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!
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.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.
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:).
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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