Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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!
(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 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!