Radio Survivor

The Prometheus Radio Project will run its 12th community radio barn raising by launching a new station: WBXC in Hudson, New York on September 24-26.

This is the first such event, however, that will involve setting up a full power station—3,300 watts as opposed to the usual 100 watts of low power FM.

“This new station will be uniquely decentralized with three main studios spread out across the listening range, allowing broader participation from residents of New York’s Greene and Columbia counties,” says Prometheus. “Partnerships are already forming with schools, music venues, and town halls to create live feeds from various locations, furthering the scope of the station. WGXC: Hands-On Radio will be much more than just a radio station, with regular exhibitions and events, ongoing media trainings, a news blog, and community meetings.”

The station already streams at www.wgxc.org. We tuned in and, no big surprise, got a Gamelan tune from the composer Pauline Oliveros and the Berkeley Gamelan Ensemble.

If you want to help out and live in Greene, Columbia, Dutchess, Ulster, Albany, Rensselaer, or Delaware counties in New York or Berkshire counties in Massachusetts, click here to register. Otherwise click here.

While health care reform has seemed to dominate the Congress for all of 2010 thus far, community radio enthusiasts have been waiting for action on the Senate version of the Local Community Radio Act. The House passed its version back in mid-December and now the full Senate is set to take up their bill during the spring term, although the exact date is still up in the air.

If passed the Act would restore low-power community radio to the standards the FCC originally set for the service when it was created. These standards were made stricter by Congress at the behest of the National Association of Broadcasters via a last-minute addition to an omnibus budget bill at the very close of 2000. As a result many of the country’s largest radio markets with dials too full for new full-power stations were also deprived of the chance to have new low-power community stations. Now the hope to realize the full potential of LPFM is greater than it’s been since December, 2000.

Because the Local Community Radio Act has the support of several high-ranking senators, the LPFM advocacy group Prometheus Radio Project predicts “quick movement to pass this bill through Unanimous Consent.”

It was some pretty exciting news from the FCC on Tuesday, when they announced the list of 59 organizations who won the non-commercial educational radio license lottery. Although I was thrilled for some of the winners, as a college radio observer, I was saddened and surprised to see that very few colleges or educational institutions applied for these coveted licenses.

As Paul reported on Wednesday, the largest percentage of new licenses went to religious groups (at least 17), whereas only a handful were awarded to educational institutions (colleges, primary or secondary schools). In some cases college radio applicants lost the race against religious groups due to the complex point system (looking at local ownership, population served, etc.) that the FCC uses in its decision-making.

Scanning through the FCC’s grid of groups who applied and won, it’s often quite difficult to figure out which are actually affiliated with educational institutions. For example, Central Florida Educational Foundation (which won a new license) operates a whole network of 10 non-commercial Christian radio stations in Florida.

A closer look at the 7 winners in the college/primary/secondary school category reveals that only a few are likely to have any sort of student involvement in the resulting radio stations. Two of the groups already run networks of religious stations, one runs a LPFM community station, and another runs a public radio station. Of the remaining three institutions, one has both public and student radio stations, another has a broadcasting program, yet no station, and a third currently owns the license for a student station.

So, the question from me is, why didn’t more colleges/universities/high schools go for it back in 2007 and apply for these new radio licenses? It’s clear that religious groups are organized and have the funding to pursue radio expansion, but it saddens me that college radio for the most part sat on the sidelines while these licenses were doled out to groups with a very different take on educational radio. The Future of Music Coalition has a great fact sheet that gives a bit of perspective on the process for obtaining these licenses and it’s a good reminder that financial considerations are probably a key reason why college stations might have been scared off from applying.

Here are the college radio groups who won: (more…)

The FCC opened up an important licensing window for new noncommercial FM stations in 2007, announcing the first round of license winners in 2008. However another 59 licenses remained up in the air due to the Commission needing to pick a winner amongst competing applications. The FCC announced those winners on Tuesday [PDF].

The Commission uses a point system to judge which group should receive a noncommercial FM license amongst multiple competitors. The system awards points with preference to candidates that are locally headquartered with an “established” presence, do not have a controlling interest in another nearby station and which propose to serve the largest number of people.

For the first time the FCC had to contend with applicants who are currently running low-power stations. Because the operators of LPFM stations cannot also operate full-power stations, the Commission will require these operators to give up their LPFM licenses before signing on with their full-power stations. In order to make sure their communities are not deprived of service any longer than necessary the Commission is allowing the LPFM stations to petition to maintain broadcasts until they are ready to begin test broadcasts with their full-power stations.

A total of nine LPFM station operators were in competition for licenses nationwide, and of these five won. Two winners are stations that have been operating as traditional community radio stations: Radio Free Moscow in Moscow, Idaho and Berkshire Community Radio in Great Barrington, MA.

Radio Free Moscow (RFM) edged out Fire Media Corporation and Country Roots Preservation Group based upon RFM demonstrating that it is an “established local applicant,” which neither of the other contenders claimed. Berkshire Community Radio (BCR) won out over the University of Massachusetts and Home Improvement Ministries. BCR and UMass both scored the same number of points, which required the FCC to use “tie breaker” criteria. The first tie-breaker criterion prefers the organization that has fewer licenses in other communities. UMass operates WBCR in Boston, while BCR, as a LPFM, operates no other, which resulted in BCR winning this competition.

Amongst the rest of the licensees [PDF], seventeen appear to be obviously religious groups, three are universities or colleges, two are primary or secondary schools, two are established public broadcasters and one is a Native American group. The nature or affiliation of the other licensees can’t be easily discerned from their names.

These awards are considered tentative because will be an opportunity for the filing of petitions to deny a license to any of the winners. However, in practice, such denials rarely occur.

On Friday the FCC’s Media Bureau quietly announced that it adopted an order to allow FM stations broadcasting a digital HD signal to increase their power levels up a maximum of 10% of the power of their main analog signal. While the National Association of Broadcasting and iBiquity have been agitating for this change for quite some time, it’s the backing of National Public Radio and its engineering report on the matter that was the likely tipping point.

But, as radio researcher John Anderson points out, this change is also likely to produce more interference complaints from listeners trying to tune in weaker stations adjacent to these higher power digital signals. There have already been significant complaints and concerns about digital HD signals interfering with adjacent analog stations with the previous power limit set at 1% of a station’s analog power.

The Prometheus Radio Project, in particular, questioned NPR’s support for the increase based on NPR’s own engineering data (PDF). Prometheus noted that listeners asked by NPR Labs to rate HD interference to analog signals at the new power levels gave the quality of the resulting audio a score of 2.7 on a 5 point scale, which is below a rating on “fair” on that scale. Prometheus further argued that,

The NPR Labs Study represents a “best case scenario” test of interference to analog. … Although the NPR Labs Study showed troubling levels of interference, the decision to use a single, highly selective receiver dramatically limited the extent to which these results can be extrapolated.

For its part, NPR responded to Prometheus and other critics [PDF], contending that they “generally misapprehend or ignore the [HD] testing methodology, the test results, or the results of NPR Labs’ prior [HD] testing.”
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As I said in my introduction to our subjective and opinionated review of radio in the 2000s, I still think it was darn near impossible to predict how the medium of radio would end up at the beginning of 2010. Sure, the seeds for satellite radio, HD radio, low-power FM, internet radio and MP3s were already planted by the turn of the century. But home broadband–nevermind wireless or mobile–was a relatively exclusive luxury. MP3 players were lucky to sport enough memory to hold about a hundred minutes of music and weren’t integrated into cell phones. Satellites for Sirius and XM were launched, and HD Radio was being experimented with, but no stations were on the air. Clear Channel was flying high for more than $90 a share.

Anyone taking a broad view of the radio industry in 2000 could certainly see a lot of balls being thrust up into to the air, but it would have taken a psychic to predict where they would land. Nevertheless, for all of the churn we can say very safely that audio-focused content is alive and well.

It’s become clear to me that we Radio Survivors do consider radio to be greater than just the traditional electromagnetic broadcast medium. While we included the RF-based college radio, pubic radio, LPFM, HD Radio and satellite radio in our review, we also touched upon internet radio, Pandora and digital downloads. I believe we are first and foremost fans of terrestrial broadcast radio, but that does not cause us to ignore or discount new audio media. Nor does it cause it us to claim that they are not, in essence, radio services.

The homogenization and delocalization of the broadcast dial caused listeners to seek alternative places to hear more interesting and diverse content. At the same time the popularity of MP3 players and Pandora shows that people were also looking for customization.
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Today there are close to 1000 more noncommercial, locally-programmed community radio stations on the air in the US than a decade ago. The reason for this is the low-power FM radio service created by the Federal Communications Commission in 2000. While Congressional intervention cut the new service off at the knees at the end of that year, the creation of LPFM is an important event that provided crucial recognition for the value of hyper-local community radio.

By the end of the 1990s the FCC was feeling a lot of heat about radio. From one side were complaints about the steep decline in local service brought on by the great loosening of ownership restrictions in the 1996 Telecom Act. On the other side broadcasters were haranguing the Commission about the rise in unlicensed “pirate” broadcasters.

The unlicensed broadcasters–who often preferred the moniker “microbroadcasters”–justified their actions as civil disobedience. Using power levels well under the 100 minimum the FCC set for the lowest class of broadcast station, the microbroadcasters correctly cited the fact that the Commission refused to provide licenses for this class of stations.

A perfect storm for microbroadcasting was created by the availability of inexpensive transmitters and a unifying raison d’etre. Besieged by as many as a thousand unlicensed stations nationwide, the Commission’s Enforcement Bureau had no real hope of keeping up. Yet the Commission had to defend its own legitimacy in the face of critics upset about the spike in unlicensed activity. So the FCC kept up enforcement actions, with the apparent hope that some high profile busts would keep both critics and would-be pirates at bay.

That was the scene set for the emergence of LPFM. The idea for LPFM did not arise fully-formed from the mind of then-Chairman William Kennard. Rather, several proposals for an LPFM service had been floated to the FCC in the late 90s. Furthermore, a real movement had grown behind LPFM, with the Prometheus Radio Project leading that organizing effort.

For Chairman Kennard LPFM offered a ripe opportunity to release some of the pressure by offering would-be unlicensed community broadcasters a shot at a real license. LPFM also looked good politically. Who would oppose inexpensive low-power noncommercial stations intended to serve small, local communities? Well, the NAB and NPR, for starters, under the reasoning that any competition is bad for business.

Nevertheless Chairman Kennard’s FCC moved forward and emerged in January, 2000 with a full-fledged service. There were two real innovations with LPFM. The first was permitting low-power stations to be spaced closer on the dial than full-power stations. The second innovation–often overlooked–is that it created a simplified and expedited licensing process. Obtaining a full-power station license is often a long, laborious and expensive endeavor that requires pricey engineering surveys and legal assistance. With LPFM the Commission did the engineering work in advance, identifying every possible LPFM frequency nationwide. It then set licensing windows during which all applicants would submit their paperwork.

The hitch in the program came at the end of 2000 when the NAB finally succeeded in convincing Congress that close-spaced LPFM posed an interference threat to their full power stations. That resulted in a rider attached to an omnibus budget bill which forced LPFM stations to obey the same spacing as stations broadcasting at thousands of watts. But, importantly, the NAB did not succeed in killing LPFM altogether, and stations started going on the air by 2005 2002.

At the end of 2009 the House passed the Local Community Radio Act, intended to restore LPFM to the levels originally set by the FCC. Now we wait for action by the Senate. When passed, the shorter spacing allowances promise to add many more hundred LPFM stations, especially in the nation’s largest urban markets.

Although most of commercial radio is vaster wasteland than it was a decade ago, noncommercial stations continue to be a bright spot on the dial. Because of LPFM hundreds of communities that otherwise would never have a vibrant, locally-programmed noncommercial station enjoy the sort of community radio that was rarer commodity just ten years ago.

It’s a day that thousands of low-power FM and community radio activists have been awaiting for just about nine years. This evening, at 7:06 pm the House of Representatives, with a minimum of drama, passed H.R. 1147, the Local Community Radio Act of 2009 by voice vote. Little drama for the House nevertheless meant nearly two days of sitting on the edge of the seat for LPFM advocates as they waited for the House to move through its usual machinations and other business. Regardless of how much we might wish LPFM was at the top of the legislative agenda, instead it seemed more like an afterthought. At least it was enough of a no-brainer for the House that they didn’t even need a roll call vote. I’ll take it.

The bill restores the original technical specifications for LPFM which the FCC instituted in 2000. These specs allow a low-power station to be placed as close as the third adjacent channel on the dial. In practice that means if a full-power station broadcasts on 100.1 FM then a LPFM may be placed at 100.7 FM, provided that the frequency is otherwise available.

On Dec. 18, 2000 a provision limiting LPFM stations to obeying the spacing requirements of full-power stations was slipped into an omnibus budget bill and signed into law by President Clinton after a long series of back-room horsetrading. Under these still-current rules, a LPFM station may only be spaced as close as 100.9 FM next to that hypothetical full power station at 100.1 FM.

.2 MHz may not seem like a big difference, but when it comes to spacing stations on the FM dial, it is a game fought and won by tenths of a megahertz. This difference is of particular importance in the nation’s largest radio markets which already have very full dials that will not permit the addition of another full-power station or LPFM that has to obey full-power spacing rules. LPFM proponents estimate that passage of the Local Community Radio Act will create the potential for at least a hundred new stations nationwide.

Now the focus moves to the Senate, where the Commerce Committee has already approved the Senate version of the bill. If it goes to a floor vote and is passed then it is likely to be signed by President Obama.

The Local Community Radio Act of 2009 was scheduled for a floor vote in the House of Representatives today, a moment that LPFM activists have been awaiting for almost nine years. And wait they did. Anyone who has watched her share of C-SPAN knows that the House moves at its own pace, for its own reasons. Today, it waited for quorum, then lumbered forward on about half its agenda today. As of 5:30 PM EST the Clerk of the House reports that business for the day is over and so the vote for LPFM moves to tomorrow.

This is the first time that a vote on a bill to restore low-power FM to the FCC’s original specifications has been scheduled for the full House since 2000. Signs are looking good that the bill may finally pass, though we’ll know much more tomorrow…. maybe.

Today the House Commerce Committee unanimously passed the Local Radio Act by voice vote, opening up the gates to send the bill for a vote by the full House. This bipartisan action is the best hope the restoration of low-power FM has seen since its wings were clipped back in 2000.

When the FCC created LPFM it intended that these stations could be spaced one notch closer on the dial to a full-power station than another full-power station could be place. That is, if there were a full-power station at 101.1 FM, another full-power station may be no closer than 101.9 FM. But under the FCC’s original rules an LPFM could be at 101.7 FM, known as the third adjacent. Each adjacent is .2 MHz, so the first adjacent to 101.1 FM is 101.3 FM and the second is 101.5 FM.

Under heavy pressure from the National Association of Broadcasters Congress and President Clinton horse-traded away this closer spacing in a rider to an omnibus spending bill passed at the end of 2000. This move achieved the NAB’s true goal of limiting the number of new non-commercial stations by making 10 and 100 watt stations absurdly obey the spacing limits for 10,000 watt stations, even though the NAB’s own members operate close-spaced low-power repeater stations called translators. With a flick of Clinton’s pen some hundreds of communities–especially in large metroplexes–were instantaneously deprived of the opportunity to have a new low-power non-commercial community radio station.

LPFM advocates like the Prometheus Radio Project generally claim that passage of the Local Radio Act will enable hundreds of new stations to go on the air. But I do actually wonder if those hundreds are still possible.
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