New LPFM applications being accepted in Oct. - any interest in community radio here?

[Michael Garcia]

[crossposted from facebook]

Hi there - not a cardholding member but a long-time admirer. The FCC has just announced a rare open period for educational groups to apply for one of 1000 new licenses to operate low-power FM community radio. I'm willing to spearhead the application process, but it's only open to non-profit educational groups (among a few other categories). Is there any interest by the folks here around reaching into community radio? I'd like to work with an existing educational group on this process. in particular I think it could be an amazing resource not only to reach out to the community but to play with antenna design and other RF goodness. Please let me know what y'all think, I'm also reaching out to other groups I'm associated with, so even if you think this isn't a good fit for Heatsync, if you are interested in the project, please get in touch with me.

I'm starting to review the documentation here but am coming into this as a lone amateur/pirate transmitter so any guidance is welcome:

http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/low-power-fm-broadcast-radio-stations-lpfm

http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/low-power-fm-lpfm-channel-finder

http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/bc-chklsts/EB18LPFM06_2008.pdf

[Ryan Mcdermott]

Just to vouch for who this is: Michael (or Admiral Fiesta) is really
heavily involved in the local Burning Man community, and I've known
him for a couple of years through that, and some other stuff around
Phoenix.

He ran the radio station for our local burn here in Arizona this May,
is an cool guy, and generally smells like springtime.

I know there was talk of something like this recently (around a year
ago?) HAMs? Do you know about that?

Paging Jasper?

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[Jasper Nance]

Its a really cool idea, but we would need to come up with some seriously commited people to do interviews, programs, put together and stream (with permission) hacker webcasts....

 

If the station is mostly off the air it would be very easy to get the license taken back from us.

 

I can't be that person, sadly. Not right now anyway.

--
----------------------------------------------
Jasper Nance - KE7PHI
Creative and Scientific Imagery
http://www.nebarnix.com/

[Ryan Mcdermott]

BTW, Fiesta, heatsync is a do-ocracy. In my opinion, if you want to
tackle this, then do it. I think it would be awesome if we had a
radio station.

Like Jasper said, it would probably take a LOT of commitment, and we
would definitely want to make sure that we aren't doing anything to
that exposes heatsync labs to any sort of liability, but other than
that: go.

As far as liability: what do they want to see as far as a non-profit?
Does the non-profit have to be the one signing the forms? Is heatsync
labs (the legal entity) exposed to any legal liability if you start
dropping F bombs on the air?

[Jasper Nance]

Truth! Also, I think if you had an existing internet station set up (even with video or audio over images of the lab and occasional video) it would be super easy to submit this material with the proposal.

 

The upside of this is that its free (no special eq needed comapred to FM radio), you can test out the methods used, dedication of the lab to the idea, and have a product to show to the FCC.  You could even drop F bombs which you can't do on the radio.... but that probably wouldn't get the FCC on your side. ...

[Larry Campbell]

I have a low power FM antenna transmitter and antenna collecting dust... many years back during my search and rescue days back in California  I had a friend who ran a "low power" radio station in a small town up in the mountains (only about 1500 people) with an identical setup. He ran most of it as automated but went live a few nights a week.

Id be glad to bring that down if Michael was to apply for us to have a license!

( I will plead the 5th if anyone asks who installed the antenna for him)......::innocent look::

Since they were in a dead zone they had precious little for stations in the area. Everyone including local law enforcement there rather enjoyed it...until the FCC showed up on his doorstep and confiscated everything


Larry

[Jasper Nance]

Royalties, how do they work???

[Ryan Mcdermott]

FIGHT THE POWER, HACK THE PLANET!

Actually, good question: Michael, what would you be playing on the
station? How would you deal with licensing the audio? (I'm assuming
you'd play some phat beats?)

[Jasper Nance]

Does anyone know if soundcloud has a creative commons type of license that we would be able to broadcast with attribution?

[Ryan Mcdermott]

Oh, now you're thinking... Although I wonder how well that is
enforced? If a DJ uploads a mix to soundcloud, calls it creative
commons, and then we end up broadcasting it, are we exposed to
liability?

Ask for forgiveness, I suppose :)

I'll look around soundcloud's API -- I've done some work with it before.

[Larry Campbell]

http://www.bmi.com/licensing

Ive been going rounds with a few licensing places trying to get a liscense for the traditional "happy birthday" song for the nephew and nieces as a present so they could always have that sung to them.

LC

[Ryan Mcdermott]

I think that the license for that song was very recently (as in a
couple of days ago) deemed invalid.

[Will Bradley]

I always thought if I were to run such a station, I'd play freely-licensed content. There's been a movement lately (thanks to internet radio I'm sure) to publish audio with creative commons licensing, etc.

[Jasper Nance]

Not quite yet

 

http://www.spin.com/articles/happy-birthday-public-domain-lyric-sheet-lawsuit/

[Larry Campbell]

The lawsuit itself was just filed a few days ago...Im sure Mildred and Patty Hill would have been appalled at how Warner/Chappell, and the Harry fox agency as well as BMI, ASCAP and SESAC have continued to profit off their work over a century later.........

Regardless, I do not know if Non Profit orgs get price breaks, might be worth asking...

Larry

On Friday, June 21, 2013 3:10:42 PM UTC-7, Nebarnix wrote:

Not quite yet

 

http://www.spin.com/articles/happy-birthday-public-domain-lyric-sheet-lawsuit/

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Ryan Mcdermott <blh...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think that the license for that song was very recently (as in a
couple of days ago) deemed invalid.

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Larry Campbell <l...@llnw.com> wrote:
> http://www.bmi.com/licensing
>

> Ive been going rounds with a few licensing places trying to get a license

[Ryan Rix]

Someone should automate my old favorite troll-the-lab game, Jamendo Bingo

1) go to jamendo.com
2) have someone pick a country
3) have someone pick a genre
4) play the first album that matches
5) run

Ryan Rix
http://rix.si

[Steven Pletsch]

Years ago I helped a friend with a station he had set up in a small town, he contacted independent music labels and got a lot of stuff sent to him with licenses agreeing that he could play it royalty free, you would be surprised if you take the time to talk to them, how many small labels would really just love to have someone play their stuff. Between unsigned artists, and small labels, he collected about 1000 free CDs in the first month or so, had plenty of music to choose from. He also wrote to different pseudo-celebrities that he admired and asked them if they had any unreleased material he could play, or anything they would allow him to play. Most did not respond, but those who did were very generous with their material. I know there are a lot of local artists, speakers, comedians, etc. that would love an outlet for their material.

[Michael Garcia]

Hi everybody - glad to see there's some interest here. Here's a little more detail on me, and also what I've found out is involved for something like this:

Me:

As Ryan mentioned, I've done (and continue to do) some temporary stations, I use a (cheap chinese) 2w/7w transmitter and my whole "station" fits in a small suitcase (less my Comet 5/8 wavelength antenna and a 10' piece of pipe for a mast). I'll be broadcasting at Firefly festival next weekend in flagstaff doing preprogrammed as well as live content. I generally solicit folks on the event facebook pages to submit content beforehand so i can put it in rotation (even to the point of ripping youtube videos of them singing etc) and also ask them to come find me with music or stuff they want to read/say/play on the air. I also just picked up a library of really old radio thriller dramas (commercials and all) from archive.org which i'm excited to be playing late-night. I use software called ZaraRadio for the basics of automation at this point - it does all your standard stuff like station IDs, time/weather announcements, playlisting, jingles and whatnot, but nothing fancy.

Regulations:

First off, I'm not a lawyer nor an RF expert. If any of you happen to be either, feel free to chime in.

There are 2 classes of LPFM: LP10 and LP100, which refer to the total operating power of the station (10w/100w). As I understand it, there has never actually been a license granted under LP10, and it's actually the subject of some controversy. As far as I understand it today, and I may be wrong, regulations on LP100 are that you have to operate at a minimum of 50w effective radiated power at 30m height, or the equivalent power that produces a 60 dBu contour of at least 4.7 kilometers. This is not an outrageous feat, but a 30m mast would certainly require lighting etc. I haven't gotten into the tower regulations yet, but the alternative here would be more power at a lower altitude, perhaps a rooftop mast with a high-gain antenna.

LPFM stations have to broadcast a minimum of 36 hours a week.

There are regulations around recordkeeping, FCC access to the station records and equipment, and other admin stuff that do not seem particularly insurmountable.

LPFM stations are required to support the Emergency Alert System, which I understand requires some commercial-grade hardware.

Perhaps most importantly, we'd need to find an open frequency in our area - I was literally just sent this link: http://www.nautel.com/support/technical-resources/rf-toolkit/ but haven't explored it yet.

Theres obviously a lot that i've missed, and a lot i've glossed over, but this idea is very new at this point, much to be learned and hammered out.

Content:

You all raise good points about rights - in the past, i've found that asking for royalty-free music goes a long way towards getting royalty-free music. To Ryans question about DJ mixes, I'm pretty sure those would generally be out lest we have to wrangle BMI (I'm not sure that's fair use, and even if it is, I'm not sure I'd want to pick that fight at this point). But I have also heard an unsubstantiated rumor that any FM broadcast that is also simulcast via the internet is somehow less vulnerable to legal action... Point is, I don't want to try and dodge any record companies, I'd rather just do as much original content as possible, and solicit that from as many folks as we could - even to the point of playing folk's podcasts over the air with permission. The soundcloud idea is a great one, i'd have to imagine they expose the rights information via the API.

This raises the other legal issue of "who's liable for obscenity fines or anything else" - in short, I don't know yet. I have the name of a lawyer who works/worked with Radio Phoenix for years who i'll be contacting once i have my shit a little more together.

As a corrollary- what role does the 501c3 take? short answer - I don't know that either. In fact, the legal entity may not have to be associated. What I've seen is "noncommercial educational groups" but not specifically the word "nonprofit". I'm going to need some time to dig into the docs more, as I don't have a clear understanding of what qualifies as a "group". Personally I think I'd be more comfortable incorporating the station separately if that's legally possible, again just to protect the lab and individuals from liability to whatever extent possible.

I hope this answers some questions, and I also hope it raises some new ones. Thoughts?

[Michael Garcia]

Oh yeah: https://www.facebook.com/groups/472600409484297/ - I have some folks interested there as well.

[Will Bradley]

My thoughts: do it :) you raise good points about the 501c3/org/legal stuff and as long as you're not representing yourself as acting on behalf of the HeatSync Labs non-profit corporation or doing something that might need community approval (using our space, money, major construction) then there's very little stopping you. I think that being the sponsoring organization for an educational radio station would probably get a "yea" vote from the community and the board, so let's keep working at it and make something cool!

--

[Michael Garcia]

Good stuff, that's what I like to hear. 

The station will require a physical location at least for a transmitter and an antenna/mast/tower - this is something I'm just beginning to explore. Presumably there should also be a physical production space (i'm thinking a closet with a laptop and a mic would be sufficient) but that could be physically removed from the transmission equipment and just run a web stream through an encoder.

I'm in talks with a few groups (i'm thinking art co-ops, community groups like the Elks club, etc.) who might be willing to host one or both of these physical pieces of infrastructure, there's also the possibility of leasing space but that creates significant overhead and frankly i have no leads on bankrolling the ongoing operation of the station, I think it would have to be crowdfunded.

One final thought I had is partnering with a charter school - these station licenses are often obtained by high schools with radio classes (when they're not picked up by churches first). If anyone is familiar with a particular (perhaps arts or tech-oriented) charter school that you think I should approach, I'm all ears.

No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

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[Ryan Mcdermott]

personally I would love to see this as part of beatsync (our music space).  We have a generally quiet space upstairs that is meant as a music practice/recording room, and think this would fit for that.  (there has been talk of podcasting from there before.

[michael.r...@gmail.com]

I've looked into it a bit more here's some further answers. The organization and the dj on air both are liable for fines in case of obscenity. No legal shield there, its a people problem, of making sure we have clean content and that the djs/podcasters/content providers know they have skin in the game to keep us compliant. My overall vision here is to create a canvas, and then to put structures in place to make it easy for folks in the community to be creative with the canvas, and still be compliant.

I realize the liability issue is a major concern, so I'm going to reach out to some other LPFM stations and get some case studies on how they handle that.

Also, not sure what the final word is yet, but it looks like my current antenna at 50 feet height above average terrain with a 50w transmitter and good heliax cable could be sufficient to meet the reqs. and not need any special lighting or whatnot, just a mast on the roof of a building. I don't know if that qualifies as major construction.

Still researching the open frequency spectrum around here.






Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Smartphone

[Chad Stearns]

Liability issues aside, this sounds really cool. I'd like to see it happen. And if you need any help...

-Chad

On Friday, June 21, 2013 9:00:52 AM UTC-7, Michael Garcia wrote:

[Moheeb Zara]

As long as we're not profiting we can play whatever right? :P

Anyway I'm interested and could give some time to this. I'd live to be involved. I'm sure you could fish around the net for people with good music willing to let you play it. It'd be a great outlet for local music.

A friend runs the campus radiostation, he might know more about licensing and such.

I love the idea of a hacker radiostation.

[Ryan Rix]

More ideas:

* On-air button in BeatSync
* Attach a contact mic/guitar pickup to the ultimaker, broadcast the audio
* Cc-licensed recorded chip and lab-created musics
* hot topics live

[michael.r...@gmail.com]

I will need help in various aspects - ill keep the group posted on what our needs are, and what I can't do myself. Glad to know you're interested!

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Smartphone

----- Reply message -----
From: "Chad Stearns" <chadst...@gmail.com>
To: <heatsy...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [HSL] Re: New LPFM applications being accepted in Oct. - any interest in community radio here?

[michael.r...@gmail.com]

I'd love to get your contact at the campus station to pick their brains.

Unsure if noncommercial use exempts us from 'public performance' performance at this point, Guessing no.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Smartphone


----- Reply message -----
From: "Moheeb Zara" <mohee...@gmail.com>
To: <heatsy...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [HSL] Re: New LPFM applications being accepted in Oct. - any interest in community radio here?

Date: Sun, Jun 23, 2013 8:20 PM

As long as we're not profiting we can play whatever right? :P

Anyway I'm interested and could give some time to this. I'd live to be involved. I'm sure you could fish around the net for people with good music willing to let you play it. It'd be a great outlet for local music.

A friend runs the campus radiostation, he might know more about licensing and such.

I love the idea of a hacker radiostation.

[michael.r...@gmail.com]

All good ideas

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Smartphone


----- Reply message -----
From: "Ryan Rix" <r...@n.rix.si>
To: <heatsy...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [HSL] Re: New LPFM applications being accepted in Oct. - any interest in community radio here?

Date: Sun, Jun 23, 2013 10:02 PM

On Sun 23 June 2013 20:20:06 Moheeb Zara wrote:

> As long as we're not profiting we can play whatever right? :P
>
> Anyway I'm interested and could give some time to this. I'd live to be
> involved. I'm sure you could fish around the net for people with good music
> willing to let you play it. It'd be a great outlet for local music.
>
> A friend runs the campus radiostation, he might know more about licensing
> and such.
>
> I love the idea of a hacker radiostation.

[Michael Garcia]

Links of interest from the Prometheus Project out of Philly, which was instrumental in getting these new licenses made available, and which will undoubtedly prove very useful:

LPFM basics:

http://www.prometheusradio.org/what-is-lpfm

Application checklist:

http://www.prometheusradio.org/checklist

Applicant support links:

http://www.prometheusradio.org/support

In particular I'd like to highlight the checklist (much more detail for each of these available at the link above). I am working through the various aspects of this list, but input is always appreciated:

Meet the FCC Requirements
	(1)	We have confirmed that there is an available channel at our location.
	(2)	We are an eligible nonprofit (or school, government agency, or Indian Tribe) and we can prove it.
	(3)	The members of our board either meet all eligibility requirements or fall into the listed exceptions and we can prove it.
	(4)	Our organization is based close enough to our transmitter site and can prove it.
	(5)	We have a description of our organization’s educational program and ­how our proposed station will be used to advance it.
	(6)	We have a detailed description of the nature of our proposed station programming and, if possible, program schedules.
Improve Your Chances
	(7)	We meet the 2-year established community presence point and can prove it. +1 point!
	(8)	We can pledge to produce at least 8 hours of locally originated programming every day. +1 point!
	(9)	We can pledge to maintain a publicly accessible studio in our community and staff the studio at least 20 hours a week. +1 point!
	(10)	We pledge to meet both of the above criteria (we will produce locally originated programming AND maintain a staffed studio). +1 point!
	(11)	Our organization has no other broadcast stations. +1 point!
	(12)	We are a Tribal Applicant and our station will be located on our Tribal lands. +1 point!
Find a Channel and Antenna Location
	(13)	We have identified an antenna location and we can prove that we have permission to use it.
	(14)	If there are multiple channels available at our site, we have identified which one we will apply for.
	(15)	Our proposed station complies with all technical rules and we have collected all necessary data about our antenna site.
	(16)	We agree to operate within the power and height restrictions that the FCC will calculate based on the data we provide.
	(17)	We have identified a possible studio location.

No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

[Jasper Nance]

20 hours a week? wowsa. What will happen to beatsync labs? will we air 15 hours of Chad drumming (+1!)

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[Ryan Mcdermott]

"Staffing the studio" could just mean that it's available to use.  We have 15 open hours per week already.  I think the requirement is just that there is a studio available for people to use, and that it is available for 20 hours.

That could just mean that we have a podcast studio (or a drum studio) upstairs, and that it is available.  I think we meet that requirement :)

[Michael Garcia]

I think Ryan's interpretation is close to how the regulation should be read, but IANAL. 

Also, I don't see this as a Heatsync project solely, but a collaboration between Heatsync and the community. I'd like to set up an organization affiliated with but not necessarily under Heatsync that would manage the station as far as programming, licensing, content, recordkeeping, etc.

I think that Heatsync can play a vital role here, but the LAST thing I want to do is make this process odious or burdensome for the Heatsync community.

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[Michael Garcia]

According to the FCC, the following frequencies are open (based on the location of HeatSync labs as the transmitter site), which alleviates one of my concerns that there just wouldn't be any available bandwidth. You can check this yourself here: http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/lpfm_channel_finder?dlat=33&mlat=24&slat=55&dlon=111&mlon=50&slon=6&detail=1&x2nd=1&xif=1

 Channel 225 ----  92.9 MHz
 Channel 229 ----  93.7 MHz
 Channel 256 ----  99.1 MHz
 Channel 258 ----  99.5 MHz
 Channel 293 ---- 106.5 MHz
 Channel 294 ---- 106.7 MHz
 Channel 298 ---- 107.5 MHz

No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

[Michael Garcia]

Does anyone happen to have any contacts with RF engineers? I'd like to get a quote on what it would cost to get a survey done re: this application.

[Larry Campbell]

I tried calling a guy I knew who would have such a contact...apparently his number was changed in the last 4 years... Ill keep trying to chase him down via an old email address however dont hold your breath for a response from me...

LC

[Michael Garcia]

I'm talking to a buddy who works installing RF towers/equipment for the big commercial stations, he should have some contacts, and if not, there's always Radio Phoenix and the Yellow Pages...

No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

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