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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."
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?
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.
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Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
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.
Check out Clear Channel's newest competitor, Cheap Channel Radio!
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.
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.
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."
That said, you can also reduce the number of royalties you must pay by getting in touch with a company called Clear Channel--they dictate what is played on most US radio stations.
Further, your little Mandrake box can do it, using shoutcast, an icecast-server, and a microphone, but that would give you an "Internet radio station" as many of the shoutcast servers you can listen to with winamp or Windows Media Player are called.
Finally, a local station I listen to was discovered to be transmitting a syndicated Internet radio stream--you can hear a bit of "tinniness" to the audio when doing this (because many stations use a very low bitrate to accomodate dialup users) but it seemed to work rather well for them. That would be a way to allow people to listen when you're not manning the studio...
HTH. HAND.
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.
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.