your range. at shortwave frequency multi-hundred kw stations are common, because the signal can propagte around the world. so it really depends on what kind of station you're setting up. still, equipment and licensing fees are going to be beyond what the average person can afford out of pocket, but if do your market research and write up a decent business plan, you may be able to get start-up capital for a small station. or if the school offers a communications program, maybe you could talk them into funding a campus radio station.
(1) Site survey. This cost a few K$. Basically an engineer has to figure out how far your signal will propagate given your proposed antenna location and broadcast power. This determines whom you'll be interfering with, if anybody. It also helps determine what broadcast frequencies are available.
(2) You need a broadcast engineer on staff, at least part time. This is an FCC requirement. In our small town, we just paid the engineer from a local commercial station a modest sum to help us out and fulfill the FCC requirement.
(3) Not sure you'll have to pay royalties if you're an educational station (below 92 FM, I think). But, you'll have to get licesned as such, and your university will have to buy in.
(4) There are a ton of rules and regulations you have to follow. Examples: hourly monitoring of your broadcast power & modulation to be sure you're not 'bleeding' into adjacent stations & violating your license; I think you have to have someone there 24/7 when you're broadcasting in case things go wrong; station IDs at the top and bottom of every hour; maintenance on your transmitter; etc etc.
(5) You have to get an antenna. A tall building in the area might let you site on top of their building, but you'll have to pay for the antenna, transmitter, cabling back to your station, etc.
There's more, but I'm tired of typing.
I would suggest getting your university involved and setting up a campus radio station. The school might throw in the funds. You could also consider cable FM. It's a pretty cool way to more easily get your signal out there, particularly if other stations are already on cable FM.
What you're attempting is going to be extrordinarily difficult and amazingly expensive. If you go the comercial radio route, you'll need between $1 and 4 million to get you up and rolling. You said you're in a small college town. Is that a small town in the middle of nowhere that's serviced by one Top 40 station, a Country, and a news station? Or are you withing listening range of a larger city's stations (which still suck)? If the latter is true, the odds are that all the freqwuencies are already taken, and would cost millions to purchase.
First thing you need is a frequency. You'll have to do a formal frequency search to determine if there's space on the dial for another station. If the engineer you hire can find that there's space for, say, a 10 megawatt station operating at 93.5 FM, you've passed the first test.
Odds are, that's not going to happen. I would suggest trying to start a college or public radio station. There's frequencies reserved for these stations at the bottom of the dial: 88-91.9 FM. There may be room there.
OK, you have the frequency. Now you have to jump through all the FCC's hoops. Get a lawyer. You have to prove that you can serve the public interest, and obey all relavent laws. This is a long drawn out procedure, and one I've never personally had to go through.
Once you have all the legal stuff done, you need an engineer. Broadcast engineers are expensive, and hard to find. Think $50-100K a year, no matter where you are. Next, you'll need a transmitter and antenna. Call it $100K. Look for a used one. Another way to go is to find a small Mom and Pop station nearby that hasn't been bought out by Clear Channel and make them an offer.
Time to build studios! Don't skimp. This is where the magic happens. Get gigahertz pcs to run Sound Forge or ProTools. Invest in a good sound effects library, not "300 sound effects on a cd!" from Kmart. Your air studio is going to need a mixing board (10K or so), 2-3 broadcast quality cd players, a cassette deck (for recording shows), and an UberPC to run the whole thing.
A cheaper way to go is to use cart machines (they're kinda like 8tracks), and reel-to-reel tapes, but the price you pay is that you can't automate. That's important.
OK, you built it all. You've got a broadcast studio, an engineer to maintain it, and the tower is up and humming. Now you gotta staff it. Start with sales. You need to bring in a lot of advertising to stay afloat. It's a full time job and then some. You also need someone to do traffic: scheduling ads and billing for them.
Next is the Program Director, and I assume that's you. Brace yourself: it's an 80-hour-a-week job for almost no money. You pick the music, the promotions, hire and fire, and keep all the onair stuff rolling. Plus you'll do an airshift, that's 25 hours a week where you can't do anything else.
If you use an automation system, you can cut your airstaff severely. That sucks, but keep in mind that you have to pay your jocks (minimum wage). 168 hours a week x $5.15 an hour = 865.20 a week on salary for airtime alone. Add production duties, promotional stuff, and you'll be spending $7-8 grand a month on jocks salaries alone. and being as you're in a small town good DJs will be hard to find.
I haven't even discussed music programming, which is a whole other rant. Suffice to say that you are trying to get into a business with a low profit margin and an extremely high cost of entry. If all you want is to have cool tunes for you and your freinds to listen to, try this:
Get an mp3 player for your car with a big-ass hard drive. Run a shoutcast server and broadcast on the net. It's orders of magnitude cheaper, and you can do it all yourself.
Interociter
-=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
After you can come up with something a little bit more concrete than "I want a 1337 radio station," start exploring the different resources available to you on campus. A school of 10k kids is bound to have some organizations with pockets of money to spare. They can probably even get you a room in the basement of a building on campus, and an antenna on the roof of the tallest building on campus.
Another idea is you can contact other college radio stations, chat it up and ask how they got their balls rolling.
I recommend downloading any music you might want to play off of the Internet.
This is not an easy or cheap thing to do.
First you need to have a company look into the area and analyze all radio stations within a certain distance to try to determine any regulations or interference. Cost : Several thousands
Then you need a license from the FCC for a call sign and permission to broadcast at a certain
frequency. Cost : Several thousands
Then a site permit from the city to set up the equipment as well as permission to transmit near any delicate area (hospitals in some cases)
Then you need a license with the RIAA (Music Industry). Cost : Tens of thousands a year
Then you need a transmitter, aerial (antannae), cable (even cheap cable is expensive), and installation. Cost : Tens of thousands
Then mixer, limiter, cables, computer, mics. (Low end is around $1000)
Then you need the music. Not only do you have to pay the RIAA a bunch of money, but they make you buy the discs too. Sometimes you will get free radio promos from music that will soon be released.
Then don't forget to factor in electricity for the equipment, transmitter, cooling.
I don't mean to squash your dreams but I seriously looked into this plus I got several chance to visit a radio station, KESO on South Padre Island. If any of you visit the island, you probably have heard it "92.7, the valley's only alternative". Their situation is very starange, to me at least. They buy most of their programming from somewhere else, then mix it with their stuff and broadcast it by microwave to Port Isabel to the FM transmitter. They have a pretty short range yet it is still expensive to run.
You might hear people talking about pirate radio stations. Keep in mind that unless you load the equipment in a van and constantly drive around, you will be caught sooner or later, plus you only will have a range of a couple of miles.
krashed
Brownsville, Texas
I found a site with a lot of good links here:l /8701/p iralynx.htm
.75 watt to channel 3 or 4 of all the TV's in the vicinity. What fun.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hal
He has a link to some stories about the FCC's new regulation which licenses 10 and 100 watt stations (10 Watt is the lowest legal amount of power you cna have). This would be the cheapest legal way for you to get set up.
Pirate radio stations are often in the 2.5 watt range, which is enough to cover about a mile to 2 mile radius. Once you get more power than that, you become easier to catch. Typical pirate stations only run for a few hours a day, or week, since they are usually operated by a lone DJ.
A kit to get you started should be about $500.
On a side note, just about everyone has pirate broadcast equipment sitting around their house, but doesn't know it. You can take your VCR and hook up an antenna to your video-out co-ax connection (instead of a piece of coax cable into the back of your TV) and bango! You're boradcasting at an incredible
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
Some guys did it at RPI when I was there. They started it out of their dorm room, posted signs around campus listing the station, and did a decent job involving the listeners. It went for a while, but listeners dropped off, as did participation ... but for the month or so that it ran, it was amusing.
It is very hard for the little guy to start a radio station unless you are independently rich or have backing from a major radio company (say Clear Channel World Wide).
If you have the money then you still have the problem of getting the ok to play the music. Most record companies go to Clear Channel and don't care much about the independent stations.
If you can get backing from a major radio power then music won't be a problem, but misc content will be. Not only will most of the money go back to the corporation, but they also won't let you compeate with their shows in any way. And on air shock? Forget about it, they don't want to pay the fines for a small guy.
Even with this pesimistic view I wish you best of luck! If you get it all going please write up a public HOW-TO for the rest of us!
I don't know the costs of doing this for commercial radio stations, but we know how loving and understanding the Recording Industry of America is when it comes to helping out the little guys...
Make sure you research that before digging too far! Good luck!
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
What's the matter with your college? I've never been in one that didn't have a radio station. Volunteer! Create a radio hour that is uniquely your own!
College radio can be terrific: weird, oddball, quirky stuff gets played, and you typically get DJs who actually care about the music, yet have their own personalities. I'm listening to KUMM right now -- and it is great, if you want something other than the usual pablum.
(No, it is not a porn site -- this is the University of Minnesota, Morris, and those really are our call letters)
Why Would You Start a Radio Station?
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Keep in mind that to avoid interference with other frequencies on the FM band (and to make it sound decent), you'll need some kind of dynamics processor to keep the volume steady (for those tracks that get really loud and really quiet) and keeps the really big spikes down.
A DP consists of an automatic gain compensator, which keeps the volume steady, a compressor and a limiter, which keep spikes and other sources of intereference in check, and usually an equalizer if you haven't got one otherwise. The studio's levels are usually very poor for radio broadcasting, so you need to find out what works for playing rock/alternative on FM radio.
I know this is Slashdot, and that there are lots of Linux zealots here, but if you want to save the thousands of dollars that a dynamics processor for broadcasting usually costs, build a Windoze box with a SB Live/Audigy and go buy OtsJuke. Wonderful little program; auto-mixing, auto-processing, and you can throw in plugs and stuff on the fly. I only wish there was something as good in OSS.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
This has to be the stupidest Ask Slashdot ever! Damn!
Here's my Ask Slashdot:
I want to, like, start a club or something, since all of the clubs around here, like, have bouncers, and like a cover charge, plus they advertise, and they close at 2AM, instead of serving liqour all night. I want to pose a question to all of you dumb fuckers jerking off in your basements: How would you go about starting a club?
So you can learn how to treat your disc jockeys.
You'll need to get the process started, of course. File whatever applications you need to file, and get the concept in place for your station. Then, when Clear Channel sees that another radio station is popping up that they don't already own, they'll buy you out. They'll handle the rest.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Why do people insist on posting when they don't the first thing about the topic?
I was station manager for my college's radio station and I have also helped start another radio station in the Milwaukee area (still waiting for our frequency).
Most likely if you live in any kind of metropolitian area of 100k people or more, then you probably are going to have to fork over big bucks to a radio conglomerate to even have access to a radio frequency (after deregulation, radio conglomerates bought up all available frquencies).
If you are able to obtain rights for a frequency from the conglomerate, or there are available frequencies, then you must applie to the FCC for control over the frequency. In the application you must choose if your station will be low or high power and if you will be a non or for profit station.
So now you got approval from the fcc, for lets say, a high power commercial station. Now you have to rent the use of a broadcast tower (big bucks). You also need to buy equipment, a transmitter, an amplifier. At minimum you will want to be able to play music, so you have a few more expenses.
You need to buy a soundboard at minimum something like a Mackie 1604 VLZ (wich runs about $700-1000 US). Cabling will run you anywhere from a mere $200 to over $5000. Oh and if you want to play anyone's music, you have to pay for your music or get record company demos, (no Napster mp3s here) and you must pay for royalties to a company like BMI, rates are based on revenues (a $500 minimum yearly fee).
IF, you can get thru all of the above (you are probably looking at startup costs of upwards of $50k-100k), and I probably left some things out, then you should be well on your way.
Here are some useful links:
BMI Licensing: http://www.bmi.com/licensing/
FCC Broadcast Radio Page: http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/
In all, good luck.
Go to the student affairs office and tell them you'd like to start a radio club. Should they approve (i've heard of very few clubs being turned down at campuses) you can get funding thru the school to buy equipment and such. Since it would be for "educational use" the FCC lisence is really out the door. Granted you can't broadcast too far (I think 2 miles but that's enough for a campus typically) but it's a start!
You need toi obtain a Radio Broadcast License before you even consider broadcasting on either the AM or FM bands. Go to How to Apply for a Broadcast Station - Audio Division (FCC) USA for a start.
If you don't want to go through all of the licensing requirements, I believe you can legally broadcast anytime you want, if you keep the station output power below 100 mW. That might be enough to cover a few square blocks, on a cold, clear night.
> 50kw AM stations from Chicago, which is about 800 miles away.
No offense, but that is a rare location you are at. I bet if you moved 10 miles from where you are at you could not pick it up.
the signal bounce off the sky has to be just right for that to happen. Search the dial a bit I bet you might find more that one station that is off the transmitter in chicago.
I sometimes pick up radio station from very far away ( I'm in NJ ), on real empty spaces of the dial.
you should try to find the transmitter and then plot the days that you get chicago and the days you don't.
onepoint
if you see me, smile and say hello.
http://www.beosradio.com/tunetracker
very cheap (especially compared to other radio automation systems) and very stable.
my pet machine
First the hardware costs, and someone to maintain the gear and engineer the shows. You need a FCC license, and guess what you have to pay for the music you play. That's what BMI and ASCAP do is make sure you are tracking what you play and pay tne mechanical royalites that the artists eventually get.
To start a "real" station is for the most part impossible, due to the NAB, Clear Channel, FCC, big money, etc. But you can go ahead and create your own micropowered station with a couple of watts that will cover several miles, and not interfere with any existing stations. Get yourself a 4-watt transmitter from http://www.nrgkits.com, put it into a case, make yourself an antenna, and hook it all up to your mp3 list. This setup is affordable and doable with a bit of effort. Although the FCC rules presently say otherwise, the airwaves are public and you can assert your right to use them.
Technically and financially, starting a radio station is not all that difficult. You would definitely need someone familiar with the FCC rules and someone technical enough to keep the station within the regs.
Other than paying for personnel, turntables and a music collection, a decent alternative-style station these days could be built for quite low cost. A hundred-watt station with a vertical gain antenna could be done for under a thousand with some scrounging.
But as an individual, the odds of obtaining a license are almost nil.
If you were to create an organization you'd stand a better chance at a low-power license, the next time that window comes around. But a rock station? that wouldn't help your chances.
> The university here has around 10,000 students, but in my opinion, not a single decent radio station.
Your best chance of getting on the air is working with the university/faculty. If the school's not on the air, they have the pull to possibly get a license. If they're already on the air, you could 1) get hired and work your way up the ladder and try to change programming. Or 2), quicker still, you could go to work for an existing station as a volunteer DJ, in return for a chance to put what you want to hear on the air.
Lots of people would like the chance to become a broadcaster, but the doors for that closed for most of us a long time ago. Bandwidth is scarce, and the winners were already decided before most people here were born.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
... another classic rock / alternative / hard rock station. If you don't have one, just be happy Clear Channel hasn't completely invaded your little corner of the country.
Here's a link to the FCC website regarding low power FM radio stations for noncommercial and educational entities - http://www.fcc.gov/mb/policy/lpfm/
A friend of mine and I actually ran a pirate station out his house for a week over spring break about 10 years ago. Despite what some people are saying on the list, you do not neet 50 to 100kW to cover a good area. In fact we covered most of our town on 25W and a j-pole antenna mounted at about 35ft on our antenna tower.
There's only one place I can think of off the top of my head to go for decent quality broadcast transmitters. That's Progressive Concepts (http://www.progressive-concepts.com). They have a decent selection of transmitters, stereo generators, amps, and a whole buch of other useful stuff for the FM broadcast band. It's been a while since I looked at their catalog but I vaguely remember that most of their equipment is for export only if you do not have a license. The hardest part of the whole process will be getting the license, not the equipment.
Good luck!
that thinks because he has 10,000 rock mp3s on his hard drive that he can be the next howard stern or casey casem. Yo! Dumbass! Just because you have a bunch of songs doesn't mean you can broadcast them to the wind. In fact, either amateur or pro has to pay royalties on the music- and probably purchase the music legally to boot. If you're serious, pick up the latest AARL manual and if you're not asleep by page 6, then perhaps you've the will to investigate the other options. I doubt it tho, primarily cus you're asking the wrong group of people and your question was Linux centered. Linux is the least of your worries. Just my $.02
10 years ago myself and a few friends did just that. We built a couple of Ramsey stereo FM kits and just started broadcasting music. The range was short (around 1/3 mile) but a few of the dorms could pick up the radio without any problems. The Ramsey kit can be had for around $20-30.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Free Radio Berkeley has plenty of links and info on setting up your own low-power radio station. Including why you don't need an FCC license, and what do to when they hassle you. FRB has been online w/o an FCC license since at least 1993.
;-)
Oh, bring a lawyer
If so, apply for a position, and start there. If not, get 10 or 20 people interested in helping, and get 100-200 people willing to support you with words, and form one through your college.
Lots of money. You are competing with Clear Channel
License from the FCC, frequency assignment. NOTE: There are unlicensed stations, but they are low power.
Transmitter - rated in watts, more is good.
Tower for antenna to be mounted on - rated in feet, more is good
Antenna - rated in Db Gain, more is good
Transmission line/wave guide
Nitrogen gas for transmission line/wave guide/antenna bay
Clearance from the FAA if the tower is in a flight area.
Land to plant tower
Building to plant Transmitter
Power to run Transmitter (around $5,000 to $30,000 per month, depending on AM/FM and power output.)
Audio equipment
License agreement with ASCAP, RIAA, others
permits from your state and city
An accountant
A sales farce
Engineers & Technicians
listeners
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
How about an Internet radio station that broadcasts only music which the artists distribute under some kind of Open Music license?
Marketing: the station-master could plug it on Slashdot, and all of us righteous "information wants to be free" folks would be interested. I run Free Software on principle. I'd like to apply the same principles to my choice of music.
Licensing: no RIAA, no royalty payments. Come up with some kind of meta-license like the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and announce that you'll play any music whose license is compatible with that. Add some meta-format stuff to the streaming format so that a listener can click through to the band's web site easily.
Bandwidth costs: offer a low bit rate stream for free. Offer a high bit rate stream for a few dollars per month.
Redistribution: just like the free software distros do it. Make it easy (legally and technically) for people to make their own mix CD's off the station.
I want to get my music from the musical counterparts of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Bob Young -- not the musical counterparts of Bill Gates and David LaMacchia!
THAT'S how you do it.
1)find a bunch of friends around town that have cable modems.
2)put a little dedicated box off of a router in each friends house.
3)set up the boxes to stream your station from your HQ.
4)connect output of soundcard to a soundfeeder or similar-type low-power FM transmitter.
5)set all transmitters to same frequency (duh).
6)????
7)profit!!
dude.
For a REALLY low cost solution, check out TuneTracker Systems.
http://www.tunetrackersystems.com/
Not only is it far less in price than anything on the market, but it supports more features and a "walk-away-" mode that lets you simply make a playlist (or multiple) and walk away.
Supports mp3, ogg, or both at the same time.
Multiple streams.
VERY stable.
I highly recommend checking it out. I want to pont out that I do have an association with BeOSRadio which both produced and uses this software, in case anyone is wondering, but they did NOT put me up to saying this about TuneTracker. It simply roxors.
user@host$ diff
For the past few months, I have been looking into starting up a radio station here [...] I know very little about the FCC's regulations, the costs of the equipment, and what equipment I would need
You've been looking into this for the past few months? And you still know nothing?
Much of what's already been said here is correct. Like most things on Slashdot, some has been exaggerated (1 million dollars? 50,000 watts?) and some is way oversimplified.
I have in the past been involved with a college station; based on that experience, most of which applied to commercial radio as well, here's I can think of that you need:
In short, this is not something that is going to happen on a whim. It could be done on the cheap if you're willing to put considerable time and legwork in yourself (which it already seems like you're not). It will still probably cost $20,000 for an absolutely minimum legal setup and this includes bargain shopping used equipment and getting some favors from a sympathetic engineer and officials. A transmitter in the range of 100 to 300 watts with a decent broadcast antenna will give you excellent range (about 15 miles depending on terrain)
If you're serious, I would put a call into the closest college station and see if you can arrange a time to talk to their engineer (who probably only works there an hour or two a week). They might or might not make time to talk to you, of course, but that probably depends on how you approach them and present yourself. But, if you can get a half-hour of their time, they can give you an excellent idea of how to start (read as: they can discourage you immediately). Radio is not a toy!
If you're not that serious, how about just buying an XM (satellite) radio?
Got to radio shack or best buy and get a sound feeder and 12 volt power supply.
A sound feeder allows you to broad cast low power FM. It is already approved by the fcc.
You could even create a network of station through out each dorm.
I would highly recommend you take a look at ham radio and maybe Monitoring Times and Popular Communications magazines. Sounds like you might be a good cadidate for a radio hobbyist. Good luck!
I understand the fact that radio stations suck.
First off I don't recomend A pirate readio station from your Linux box. To have effective broadcast range, you would have to steal a tower and A LOT of power. I'm sure somebody would notice that.
So lets say for the sake of argument that you want to do this right. Many of the posts say that you need a lot of start up catital. They are right. AND you need to secure the rights to play copyrighted music, and pay the GOV to secure a radio frequency. AM is much cheaper but, as you know the signal quality sux and its mono only.
So you might want to look into if your school teaches communications and broadcasting. They might have and old station that they don't use anymore because it was too costly. Talk to the dean of the department and see what it's going to take to get it started again.
You can go the NPR route. Rebroadcast classical and news durring the day and whatever you want at night. This will help you save on staffing. I ran a problem of a station at my college and it was a huge task, (especially since I was still in school). I figgured out that I had to fire all of the students who were not Seniors because they wouldn't take it seriously enough to show up for work!
So basically if your major is economics, don't bother with a radio station because it WILL be a fulltime job.
As the IT Director for my university's student-run radio station, I will offer the following tips.
1. Become an official club at your college/university. This way, you can ask the Student Government Association (or whatever it is on your campus) for startup money and could even get a yearly budget as well from them. Also benefit from whatever promotion they do of student clubs.
2. Plan your organization out. I assume that you will be the General Manager. You need a program director (which handles the schedule, training of DJ's, problems with DJ's, etc.), a music director (to get record companies to send you free music), a secretary (to keep track of station finances, etc.), and so on. At my station, I happen to be the IT Director (running all of the computers).
3. Start small and work from there. According to my station's history, we started off as the 2nd college radio station in the USA to broadcast online (don't ask me how we found that out, it was before my time). Start off webcasting. The costs to startup is not bad and everyone in your club can get practice running a station. Then slowly work from there. Last year, my university's station added a AM signal that is available only on-campus right now. In the future, as soon as an FCC filing window comes around, we will apply for an FM frequency. Nothing would suck more then to go all out, build a state-of-the-art FM station, and have no listeners!
4. Get an advisor. Usually whoever runs the Audio/Video department at your school would be a good choice, or someone that works for a real radio station. Very helpful when you have a problem (THE MIXER DIED!?!) and need someone to run to.
5. Talk with the college's lawyer about royalties and such. Go to saveinternetradio.org for more information on how the royalties are working out for webcasting.
6. Try to get the radio broadcast rights for your college's sports teams. Not only will students listen on campus, but countless parents and friends back home will tune in as well (via the webcast). Great way to spread the word about the station and to gain a ton of listeners.
7. If you are going to do webcasting, do it internally. Don't rely on an outside server for your broadcast...it isn't reliable. Instead, get a server, load up Shoutcast or Windows Media (whatever your choice is), and webcast that way. Removes a lot of headaches when everything is working fine, yet your webcaster server in Colorado is down. Not to mention, students would make the connection on the local LAN and not eat up as much valuable bandwidth on your college's T1 (just parents and friends would use the T1 to connect).
As for equipment, talk with your advisor, they would know what you need. Assume that you would want 2 professional CD decks, a mixer with lots of inputs/outputs (to allow for future additions to the station), a computer that plays MP3's when no DJ is in the station, a server for the internet broadcast, etc.
Good luck. It's a struggle to get started, but it is well worth it in the end.
The important thing to remember is that each community has a certain number of channels alloted to it. I can tell you right now, that everything in your community is occupied and has been for a very very long time.
.... it helps). This process alone requires an attorney. But it's just not any attorney, its an attorney that specializes in dealing with the FCC. You'll pony up money for the attorney and the filing fees before the commission. The commission may rule immediately against your application or they may table it for a period of public comment. If they rule against it immediately, you'll feel like you should have taken your money to Las Vegas and blown it there.
There are numerous web sites devoted to the channel allocations, numbers and class. The class is the power output with A being around 5000 watts ERP, class B about 20,000 watts ERP and class C being 100,000 watts ERP. For example, channel 252B is 99.5 in Detroit and they, coincidentally, have an ERP of 21,000 watts(I know, I did the construction permit).
Say on the very unlikely chance that a channel is available in your community, or possibly in the next community over. Now you have to put in an application for license. But before you even do that, you'll need to hire a consulting engineer who will study the technical aspects of your theoretical radio station. This firm will determine the maximum amount of power that your radio station can use to maximize your coverage, and do it without creating interference to co-channel and adjacent-channel stations. For your money, you'll get some very nice narritives and drawings that you'll file with your application.
You'll also get an idea of where you can have your transmitter site, although you should have options on land or tower space before you file.
Now it's time to make your case in Washington (sing the old Schoolhouse Rock "I'm Just a Bill, Yes I'm only a Bill"
If it goes before public comment (likely because you want to reassign a channel or create a new one), you'll be required to take out a public notice of your intent, let them know who you are and give a reply address at the FCC where people can voice their support or objections to your request. Don't worry about ClearChannel or CBS reading these and filing their objections, they will have their objections sitting at the FCC by the time you're told that your application hasn't been rejected (yet). This would be the result of their FCC attorney doing her/his job.
Incidentally, the objections of the likes of ClearChannel or CBS may or may not have merit. They'll always claim that your allocation will cause interferrence, even if it's not to one of their properties. They don't want you in the market, period.
If you manage to get an honest-to-God license, you'll also get a construction permit. This entitles you to build a broadcast transmitter facility. You can probably put together your own site, on the cheap, for well under $200,000 (it's been a very long time since I've dealt with the broadcasting industry, so that may not be accurate). I've been involved in the construction of class-A transmitter facilities that were just about $125,000, and that was 15 years ago.
Ok, so this is overwhelming. The good news is that you don't have to go that route. That's because the FCC, realizing that they sort of messed-up, also allows you to lease the entire operation under LMA (local marketing agreement). Basically, you get to run the show, and you simply lease the radio station. The bad news here is that you need to approach the owner, and tell them you want to LMA their station. If they are making money, they'll politely tell you know, and laugh at you during the next manager's meeting. But if they are distressed, you can probably get an LMA. The price of this depends on the property and the market. Be advised that very few LMA's for long-term programming have actually made any money. The ones I have been familiar with have all gone broke and bankrupt within a couple years.
Wait a few years when radio collapses back onto itself. All the major players have huge debt, and with the crappy economy and advertisers no longer seeing value in the 15 minutes of commercial load per hour, the broadcasting folks can't keep it up forever.
Lorenzo W. Milam, aka P. P. McFeeley. He was involved heavily in starting KBOO in Portland, KCHU in Dallas, KDNA in St. Louis, and several other community stations around the country. He was also part-owner of a profitable commercial operation near the Bay Area of California. He wrote a book about it _Sex_in_Broadcasting_. The book didn't have any sex in it, but he knew it would sell better with a catchy title. Get the book if you can. Find Lorenzo if you can. Last I heard he had given up on radio as totally under the domination of the powerful interests and commercial forces, moved to Mexico, and started writing about other subjects.
I worked at Assumption College's AM over AC power and their LPFM station and was on the team that started St Anselm's LPFM. The steps are largely what is detailed - but forget royalties if you're LPFM and college radio.
it's a lot of hard work, but it's fun and rewarding.
LPFM went away for a while and is now back - but see the FCC about what's different.
You do have to do a frequency & call sign search, you have to do a power survey (an engineer divines where your signal will reach with a given effective radiated power) - this is a real cost by a pro. The great thing about both of these stations was that they were on hills in Worcester MA and Manchester NH - we carried pretty far on both - more than the mile you expect.
The "new" LPFM is 100 watts and 100 feet - 100 watts ERP at an antenna height of 100 feet. That should cover about 3 miles in most cases, YMMV.
You do have to have the school involved. It has to be official. The school will be the applicant to the FCC - we stared the NH one with board approval and in 1979-80 it cost roughly $80,000, though if we sweated a lot we figured we could have done it for $40,000, again from scratch.
You do have to wait for an application window - you can't just walk up and do this when you feel like it.
You need a studio, transmitter, and people to take care of these things. The engineer is a licensed person generally, though the LPFM regs are forgiving - we got a geek to be "it" and ran him thru the courses.
Many trips to the Boston FCC - whose offices at the time were in the top of the Customs House.
We lucked out in NH because we started with people who were geeks and band members - so they did a lot of the background work oin getting good stuff right the first time.
You will have to do a demographic survey of the area you'll be serving. I at one point knew exactly how many persons of each race were in Hillsborogh County NH - for some strange reason southern New Hampshire had a whole lof of Philipinos.
In this capacity, the FCC is not the draconian bunch many make them out to be - they will lead you by the nose to get these steps done, it's their job to promote this stuff.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
To start your own radio station, you need equipment, a facility, engineering know-how, an FCC license, a lawyer and much more. Not to mention the cost of a blanket license from BMI and ASCAP.
It's expensive!
There's a better way. Let someone else handle it! There are stations that rent out their airtime in blocks. They handle FCC regs, ASCAP and BMI licensing, etc. All you have to do is sound good.
If your topic is interesting enough, you might even make a profit by selling your own advertisements. Look into it.
There used to be a kind of broadcast operation called "Common Carrier" that was relatively cheap and unregulated, mostly used to serve campuses. You didn't put up an antenna to transmit, you pumped your signal of a few watts into the power lines, and the electric wires would carry it around a local area and right into any radio that was plugged into the power lines. Since it wasn't going out over the air a whole lot, the FCC didn't much care. IIRC, however, this mode didn't work for the FM band, it was used in the AM band, so forget about your stereo hi fi super digital type of signal.
There are at least two peer to peer Internet radio networks: Streamer
... as long as they can afford to keep going.
and PeerCast.
You could also serve hot streaming mp3s with this very cool perl script
Or you could just bliss out to some great trance music
Eponymous Mallard
"If it quacks like a duck, it's the Eponymous Mallard"
What you really need is:
1. A Radio Engineer for the technical stuff, such as maintenace of the transmitter, making sure your output is clean, etc.(believe me, you WILL need one)
2. A lawyer to consult on legal issues, frequency, power output legal limits, etc.
3. Staff for DJ-ing, talk show hosts, etc.
I'm not a radio transmitter expert, but I'd say you need the above just to get the idea going...
Geez, all you blowhards saying "think of how much you'd have to pay the DJs!" and "you'd have to pay $200-$500 in cables, and buy a $10,000 soundboard!"
Idiots.
I bought a ramsey kit and broadcast from my soundcard. Then I was able to use my nice radio as semi-wireless computer speakers, and I was able to play MP3s on any of radios in my house.
I'm bad at soldering, so it was so staticy that it wasn't fun. But a good solder job could make this EASILY feasible. And all you need to do is run more voltage and get a higher/bigger antenna to increase your range. Total cost (not counting computer) = $50.
You blowhards. He's not talking about setting up some K-ROK station with radio personalities and a promo-van. He wants to broadcast his playlist.
Austin is more fun than Dallas.
In fact, Clear Channel used Andromeda to share their 9/11 archives with other stations.
Basically, Andromeda builds streaming web sites from collections of MP3's, OGG's, etc. You'll need a web server that can do PHP or ASP.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
gettit
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
My college had a low power AM station that for whatever reason, went off the air (transmitter problems). They were already simulcasting over the college's cable TV network (channel 3 with scrolling news announcements).
They decided nobody was listening over the airways anyway and just stuck with the cable feed.
If you're looking to start up a radio station yourself (not internet broadcast, but real over-the-air station), and you don't have at least $50K laying around, then I'd say forget about it. Even if you are planning to do an internet-broadcast-only station, I assume you haven't been keeping up with legislation about royalty payments even for small broadcasters.
Now, if you are planning to help start up a station for a college, you may have a better chance. Again, you'll need roughly $50K just to get the station off the ground (no pun intended). Depending on how saturated your radio market is in the area, what part of the country you're in, how much of a surplus budget the college has, and the logistics of building a studio and placement of the antenna, there's a lot to do before you even think about asking for the money in the first place.
Now, here's the rundown for what you'll need, monetarily speaking:
Minimum $8K operating expenses per year. This will mainly be needed for royalty payments and other payments to the record companies. These fees are NOT cheap by any means. This is a re-occuuring cost, so you'd need some real financial support to keep the station going. Stipends, new equipment, etc is not even factored in here, but that's an additional $6-8K a year.
The FCC no longer allows any less than a 100W Class A license for new radio stations. You may still qualify as a non-commercial, educational (NCE) station if you are building a station for your college--this allows you some reduced fees.
Low power FM (LPFM) licenses are also possible, but I'm not familiar with how the FCC deals with those--it's a whole other type of license scheme than what I'm familiar with.
Your antenna will cost roughly $3-4K, and a 100W transmitter will run you $6-8K. This is just a basic estimate for the lowest possible license class.
Site survey and engineering paperwork will run you about $3-4K minimum. This is absolutely neccessary for filing with the FCC. I recommend actually paying a company to do this work, even if you attend a technical college.
FCC Lawyer--get one. They can really help with the paperwork and answer any questions you have, but it's not cheap either. Expect anywhere from $8-20K for that expense (roughly $300/hr)!
Good news: filing the application for a non-commercial license with the FCC is free. Bad news: you will wait a minimum of 4-6 months just for the FCC to look at your application. That doesn't even include the waiting around for new application windows and postponements for rule making sessions. There's a whole list of crap the FCC does that will delay your license.
Contact and subscribe to magazines such as CMJ (College Music Journal) to help you get music for your station. This is about $300/yr, and can be included as part of the first expense I mentioned.
Most importantly, you'll need a broadcast studio. Mixer, CD players, mics, etc will run you another $10-20K, unless you plan to hook your computer straight to the transmitter :)
I don't mean to discourage you, but if this list hasn't made you turn tail and run, then I wish you the best of luck in sticking it to the world of commercial radio.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
This story peaked my interest and I headed over to Ebay to see what kind of radio stations might be for sale... you never know.
What I found instead was a Ramsey FM Transmitter (model number FM-100) that was currently at $349. Turns out that's way overpriced, considering Ramsey sells it for $224.95, unless this is the high-power version that Ramsey isn't supposed to sell inside the US -- in which case that might be an excellent opportunity for somebody in the US to get this one from a "third party" -- I'm not saying you SHOULD, just that you COULD.
Anyway, I thought this was really neat. Is it going to give you miles and miles of coverage? Heck no. But it's an all-in-one FM transmitter, and replaces a bunch of hefty equipment that I remember from my days in FM radio as a kid. Especially if this is the "overseas version", you could get enough coverage for you and your friends.... then you can head over to the FCC's site about LPFM (Low Power FM) to see if, through your school or something, you could get a LPFM license. Apparently they're pretty straightfoward.
It may have changed, but the FCC used to ignore anything under 100 miliwatts as long as it wasn't interfering with commercial stations. It's a good place to start, and you can always boost your signal strength later. For a while I saw billboards with messages that said "Tune your radio to (some AM freq.)". Transmitters on the billboard would have a very low power signal.
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal -- Jello Biafra
At 4 minutes per song, allowing 12 minutes per hour for chatter, that's 12 songs per hour, 288 every 24 hours, and 105,120 every year if you're on 24/7.
Better start building that music library right now.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
1. Get your school to set one up. Because it is an educational institution, it could probably find a frequency in the bottom end of the spectrum where the spectrum is less dense, which means that A. they'd be more likely to be able to -get- a license, and B. they'd have less interference problems at lower wattage. A typical college station is 300-600 watts and can reach about a 20 mile radius. (The advantage of being at a lower frequency and having less adjacent stations.)
:-)
2. There's the issue of the site survey, filing for a construction permit with the FCC, getting said permit, building the tower and getting it up and running within a year, and REMEMBERING TO UPGRADE YOUR LICENSE WHEN CONSTRUCTION IS FINISHED! I can't emphasize that enough. Failing to notify the FCC of completion of construction is the surest way to get pulled off the air, fined, or both.
3. Decide on how many hours you will broadcast. You don't have to broadcast all day, but if you don't, someone else could insist on taking over your spectrum slice the rest of the day. It is better to defend it by broadcasting 24x7 unless you are in a rural area and can't afford to do so.
4. Make sure you buy a transmitter with automated monitoring capabilities. You do not want to have to have an engineer on-site at all times.
5. The college must hire an engineer to be on call.
6. Set up the on-air studio. Lots of other people have commented on that, so I'll keep this brief. For the on-air studio: decent mixer, decent CD players, decent cassette deck, decent on-air automation computer, decent microphone, and at least two cart machines. They don't have to be new digicarts. Find a couple of old ones that a commercial station is throwing out. This is important because you need to be able to broadcast liners even if your automation goes down.
7. Set up the production studio. Similar equipment to the on-air studio. Networking between them, preferrably not part of the campus network to avoid hacking issues.
8. Automation software and possibly hardware. Scott Systems makes a decent system, as do several others, but they're all exorbitantly expensive for a new station. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty in either Mac OS X or Linux to set it up, there's always songcue. It's open source, runs on top of MySQL or PostGreSQL, and knows how to drive a slightly hacked mpg123, ogg123, or esdcat. Requires esound. Ideally, you should dedicate a machine to this, and I'll note that the Mac OS X version does a better job at avoiding dropouts in the audio.
9. Talent. You'll need on-air talent to staff the station. A good way to do this is to get your school's communications department to make learning the system (say as a news reader) a mandatory part of a radio broadcasting class and to provide course credit for people who stay on and work at the station.
10. BMI -and- ASCAP reporting. You'll need to check with them to find out what needs to be reported to each.
11. As mentioned, you may also consider either a carrier current AM (extremely low power) or a cable radio (soundtrack for campus information channel) setup. That's a good way to get started initially, since you don't have to mess with the transmitter and FCC licensing. However -all- of the other costs and issues remain true, so the cost is not really that different. It does, however, allow you to get something up and running much more quickly, which can be good as a proof-of-concept for getting additional non-recurring funding the next year for equipment improvements, something which is essential in a college environment.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
90.1 WRUV Burlington (Vermont) is a good model to follow. I believe there's a webcast as well, if you'd like to tune in some time. Basically, they only play music that does not fall in any of these categories:
Any artist that has ever been in regular rotation on commercial radio stations in the state of Vermont (excluding Vermont Public Radio).
Any artist that has ever been on the Billboard Top 40 Album or Singles charts.
Any artist who has ever been in regular rotation on MTV. This excludes specialty programs such as 120 Minutes and Direct Effect.
Any artist that breaks any one of the above criteria and is in a new band.
I don't know how you'd go about starting it, but I know how you could get a very similar effect.
1) Buy a very large dildo.
2) Write the letters R I A A across it.
3) Sit on it.
That's probably as close asl you'll get.
I looked into this once. I found that barriers were very high (expensive). A while ago, there was an effort to allow low power FM but the big corporate players squashed that--the usual way. They didn't want the competition....
...better yet, don't.
A few years ago, a student who ran the low-powered Tufts University radio network decided they needed more antena wattage and a bigger antenna, so they decided to hook up their station to the subway tracks outside the station for an enourmous antena *the tracks are above ground in some areas)! The signal was so strong that the FCC came in the next day and said they were in HUGE violation of some law, and people in Atlanta were picking up the station! The subway tracks makeup hundreds of miles of interconnected track! (Forgive me if I have the technical details wrong, but I have the general story right. Anyone from Boston may remember this!)
I bet they'd like to have a hand in your radio station.
Get a copy of the book Sex and Broadcasting by Lorenzo Milam. He can give you a historical perspective on the issue, and many of the fundamental issues in creating a "private broadcasting station" are the same. Check at Amazon or on Google RE Lorenzo and this book.
There are plenty of college radio stations out there; just ask some of the ones who've been around. One such station is (shameless plug) ACRN in Athens, OH.
They started back in the 70's as a cable radio station. While that was great at the time, I'm amused to see so many people mentioning it now. ACRN still broadcasts over CA-FM, but I doubt many people still listen to it that way, since they also broadcast via icecast/shoutcast. Arguably, listening via shoutcast stream when you can tune in on cable is a waste of somebody's bandwidth, but it's just easier than asking people to go get the little y-connectors for their stereos. Students are lazy.
That said, you were probably thinking it would be nice to have a regular FM station that people can listen to in their cars. From what I've heard, this is quite a large investment, so you'll have to have the backing of the college and maybe soem generous donors to get that off the ground. Good luck to you.
whoa
I actually helped start a radio station called 105.1 in st. george, UT. The first thing you need to do is apply for a liscence. if you try and build a tower, they (fcc) looks at you as a pirate radio station, and the fines can be pretty steep. As for choice of automation.... honestly, you don't need any automation to start with. two cd players is fine, or even using a x86amp or something like that.
LPFM-s were thought to be dead, but congress has reserected them. Our 105.1 station is owned by Latinos Unidos (its a latin newspaper) but they lease the liscence to us for public use (we can only underwrite, not advertise.) If you get LPFM, its a good way to start... but if you want to go commercial, your liscence will cost more, but you can make more.
hey, e-mail me if you want more info, because i hate writing long posts.
-- DJ Dextr0us
"Martha Stewart can lick my Scrotum......do i have a scrotum?" -- Sharon Osbourne
1. Download the PeerCast (Linux or Windows) client.
2. Download Icecast/Darkice/Oddcast or any other OGG/MP3 broadcaster. (You don`t need the server part of Icecast, just the "Ices" part)
3. Decide your playlist, name and bitrate then point the broadcaster at your PeerCast client.
No extra costs, no extra hardware, nothing more than your current Internet connection. Its P2P which means all of your listeners share your broadcasting bandwidth, its anonymous, free and frankly, rather good.
You can even use it to replace an Ice/Shout server if you have enough bandwidth to serve all of your listeners.
I used to volunteer for my school's on-campus radio station (we used to broadcast directly to the dorms by hooking an AM transmitter onto the power line leading to each dorm). The way to start a radio station in your town is to appeal to the students first, as they will be your chief source of FREE labor. Yes, FREE. When we would run recruiting drives to fill up time-slots for our station, all we had to do was stick a table with "Be a DJ!" on a sign, and we'd have 100-200 people sign up with us in a day. So much for dead-air!
:)
.1 watts!) antenna and transmitter on the tallest building on the college campus (if it's the most central, great!), and hope it can reach the dorms.
:).
As for equipment, you can get great equipment for cheap as well. First, talk to your local TV and radio stations and see if they'd like to donate old equipment to you instead of chucking it. We survived for about 5 years on an old Ward-Beck board that was donated to us from KIRO in seattle. After it died, we got $10K and upgraded to a nice digital board and also got a digital logger as well
The music end of the whole thing isn't that difficult to set up; once you have a designator from the FCC (i.e. KIRO, KING, KZZP, or WAL, etc.), you can land-line broadcast no problem. As for air-broadcast, there is a way to broadcast on the air without getting a liscense, but your coverage is useless. FCC regs say that you can broadcast with at most a 100 meter range before you need to ge a liscense. So, I'd say stick your small (and it is small, about
If you want to go higher power than that, you'll need cash, and lots of it, espeically if all the open slots in your area are used up. Right now, my old U is trying to get donations to purchase a frequency to broadcast on, since the radio station right now is as good as it will get unless we can broadcast somewhere that's not on campus
Go to Ramsey Electronics website, http://www.ramseyelectronics.com/sitepages/fcc.htm
for downloads of FCC regs applying to low power broadcasters (like campus stations). The site also shows ramsey's products: which include affordable transmitters for such stations.
check out Free/Freak Radio Santa Cruz truly for the people, by the people
Three *easy* steps and you are on the air.
1) Set up a community WiFi network on campus.
2) Get everyone to buy a Zaurus with a CF WiFi card.
3) Set up a streaming audio server.
Now everyone can listen to your music and check there email too.
Since I'm not familiar with radio, I have no idea of the implications of this bit of news:
FCC Moves to Privatize Airwaves (from the Sonoma State U Project Censored Top 25 Most Under-Covered News Stories)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I've done this once before in a small market town and it went well. I eventually sold the station to the high school at a bit of a profit (not much). I used the book "Sex & Broadcasting" as my guide, and check out the other books at the Free Radio Network. Good luck!! It's worth it!
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
On a side note, just about everyone has pirate broadcast equipment sitting around their house, but doesn't know it. You can take your VCR and hook up an antenna to your video-out co-ax connection (instead of a piece of coax cable into the back of your TV) and bango! You're boradcasting at an incredible .75 watt to channel 3 or 4 of all the TV's in the vicinity. What fun.
In the early 80s my dad's business bought an early Quasar VCR (the videotape deck was portable and seperate from the tuner/timer portion) and a Panasonic color camera as a tax writeoff. We had loads of fun with the dubbing cable, a boombox, the camera, a tennis racket and a selection of obnoxious hard rock music making our own music videos.
Somewhere in the manual was a "Do Not" pictograph showing you not to hook the tv out jack to your antenna with "FCC warning" or something written near it. Needless to say, this is all the encouragement we needed to actually do it.
We put on our best music videos -- me jumping around with a tennis racket to "Whole Lotta Rosie" -- a very time-consumingly shot video of matchbox cars smashing into legos and wood blocks, and other cinema verite and then went to all the neighborhood houses we could get into to see what fabulous programming could be found on Channel 3.
Nothing. Not even a faint signal. No audio, no video, zilch. We had the tallest house in our 5-house Nielsen sample, and a big antenna on the peak of the roof and not even our next door neighbors could get the signal.
Anyway, maybe it was just our VCR but I don't think you really can broadcast with a VCR.
Search the web for Steve Dunnifer. He sells low power trsansmitters, but unfortinately, using them without a license would get you an FCC visit, but usually if your transmitter is 'Clean' and doesn't interfere with other radio services, the FCC might look the other way, but if you get ONE interference complaint, then your number is up.
A few years ago, many small radio buffs were trying to get the FCC to alloow for "low power" licenses of up to 5 watts or less. But the BIG BROADCASTERS with their infinite money and power, convinced the FCC to can that idea. Had that happened, you would be able to get a license (for a reasonable fee) if you can prove to the FCC your transmitter won't interfere with other services, but MONEY TALKS and BULLSHIT WALKS... and that was the end of that Idea.
Dunnifer has been fighting for this law on Free speech grounds, but struck down each time.
You may be able to pursuade yout college to apply for an educational license.to allow you to setup a student run station. Of course you may not have much control of "program content" as a certain percentage of content would have to be Educational in nature.
Of course it would cost some money....
License fees = ??
Transmitter (FCC approved) = $5000
Studio equipment = $1500
FCC approved metering equipment = $2500
(provided transmitter not same place as studi)
Getting these funds of course would be your main problem, but if you have contacts within the College, you could pull it off.
The population being greater then 10k people certainly qualifies you.
Don't listen to these fools who say you are doomed to fail. You *can* do it, and it won't cost a million dollars. A little imagination and elbow grease and you can do anything.
Just remember that all the naysayers in the world never got a thing done. Just do it. Jump in headlong and get yourself in over your head. That is how you learn to swim, not by wading in the kiddy pool.
My little FM station, with one less than desirable antenna location reached 5 to 7 miles with a 100 watt transmitter and had an effective radiated power of 100 watts. Pay attention to that. It's not how much power, but how well it's radiated (er, some spelling like that). As a comparison, a commercial radio staion I worked for had a 25kW transmitter and four antenna elements, all of which were well tuned, with the highest antenna line of sight place in the area. They reached 100kW of effecitve radiated power with a range what was HUGE and clear. But that's FM. AM, is much much smaller. The commercial AM I was with was something like 10kW durning the day and 1kW at night. Oh ya, don't forget unless it's really low power AM (traffic radios), there are two set of paper work headaches to suffer through, b/c of the nature of the signal. Take my adivse - never start a new AM station (but buying an existing one wouldn't be so bad).
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
I would suggest contacting other college radiostations, attempting to get funding from the school and reading a shitload about FCC regulations and equipment. At my local college we run a Nonprofit FM station that I am a part of (first year). It doesn't have much of a range (10 miles on a good day in an area full of hills) but it serves our purpose. WMTU is the name of it. It's too bad that those personal low power radio station licenses fell through. Instead you'll have to go to the level of nonprofit. I think another requirement is that someone is always in the DJ booth, so you'd have to find other likeminding people and get a schedule setup.
-John
If it were at all easy, my friend, don't you think it would have been done a lot more by now? If a chum and his Mandrake box could satisfy a small burg's classic rockers, how and why would huge corporate stations remain in any kind of business, anywhere?
"I, the listener, prefer to be bombarded by harrassing commercial bantor." Um, not.
I'm not saying I know the facts, but if you assess this philosophically, you already know the answer: no, you can't do it.
Read the back of a CD, where it says: public broadcast prohibited and such and such.
Ronald McDonald is evil.
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
Hehe do you americans still have AM-radios? I have never ever listened to AM-radio (more than testing) mainly because there are no one broadcasting AM in Europe. Yey, go PCM-radios!
The FCCs regulations are simple...
Don't broadcast outside of your assigned frequency, don't go above the power limit (you can find info on that somewhere...), and pay them money to assign you a callsign and a license.
The equipment...
An FM commercial transmitter (bring $$$), low electricity bill (more $$$), an antenna (some cities have regulations against antennas, you better check, oh and more $$$, but you can make a decent one with hardware store parts.)
Also, to publicly play music like that, you'll have to contact the RIAA, they've streamlined the whole process, so all you need to do is give them money.
Hope that helps.
I recently graduated from an urban 3300 undergrad private college that just started a radio station. They were able to get major funding, support, and on-campus space through the school. The reason for this is that they worked with our Communication department, which helped to fund it and plans to incorporate it into it's curriculum.
Plan on this taking a long time. I think they started 3 or 4 years ago, and it is now scheduled to go live next semester. Also, plans changed a lot. The initial plans were to get a low powered radio license - the school was located in Baltimore, one of the pilot cities for the program - but they weren't able to get that. There are advantages to not being licensed though - the plan was to demonstrate that we were public interest by putting lots of community broadcasting like reading for the blind - and how many college kinds want to read to the blind? They were also going to webcast, until the RIAA's webcasting rates were released and they realized they couldn't afford to. The plan now is to use leaky coax, which is cheap and easy but means only people who live on campus can listen, and only when they are on campus.
Anyway, the lesson from this - try to get support and money from your school, especially if you can get it from departments like communications that might see it as fitting into their curriculum, and don't expect it to happen fast, and don't expect to be able to broadcast thru the airwaves.
'Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community' (sex is in the title because the author was told any book with the word sex in it sold better). It was this book that convinced me that I didn't want to even try starting a radio station.
the best place to start is to actually ring around a few of the stations in the area. you'd be surprised at the amount of equipment they sometimes throw out (i work for the largest fm network in australia as an engineer). most of the broadcast stuff is relatively plug and pray these days - just a fequency tune here and there. the fcc reg (or whatever they are over there will definitely be available on the net through the governments media transmission sites, or at your own college. GOOD LUCK!
Go to the FCC website and look around. They have a 'How To' right on their website. Kind of hidden, but it's there.
Anyone who says "a lil' somethin somethin" should not be starting a radio station.
Steve
I've been listening to RADIOSTORM.COM .. it's amazing. These guys do "internet radio" the right way. Plenty of bandwidth, so I just press the play button, and it plays almost immediately (xmms). They have a good hard rock stream, without commercials or interruptions. Their stream is 128k, so the quality is good enough to actually listen to it and be able to enjoy. Screw the FCC.. "internet radio" is the way to go, especially if you do it right. People will listen.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Richard Feynman is his book "Surly You're Joking Mr. Feynman" relates how as a boy he was able on one occasion, at night, to tune-in WACO AM in Waco, Texas. This was/is possible because of the ionosphere. Due to the nature of the ionosphere radio signals are reflected to a greater degree during the night. Indeed, AM stations will be assigned a diurnal maximum power of transmission, and also a nocturnal maximum power of transmission. The former being greater than the latter, as the reflectivity of the ionosphere is greater during the night. For a more detailed explanation see: www.hfradio.com/qst.pdf.
1947 Nobel Laureate in Physics
--Sir Edward Victor Apppleton
for his investigations of the physics of the upper atmosphere especially for the discovery of the so-called Appleton layer.
Hopefully, some food for thought...
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
It's impossible right now to apply for a FM commercial radio station. The FCC has had a freeze on applications for new commercial FM stations since 1998 and will probably not allow them until late 2003. In addition, the FCC will only allow you to apply for vacant frequencies that are in their rules (95CFR 73.204). If you want to put an FM station in another community, you need to file a Petition for Rulemaking which needs to show that a channel can be put there without stepping on other stations. The FCC uses mileage separations between transmitter sites to determine this. If your petition is accepted (and there's no sure thing it will) it takes 6 - 12 months for them to assign the channel. Right now there are over 600 vacant FM channels waiting for the freeze on applications to lift. It likely will be several years before even the first one of these can actually begin constructing their station. Noncommercial FM stations in the reserved band (88.1-91.9) are easier to get. First off, you need to be either a school, church or nonprofit educational foundation to qualify. Second, there's no requirement for a rulemaking; you can 'put one where it fits' and that also allows for directional antennas (perhaps half of the non coms operate directionally). The downside is that you can not sell commercials. Finally, there's a whole new class of FM stations; The Low Power (LPFM) ones. These mostly operate with the effective coverage of that obtained with 100 watts radiated power and an antenna height of 100 feet. They cover a radius of about five miles and are non-commercial. Here is a web site that will let you find a LPFM channel: http://www.recnet.com/fmmap/ Be warned however that the whole status of LPFM's are being challenged by the big commercial broadcasters because they are not restricted to 88-92; they may exist anywhere between 88-108. The commercial broadcasters are threatened by the prospect of 100's of these LPFM stations cutting into their signals. I hope this helps you out.
but the nay-sayers are ppl who thought about it, tho don't have any idea how to pull it off. Even the ones who happen to work for a radio station, a company that definitely doesn't know how to do even the simplest task for under $10k. ..or even original.
The main reason you'll never see any good radio, is because if you're one of the few ppl who can pull it off, reasonably efficiently. Then it is worth a million(s) to sell your competetive enterprise to the competitors.
No small business has ever resisted to selling out.
No big business ever started small, they waited for a small business that worked to come along & bought an already profitable enterprise for franchising.
Your mandrake box, the troll spoke of, can replace the staff. with streaming to the transmitter & randomized weighted playlists.
You really can transmit a good distance on low wattage.
Most ppl sleep, so you need only program unique stuff for 12 hr periods, but since radio sucks so bad; most ppl only listen to & from their slaving jobs to get their pay.
If you recognized that quote, it's because it hails from an era when artists were very niave & probably costs peanuts in royalties to play.
Royalties aren't a problem, there are hundreds of thousands of songs out there, not 40.Everybody doesn't work for the RIAA, they are just the loudest + far from the best or even good,
Fuck the music industry, they can suck my dick.
Are "shock jocks", rap music, and disco "in the public interest?" I sure hope not!
n/m
You know there are two NPR stations I can pick up - one in Pittsburgh and one in West Virginia. They broadcast the same news reports but they sound very different. The signal strength is the same (I think), but the Pittsburgh one has that "radio" sound to it, the way rock stations sound for instance -- it is hard to explain. I think this must be the effect of the "compressor" you are talking about. The one in West Virginia sounds quieter and more natural... it sounds like a normal person talking, and not the speaker-filling type sound the Pittsburgh one has. I guess the WV one does not have a compressor? Anyway, I like the sound of the West Virginia one a lot better, it's a lot easier on the ear.
http://www.beosradio.com/tunetracker/
Basically, the cost involved in getting a FCC license will blow you away. Look at Haverford College's station WHRC for an example. They lost their FCC license and decided to go online-only (via streaming MP3 and QuickTime). This might be the most cost-effective solution in the beginning, at least.
You have to have a Chief Engineer, who will build the transmitter and sound booths, etc., and that person will have an FCC license, too. He will know how to get FCC approval for a frequency that you will broadcast on.
I volunteer at a local, low-watt AM station.
... or they sue.
...
...
Radio is an expensive hobby where you pay to pretend to be working.
Ditto the mess.
It is expensive. REALLY expensive.
First you hire a highly recommended technogeek who can do anything who says he doesn't need anything because he has his own tools to keep the station operating. He demands a lot of money for beeper pay, weekend pay, and after hours pay which you pay.
The power always goes out about 3A.M., Sunday, and, of course, the highly recommended is nowhere to be found.
The forms you have to fill out will take at least one full time person.
And, you have to have an office for the person to use. Two phone lines. And office equipment. And, that has to meet government standards with a bathroom and electricity and such.
Then, the forms person decides to get sick or stay home or something, so, you either do it yourself or hire ANOTHER person. So, you have two or three or four people doing the job of one.
More office equipment. More expenses. More phone lines.
You will need to have a lawyer on retainer plus parts. [Your transmitter sterilized my kudzu! I'm suing!]
You need to pay the electricity.
You need to pay the rent.
You need to pay the federal radio license [tax]. About $50,000 a year.
You need to pay telephone, cellular, fax, answering service, internet, data, and other services.
You need to pay cleaning services.
You need to pay federal taxes, state taxes, county taxes, city taxes.
You need to pay for every second of music you play.
You need to pay for the equipment, land, building, insurance, employees.
Employees. You need to have salesmen to sell advertising; but, they don't; and, they still want to get paid
Then, they want an expense account to take all the potential customers out and wine and dine them and then not sell any advertising.
And, then, that worthless scumbag technogeek with his own tools that you hired because he was so highly recommended and hasn't done a thing since he showed CLAIMS that your sub-standard equipment gave him carpal tunnel syndrome and post-radio station stress disorder so your workman's comp goes through the roof.
Your advertisers hear that you abuse your employees, cite the highly recommended, and pull all their advertising.
About that time, a thunderstorm comes through and burns out your transmitter costing you a cool $30,000 to replace.
About that time, someone figures out how to unblock 900 numbers.
And, about that time, your lawyer loses a lawsuit over that kudzu
And, the FCC show up because those four people you originally hired didn't do the paperwork right.
Then, a hooker calls and says that the salesman who had the expense account and never sold impregnated her and demands payment or she will tell the tabloids that your radio station
Then, the FCC shows up, again, with a stack of letters claiming that your station airs unsuitable content with specific dates and times. And, the four employees you hired to do the job have not done the job correctly, so, you are screwed.
And, your lawyer says he has had enough, find another.
Do something simple: find a cure for cancer or invent a perpetual motion machine.
This site has EVERYTHING you would ever need to know about pirate radio. If you are interested in starting your own radio station, THIS IS THE PLACE TO GO!:
http://www.diymedia.net/links/
I am posting this because I thought this might be a good way to find pirate radio broadcasters that could have some useful information for me.
I've been doing a lot of research into Low Power AM Broadcasting, and hope to eventually get some useful schematics and designs that anyone can download from the internet, and use to create their own AM radio station. Information on AM pirating is extremely rare and hard to find, because most of it was done before the Internet took hold, so the information is all locked away in the back of people's file cabinets.
I am looking for good AM Transmitter and Antenna schematics. ESPECIALLY Antenna schematics. I'm quite aware of all of the "long wire needed, must have ground radials" stuff, but what I'm really interested in is not just theory, but a design for an antenna that has actually been used, and works very well. What I'm especially looking for is any kind of design that helps to get around physical limitations, such as the requirement of tons of ground radials, and very long radiators.
If anyone has -any- information or schematics that could help me out, please e-mail it to vmalloc@usinternet.com. Thanks!
way back when the movie Pump Up The Volume came out.. if I remember, back in the mid to late 80's, licensing alone was $50,000 per year, before you get into any equipment costs.
Considering that I went to a high school that had it's own radio station (which I did DJ for for quite a while), I expect that there are probably substantial discounts for an educational institution.
Does your college have a radio station of it's own? If not, would it be possible to get the ball rolling to GET radio classes?
The college where I grew up by has 2 radio stations (Western Michigan University), and there was one at the high school I went to.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I know the question is being asked from the US, but I'm guessing there are /.ers in the UK who'd want to know about this kinda thing too, especially with the future possibilities of Access Radio opening up the airwaves to more non-profit organisations.
In order to set up a small scale radio station in the UK (or indeed anywhere else), there are number of things that you need:
People: A radio station needs a number of people to operate. You really can't just go it alone. You need people to present, you need people with technical knowledge to build and maintain some sort of studio, as well as know how to operate broadcast equipment. You need people to deal with the financial side of things, you need people to deal with record companies and other such outside organisations. In the student scenario, it is probably best to establish a society whose goal is to create a fully operational student radio station, which puts some basic organisational mechanics in place and provides a focus for all students interested in the enterprise.
Backing: All small scale radio ventures will need some sort of backing, both financial and in terms of general support. In the student case, this will likely be the student's union, who need to be persuaded to cough up at least some of the money needed, and help deal with issues like mounting antenna on buildings, and finding a suitable location for setting up a studio.
Licensing: Once you have people and backing, you need a license. In the UK, the Radio Authority is responsible for licensing all types of radio station. Small scale stations can currently apply for the various Restricted Service Licenses available, typically short-term (one month) FM licenses or long-term Low Power AM licenses. You need to research the different license available and decide which one suits you best. Music that is to be played on air also has to be licensed, both by PPL for record company royalties and PRS for artist royalites. Music licensing is dependent on the profit/turnover of a station as well as the type of broadcast license it holds, so music licensing should be a consideration in working out these factors.
Equipment: This is the expensive bit. A radio station will need some sort of studio from which to broadcast, which will minimally need CD players, a minidisc player (for jingles, trails, call signs, pre-recorded material, interviews, etc), a microphone, and a mixer to bring it all together. For short-term licenses it may be practical to hire out a complete kit. Long-term stations will need to investigating buying or building various of the bits needed. Equipment extends beyond the studio though. A transmitter will also be required, and intermediate kit between studio and transmitter will also be required. Places that specialise in radio studio and broadcast equipment include Alice and Radica. Canford also sell a huge range of audio and related equipment, from CD decks to rack bolts and everything in-between.
Content: Once a radio station has all the people, support, licensing, and equipment it needs to get off the ground, the final vital component is the content itself. Some of this needs to be obtained, for example a predominantly music-based station will need to obtain CDs to play on air (although music licensing does mean you can use your own CDs, as long as they are not pirated, afaik). Other content will have to be created, such as jingles, trails, call signs (the bits that say 'This is EnterStationNameHere broadcasting on SomeFrequency' which must be broadcast every fifteen minutes by law). Another major problem faced by small-scale stations is being able to provide round-the-clock broadcasts and being able to provide news content. IRN can provide the news (I forget the url, it's nearly 4 in the morning :-| ), however the option persued by most student radio stations in the UK is SBN, who provide overnight sustain programming as well as hourly news bulletins.
Well, I've tried to cover most the issues that a small radio station has to deal with, although none of them in particularly much detail. There's a whole lot more to it, and it does involve a fair whack of work, but it is great great fun, and I thoroughly recommend getting involved in projects like this to anyone who has the opportunity. I started out presenting a show at my college radio in my first year at uni, in my second year my involvement mushroomed. Now, as I approach third year (in about a week :-) ), we are poised on doing a spectacular outside broadcast, I'm running round like a headless chicken trying to make sure things work, and we look set to gain a big influx of Freshers to help the continuation of our station for many years to come.
What more can I say. It's nearly 4 in the morning nd I'm about to drop off to sleep, so I think I'll stop here. Hope I've given y'all some useful info to chew on :-)
Phil Stewart
RSL Development Officer, IT Manager, Library Manager, Presenter, and Random Bod at IC Radio, the student radio station of Imperial College, London.
Oh yeah, and occasionally I study for my degree :-)
Sweet!
Sex & Broadcasting by Lorenzo Milam
. ht ml#Sex
He's one of the pioneers of *genuinely* public radio. Here's a link that tells you a little bit about him.
http://www.flyingturkeys.com/lsw/lswalternative
I was part of the board for a local volunteer radio station in Norway some years back. We covered an area of about 20x20km (actually we covered a lot more, but that was what we had a license to cover), with very rough terrain on two 10W transmitters. Unless you where as unlucky as we where with the terrain, one would be more than e enough.
Another interesting fact about radio-transmitters is that boosting up the effect isn't really going to buy you that much. The signal-strength X kilometers away decreases by at least the square of the distance.
Lastly, unless you are a commercial radio-station, there is no reason why you would want to broadcast in stereo. People listening to the radio usually don't care much about that. We had some people complaining about the stereo-light on their radio not lighting up, so we fixed that (making the stereo light shine up, while still broadcasting in mono) and heard no more complaints.
Royalties however, are a problem. In Norway, there are no differences for royalties for songs whether you define yourself commercial or for-profit. Most local radio-stations solve this by having some kind of income. This would either be commercials (which are really boring to sell), or the much simpler concept of "radio-bingo". The last is an attempt to squeeze money out of poor old people instead of wealthy corporations, and is thus much easier. Student-radios usually get too much money from the student-organizations anyway, so they do neither.
I don't know about FCC in the US, but in Norway, our equivalent (whatever it's called these days) actually care about content. If you don't have a certain percentage of self-produced content, royalties suddenly jump to the roof. So most local radio stations will at least attempt to do some actual journalism.
This makes a lot of sense to me, if all you are going to do is to send music, there's no reason why the FCC is going to prefer your music over anyone elses to fill up the available spectrum with. So you either pay, or you send something of interest! But I have no idea if this is true in other countries (although I find it a nice arrangement).
But my guess is that factors such as these probably will come into play, if you ask the FCC for bandwidth. They will probably ask you what you are going to do with it, and check up on that at random intervals. And if all you are going to do is to stream mp3's out of your home-box, chances are that they aren't going to be thrilled. On the other hand, if you ask them to get some bandwidth for an actual student-radio, with actual student content, it's likely (or at least it should be that way), that they will be much more interested in cooperating with you.
I don't understand why you even think there is a possibility to change radio for the better. Radio is kaput. Lots of ads + lots of bad music. There is nothing new happening in radio. and nothing new is possible. It is locked up by just a few very large media companies, and no change is permitted except those that make money, and if a format is making money -- IT WON'T CHANGE. Fee-based satellite radio run by the automakers may not even make it.
If you love a certain kind of music that much, why don't you write a weblog about it, discussing the bands and pointing them to places on the web where it can be heard. A text-based dj. And it won't cost you much at all.
http://www.nashvillescene.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? story=Back_Issues:2002:August_8-14_2002:News:Cover _Story
Tells of how sick the radio and music business can be. Please don't say that rock or rap doesn't get into this kind of crime.
How do I use google?
This could probably save alot of needless electrons being wasted for stupid questions, and even more stupid responses, just like this one.
Save the electrons! And for those of you who think AC doesn't waste 'em, save the electron oscillations!
A Mandrake box and a playlist aren't enough to start a good radio station. You're a college student, so use that to your advantage -- get your university involved. THE most important piece of running a radio station is people power, and that's one of a university's great resources. Start a radio club, if there isn't one already. Promote it -- it shouldn't be hard to have folks itchin' to be DJs, but what you really need is folks to do behind-the-scenes stuff. Calling people, filling out forms, promoting, doing tech, etc. Running a radio station is a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. The best radio stations are run in large part by volunteers, 'cause then it's the love of the station and the music that drives them, not maximizing profits and targeting the right markets. They also tend to be commercial free, so you get to listen to more radio in the same one-hour period. Community and college radio is the open source of broadcasting. Next to people power you need money, space, and equipment. This is where your university administration comes in. Figure out how to get the university to pay for it -- they may have money lying around for stuff like that or you might be able to get students to vote to raise student fees for a radio station. Be prepared to ask listeners for donations, too. Your university can probably give you space to broadcast from and have offices in. As folks have pointed out, you can get an educational liscence and deal with a lot less crap. Running it through the university means it'll also have a chance to survive once you and your friends graduate. (Make sure to get community members involved too, 'cause students are notoriously busy, flaky, and absent for significant portions of time.) It's possible that your university turns down your proposal. KGNU, a well-known community station, was started after the University of Colorado turned down a proposal for a radio station, but most schools will support such a project. CU does now, in the form of KVCU/Radio 1190. You must be prepared to work really hard without tangible results for a while. You must be able to present clear and reasoned proposals. You must inspire lots of help. You have to REALLY love what you're doing. It's like starting a business, but maybe an order of magnitude harder. If we haven't scared you off yet, the first thing to do is talk to folks from other college and community stations. Get their tips and tricks. Figure out what they didn't forsee and make sure you have a plan for it.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
If the school already has a station, you're pretty much out of luck. --No college student can afford to setup a legal station. Get a block of programming time at the station... Depending on how popular the station is this could be easy or difficult.
If your school does not have a radio station, work through them! If they have a communications department, that's an excellent place to start.
It's going to cost some money, but probably not as much as you might think. You'll have to have a survey done, but many broadcast engineers are willing to cut schools a deal on this.
Next, you're going to have to apply to the FCC. You'll probably want your school's general counsel to look this over, and if it's for a student organization or department, chances are it won't cost you a thing. Non-commercial stations do not have to pay any fees to the FCC. --None!
If there aren't many stations in your area, chances are you'll be able to get a frequency. As a general rule, the FCC does not license stations under 100 watts anymore. The only exceptions generally are grandfathered class D stations. You'd probably want to start at 100 watts, which is a Class C station.
You'll then need to put the station together... You're looking at an antennae and cabling (the cable is expensive!), a transmitter, compressor/processor, console, cd players, mics, cassette players, probably a computer or 2, a distribution amp, monitors, a modulation monitor, maybe minidisc players and turntables. Cart machines aren't necessary anymore. You'd be looking at probably 25-30K if the equipment is new, and 15-20k if the a lot of the equipment is used. Don't bother trying to find used CD players, and don't even think about going with anything less than professional grade equipment. --Bad bad bad.
After that, your monthly costs depend on how generous the school is. Most of them won't charge you for the electricity, but they will for phone lines (and you'll need at least 2, one for the studio, and one for the office).
You'll want to subscribe to CMJ and report to them. Their subscription for college stations is approximately $500 for 2 years. You'll also have to pay license fees to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. --These fees are going to depend in part on the patent office, and also how many people your station reaches. However it's significantly less than a commercial station would play.
At 100 watts you'll have to follow EAS policies, but that's fairly easy... Weekly and monthly tests and then make sure your station breaks when an actual EAS is transmitted. You'll have to designate a chief operator, but there's no operator's license required for that. --If you've got a decent EE program, you could probably find some students willing to help with that. Your DJs do not have to be licensed at all.
Other than that, well, there's a lot more. The biggest thing to be aware of is that the process of starting a station is unlikely to be finished in less than a year.
Anyway, that's a taste of what I learned in the year and a half I spent as station manager of my undergraduate university's station.
-Patrick
the station I do time on spends AU$100000 a year to keep ourselves running. Our studios are run down (even though they're fairly new), and we can never get anyone to fix anything because we have no staff except for an office co-ordinator 3 days a week.
:(
It's extremely costly to get off the ground, but even more costly to keep going. We would love to have spare parts handy, but we don't even have spare microphones at the moment. And we'd love to have a 5 day a week staff member, or two.
Good volunteers are also vital if you have no money. Unfortunately, we're stuck with a lot of people who don't want to do anything more than present their one hour show a week and go home.
Teh G0ogle kaxe
If I remember correctly, there was recently (1999) allocated a whole bunch of bandwidth for low-power FM stations, specifically to be awarded to nonprofit organizations. So... it would seem that the thing to do would be to get ahold of a non-profit organization, such as Kuro5hin, to sponsor you. Then they request the bandwidth, local to your university. You get something like 3 miles of broadcast; your are limited to something like 100-1000 W.
You then cover the Kuro5hin news, but also play all kinds of free rock-n-roll (that is, donated by the musicians) in the background. Or do it for slashdot, if slashdot is a NPO (I don't know if it is or not). Or do it for any of a number of other organizations.
You will still need a good $2000-$10000 initial investment for the radio equipment, unless you want to try to build your own and get it to pass FCC regulations (not impossible, I guess). But $2k is small compared to the cost of getting bandwidth.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
1) Mandrake box.
2) ???
3) Broadcast radio!
This seems to be what KPIG, Radio Paradise, is about . There was an article about them this last year in Linux Journal. To avoid deeplinking, do a search for KPIG on www.linuxjournal.com: The Promise of Radio Paradise: An Open-Source Challenge to Commercial Radio By DocSearls on Tuesday, January 15, 2002
Here, you can't run your own transmitter...
Nope! You pay the gov't Transmission Service
to transmit your signal...
And there's far more difficulty to get a license!
So much free FM spectrum (at least outside
Sydney & Melbourne... and maybe there, too);
so little chance of getting licensed to use
any of it!
They're no fly-by-night tiny radio station. They have been around for years in the NYC area, and are quite popular among listeners of non-commercial music.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
what is the freq?
any othergood radio in pittsburgh?
-sorry, just moved to pittsburgh
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
My campus radio station is in Bristol (WQRI) and we reach Newport and Providence. And we still qualify as nonprofit.
I'm the stranger...posting to
These are simple errors, but they make your point clearer: there are thousands of regulations, most of which incur a fine if broken.
Interociter
-=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
52KW x 24Hrs/Day x 365 Days/Yr = 455520 KW-Hr
455520 KW-Hr x $0.03/KW-Hr = $13,665.60 per year
So, where are you getting electricty for under 3 cents per KW-Hr?