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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."
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
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?
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.
The correct URL for Cheap Channel Radio is http://cheapchannelradio.com.
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...
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. :)
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!
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 $350. Just plug in your mp3 box and go. Check out this website.Pirate Radio They have some good info on equipment. The only thing that might hold you back would be the greedy music companies that want royalties everytime someone even thinks about one of their songs, much less plays them. A little legal advice or at bare minimum, legal mp3 copies (you actually own the cd's) of the music you're going to play is a must.
(1) Site survey. This cost a few K$. 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.
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.
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."
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!
http://www.beosradio.com/tunetracker
very cheap (especially compared to other radio automation systems) and very stable.
my pet machine
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.
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.
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
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.
Ramsey Electroniccs is probably the best-known vendor of consumable FM transmitters, with power levels ranging from a fraction of a Watt (good for broadcasting MP3 to your boombox out on the patio), to 500W.
;)
The local college station here broadcasts with effective radiated power of 150W, from a not-so-big tower on top of a 3-store campus building. I can recieve it quite well within a 10-15 mile radius with the radio in my car, and understandably-well for a few miles past that. I consider this pretty good.
Whatever anyone does who might be considering pirate radio, I can only suggest this: be considerate to your neighbors. Nothing will draw the attention of the FCC and corporate lawyers faster than stepping all over a commercial broadcast, overmodulation of your signal (you need a stiff, brick-wall limiter in-line before the transmitter, set up by someone with a clue), or distortion of your broadcast.
The latter troublespot, distortion, is likely to be physically dangerous to others: There's aviation bands at about 2x FM broadcast frequencies, and any malformed waveforms (harmonics) eminating from your antenna will show up in exactly this spot. This Is Bad. If you kill a the pilot of a Cessna because you feel like broadcating "good music" to the masses during bad weather, I hope you rot in jail for the rest of your life.
That all said, you really want to at least borrow someone well-versed in radio broadcast to help with the setup and calibration of your transmitter rig. As long as you're considerate of others, you may be just fine, broadcasting away for free...until, of course, a knock at the door signals the end of the party.
Kid-proof tablet..
I'm a software programmer for a small locally owned station. Actually making the systems work is the easy part. A lot of time and energy are spent on the Account/Billing department. As for the government side, if you actually get a frequency, they let you know all the laws and things you'll have to pay them. RIAA and BMI and places like that will also happily send you a bills for letting you play their songs. Often the contracts with them are a percentage of your gross revenue plus a base fee.