Next October future community broadcasters will be able to apply for more new low-power stations than ever before. On Tuesday the FCC released the text of its 6th report and order on the implementation of the Local Community Radio Act (LCRA) that was passed last Friday. As Matthew noted last Friday, the decision contains mostly […]
Last week the FCC released its report on the economic impact of low-power FM stations on commercial radio. The report was mandated by passage of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010 (LCRA), and its primary conclusion should surprise nobody with any knowledge of LPFM: “LPFM stations are unlikely to have more than a negligible […]
Yesterday 28 members of the House of Representatives, led by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski [PDF] urging the Commission to ensure there is space reserved in urban areas for new low-power FM station licenses. They observe that the nation’s largest urban markets “have lacked access to new noncommercial […]
As expected, at today’s open FCC meeting the Commission released a Third Further Notice of Proposed Rule Making which lays out a plan of action to both clear out the queue of pending translator station applications and to begin taking new applications for low-power FM community radio stations. An application window for new LPFM stations […]
Ever since the passage of the Local Community Radio Act, the big question has been how the FCC will deal with its backlog of applications for translator repeater stations. Translators are low-power stations that may only rebroadcast the signal of an existing full-power station, and can be fit in many of the spaces on the […]
The Local Community Radio Act has been law now for a little more than three weeks, and since then the hardy radio activists at the Prometheus Radio Project have been hard at work mapping the road ahead. We here at Radio Survivor have many questions about what’s next for low-power radio, and we’ve also fielded […]
Right now there are a pile of applications for translator stations in the queue for at the FCC. Translators are often called booster stations because their only purpose is to rebroadcast the signal of a full-power station. This backlog of applications is important because translator stations can be spaced closer on the dial to a […]
Talk about a nailbiter. After languishing for months in the Senate due to a series of anonymous (then outed) holds placed by republican senators, followed by gridlock over the tax bill, it was starting to look like the Local Community Radio Act was never going to make it to a vote. But thanks to the […]
Prometheus has posted photos and video from their hula hooping protest in front of NAB headquarters today in support of low-power FM. According to the group dozens of people showed up to ask NAB head and former senator Gordon Smith to stop blocking the Local Community Radio Act, SB 592. It turns out that so […]
The National Association of Broadcasters has never been a friend to low-power community radio. Back in 2000, when the FCC first created the service, the NAB did everything it could to try and keep it from becoming a reality. While the broadcast lobby failed to stop it outright, the NAB did succeed in getting Congress […]
