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."

Comments

Pirate Radio

[tyrani]

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.

Re:Pirate Radio

[idontneedanickname]

Well of course there's pirate radio on the internet :) And for everyone who doesn't have a T3 handy you can use Streamer P2P radio. It's a P2P program that makes it easy to broadcast, (and listen!) all you need is a DSP plugin like Oddsock and bandwidth greater than dial-up, but even with dial-up you can have a 24kbps stream which has decent quality. Unfortunately there isn't a linux port YET, but we're actively seeking some to do so. If anyone can help just drop by the forums.

50kW for FM or AM?

[Fantome]

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.

idea

[atarrri]

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.

After two low power college radio stations...

[jpellino]

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.

Re:You're looking at it all wrong!

[langed]

Many schools have already bought the FCC licenses. So if you get the school's OK you might be able to co-operate with them, operating under their license. You may also be able to use much of their hardware, since many of today's transmitters, repeaters, and broadcast towers can transmit multiple simultaneous signals.

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.

That didn't work in the early 80s (wish it had)

[swb]

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.

Can't can't can't..losers attitude!

[rufusdufus]

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.