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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."
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
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
Um... you are actually required to do a station identification at least once an hour. also, i seriouslly doubt any radio station has 50k-100k/hour electrical bills. I work for a 26k watt volunteer station, and our total budget is under 10k a YEAR. we broadcast almost 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
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?
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
> You will also want to broadcast at 50k to 100k
> watts to cover a decent area.
I think you can squeak by with a bit less than that.
There's a smaller station in the chicago area that runs at 1000 watts, and the signal can still be picked up about 40 miles out from the city. Yes the signal is prone to a decent amount of static, but recall that the original poster implied this was for a small town type setting.
Wish I could be more specific but I read about this in an article somewhere recently, and can't for the life of me find it again.
"Um... you are actually required to do a station identification at least once an hour."
Yes, once an hour. The original poster was complaining about something else entirely - the fatal habit of radio stations to announce their callsign, frequency and style between every song.
As an example, in the Boston area tune up WCRB - a highly respected classical music station. Excepting those highly-touted 'uninterrupted' moments, you'll here "Classical 102.5 WCRB" at least three times whenever the announcer speaks.
I don't know what posseses these people to be so obnoxious.
A.
Bringing you offtopic posts since the 50,000s.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
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?
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...
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
Correct, he was saying 50k-100k "per hour", which isn't really sensical.. It's like saying, "I can run 5 miles per hour, per hour."
Electric companies typically bill you in kilowatt-hours. My last bill was ~ 8.5 cents per kW-hr. A 100kW broadcast will consume 72,000 kW-hr each month, which would cost some $6,000 at my residential rates.
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
50k to 100k? Where the hell are you getting these numbers? According to this page:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question330.htm
a 100w transmitter should have a range of 3.5 miles. That's plenty for an average town or college campus.
Oooooh. Can his electric bills handle the equivalent cost of a single light bulb?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
The rule is once an hour within 5 minutes of the top of the hour (:00). Some stations also announce at the bottom of the hour (:30) as well.
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 $350. Just plug in your mp3 box and go. Check out this website.Pirate Radio They have some good info on equipment. The only thing that might hold you back would be the greedy music companies that want royalties everytime someone even thinks about one of their songs, much less plays them. A little legal advice or at bare minimum, legal mp3 copies (you actually own the cd's) of the music you're going to play is a must.
My post is redundant, so feel free to mark it so, but it doesn't seem to be getting through: Commercial stations are required to ID once an hour. Radio amateurs are required to ID every ten minutes. The licenses and regulations are entirely different.
73 DE N0ZES
I have an idea to make a radio station that plays every song once. It doesnt matter what kind of music it is, as long as each song is played no more then once time. And I'm not talking about once per day, or week, I'm talking about once it's played it's never played again. I think that would be sweet.
Answer: Like two porquipines fsck... very carefully.
(1) Site survey. This cost a few K$. 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.
Wow, so you've looked into it? You know about the fees, the setup costs and all that?
No?
Then STFU.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Um, what part of volunteer didn't you understand?
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
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.
In his post, he mentioned that there are only a few radio stations in his area.
... and a few talk stations, but that's about it."
"There are a couple of country stations, a couple of 'today's hit music' stations
He'd have his pick of frequencies, I imagine.
Besides, Internet Radio seems to be far more expensive and restrictive.
-kidlinux.
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.
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."
Why Would You Start a Radio Station?
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I don't know what posseses these people to be so obnoxious.
This.
You can't fill out the form properly so the station can charge the advertisers for your eardrums unless you know what stations you're listening to.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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
You're talking about running a real radio station, right? Not just an internet radio station.
Sounds like it. Real world. That means you have to actually talk to real people, and raise real money, and do real work. And yes, you even have to deal with the government. Yeah, Slashdot was definately the wrong place to post a question about that.
Unless you've got a whole lot of money to invest in all the equipment, fees and royalties, don't even think about it.
Actually, it should be enough to make a couple friends who will sponsor your non-profit station... As in, people you see, not people you chat on AIM with... Again, probably the wrong forum to ask such questions.
And what does your "mandrake box" have to do with this?
Probably just a ploy to trick the Slashdot editors into accepting the story.
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.
The first step in the process is to find out the rules that apply. That takes some research. Speaking with an attorney that specializes in communications is one way of doing the research. Alternatively, you can get copies of the rule books. You're looking for CFR Title 47 as well as the relevant FAA regulations if you're going to have a tower structure. These are available from the Government Printing Office Web Site They're also available at many libraries.
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.
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.
You have to remember that 100 watts is the final output of the transmitter. It takes more than that to run the transmitter because amplifiers are not 100% efficient. (This is also why they heat your house in the winter, and not only that, they heat your house in the summer. That loss gets translated to heat.)
Plus you have non-transmitter equipment -- lights and your computer, and the fridge for the beer, if nothing else.
As for the range, it really depends on where your transmitter is located. As an example, here in the Seattle area there are several 2-meter ham radio repeaters in the Cascades that cover the Puget Sound area from Everett to Tacoma. (The 2-meter ham band is in the same general frequency band as FM radio.) Where your antenna is located and how efficient it is are as important as how much power your transmitter is cranking out, maybe more so.
Someone you trust is one of us.
A 100KW station probably isn't really using a 100KW transmitter. That's a little hokey thing called ERP (effective radiated power)... which is the power measured at a distance from a gain antenna, and converted to the transmitter power you'd need to get the same signal strength from a piece of wire (dipole). Then they get to brag about huge broadcast power.
... lots of small stations run 1000 watts ERP or less. The electrical bill is quite manageable. It's keeping personnel around to keep it on the air that's expensive ... that and staying clean for the FCC.
So let's say the station has a lousy antenna and transmitter and everything together pulls 20KW. That's 20KWH per hour of operation. At 8 cents per KWH that's $1.60 an hour, something like $34 a day, something like $1000 per month.
But you don't need to run such a big transmitter
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
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."
asnd you dont pay for the entire ascap and BMI library. so if he wants to start a non-popular radio station... he can do what you guys are doing...
ASCAP and BMI play fees are insanely priced... espically for the parts of their catalogue that get's lots of airplay. The "listener supported" station I have a friend as the programming director at has informed me that they avoid the expensive parts of the song library... which limits anything that has been popular from the last 5 years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
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
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.
He actually seems to know what he's talking about, unlike you, moron. I work in a radio station, and he's right -- it takes a LOT of money to start up(especially), maintain, etc a station.
So STFU.
That's what "clear channel" means, actually, since for obvious reasons these stations have an exclusive frequency in North America. Now that name has been perverted for other purposes...
sPh
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
No offense, dude, but you're a fucking idiot! :o)
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.
Did you know that Tufts University had a pioneering role in radio transmissons?
t m
Professor Amos E. Dolbear of Tufts University received a U.S. patent for a wireless telegraph (used to communicate for up to a quarter mile) in March, 1882. His patent blocked Marconi from operatins in the US (until Marconi bought the rights).
Later researchers at Tufts pioneered the use of DeForest's amplifier tube to enable distance transmission of voice/music by radio.
http://www.angelfire.com/nc/whitetho/1916_1XE.h
Later establishment of regular broadcasts by 1XE/WGI from Tufts give claims that Tufts had the first radio station in the US with a regular broadcast schedule.
http://www.bostonradio.org/radio/wgi.html
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.
Let me get you started in the right direction:
You don't need to "buy the rights to rebroadcast the songs from the record companies, song writers, and publishers". You merely need to pay royalties for the public performances of copyrighted compositions to ASCAP, BMI and possibly SESAC. The total of all these will be around 5-6% of your stations gross revenue.
Copyright law specifically exempts FCC-licensed radio stations from any fees for public performance of the "Sound Recording" (that is, the copyrights owned by the record companies).
As for the power you will need to cover a decent sized metro area - you sure don't need 50-100,000 watts. The FCC breaks the license classes down into 3 main groups, Class A, B and C. Class A are typically around 5kw, Class B, 50kw, and Class C, 100kw. But an important distinction here is that these amounts are not transmitter power, but ERP (effective radiated power). Also, depending upon your transmitter's HAAT (Height above average terrain), you may be authorized for a lower power than the class of license's maximum.
You would be surprised how well 1000 watts ERP on a hill into a good circular-polarized antenna system will cover a metro area. In fact, in Los Angeles, one station transmits a mere 600 watts from Mt. Wilson and covers all of the greater Los Angeles metro area. In their case, it's the height that gives them the coverage, not so much the power.
You can learn more about station coverage contours, power and classes from the FCC.
But before you get into all that, you should read the FCC's Broadcast Station Application Process. Did I forget to mention that you need to either buy an existing license or apply for a new one? And before you can even apply for a new license, you'll need to prove that you have the financial resources to complete the station and do a technical feasibility study - usually a spacing study for commercial FM (to make sure you can fit your station into the band without causing interference to existing stations) or a Interference study for noncommercial/educational stations (in the 88.1-91.9 part of the band. You can't do these yourself, you'll need to hire a company who specializes in this and has access to the FCCs databases. Dataworld is a company that has been doing this for over 25 years.
Before you get started on this, you should do a lot of background reading. An FCC licensed station is not a toy o hobby and there is a tremendous amount of responsibility that comes with it. Fortunately, the FCC has a How to Apply for a Broadcast Station section of their site. Unfortunately, it starts off like this:
There are so many other things you're going to have to think about before you apply for a license as well.
I suggest you subscribe or read online Radio Shopper, a radio tech centric newsletter that also covers things that small operators need to do to fufill their oblications to the FCC and the community. And of corse, it's a great place to find used transmitters and antenna systems.
Some places to get a feel for the prices of this equipment are Broadcast Supply Worldwide and Harris Broadcast. If you are on a budget and need used equipment, Mooretronix is a great place to start.
Here's a great pictorial of the installation of a new FM antenna system and 60kw transmitter for KPFK in Los Angeles. Just to give you an idea of what is required. KPFK is a non-profit.
I also suggest reading Bob Gonsett's CGC Communicator, a really great technical newsletter for broadcasters in the Southern California area. There are hundreds of his past newsletters online, and you can read about the saga of new stations in SoCal, as well as issues with construction permits (station upgrades). Lots of good info here.
I hope this has helped give you some good background on what all is involved in starting a radio station. I've worked at a couple small commercial broadcast stations in the past. I assisted in some upgrades to the transmitters and antenna systems, so I got to see all that was involved with just the construction permit with the FCC. I even got to assist in a proof of performance once, back in the days before GPS. We had to do it all using topo and street maps.
So don't give up hope - you CAN start your own radio station. But it's really hard to do with just one person. And it will take a bunch of money. Get a critical mass of people together in your town, form a non-profit, there is a really good chance that it you're not in one of the top 100 radio markets that you can get a license and start a station.
I encourage you to try!
--rusty
It's 88.3. WRCT
(Score:0, Interesting)
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