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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."
Maybe, but have you thought:
* A poor soundcard setup will fuzz: this can be heard
* A cheaper soundcard dying and putting the station offair is not a good look
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.
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
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?
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.
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.