When I heard a report on the Pacifica Network radio program Democracy Now! this afternoon (9/30/03) about the FCC raiding and shutting down a pirate radio station, Radio Free Santa Cruz, in Santa Cruz, California, I started a GD threat – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=278513. This station (with a left-of-center political bias) has been operating without a license for ten years. Mr. Moto raised the obvious question – why didn’t they just get a license? I don’t know and the online stories covering this don’t say. How hard is it, really, for a pirate radio station to get licensed? I found a page on the FCC website on “Obtaining a Commercial Radio Operator License” – http://wireless.fcc.gov/commoperators/htocrol.html – but it’s about licensing application procedures for individuals in the industry, not for stations; I can’t seem to find a page that explains how you get a license for a station, and what it costs, and what requirements you have to meet. Does anybody know?
The problem is that the FCC allocates licenses for a certain number of stations in a given metropolitan area based on population, available bandwith and other factors. When all of these licenses are taken up, the only way to (legally) start a new station is to buy an existing license from someone else.
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- I would add that the justification that pirate radio stations usually give for operating on someone else’s bandwidth at all is that in many areas, particularly in city areas–the legal broadcasting stations that are licensed on those frequencies are so distant or placed such that their reception is poor to the degree that it’s likely nobody in that immediate area would listen anyway.
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- I would add that the justification that pirate radio stations usually give for operating on someone else’s bandwidth at all is that in many areas, particularly in city areas–the legal broadcasting stations that are licensed on those frequencies are so distant or placed such that their reception is poor to the degree that it’s likely nobody in that immediate area would listen anyway.
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Here’s the FCC guide on how to apply for a radio broadcast license.
Although it doesn’t sound like the case for the station in the OP, my guess is that licensed stations are publicly known and more less have to pay royalties on usic they pay. I don’t imagine too many pirate radio stations are paying such royalties.
Local FM stations don’t want freeloaders on the air.
All broadcast stations must be licensed by the FCC.
FM being what it is results in a strong (nearby) pirate signal on a given frequency hijacks the receiver and excludes the weak legal signal.
Do you have a cite for that?
Based on my knowledge of Santa Cruz and its populace (I went to UC Santa Cruz), my first instinct is to think that this particular pirate station didn’t want a license because then you’re putting yourself under The Man’s thumb. You gotta be free, dude.
Broadcasting licences (at least here in the UK) are bloody expensive; the BBC is funded through the TV licensing scheme, commercial radio is funded through advertising and sponsorship, pirate radio stations just don’t have the money to do it (they’d have to set themselves up as new commercial stations, which is no mean feat in an already crammed marketplace).
And if they have no bread, let them eat cake!
Depending on the market, broadcast licenses can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In the 1980’s, this is what was happening in Austin and other metro areas around the country. A great many small town radio stations were bought up by big-town corporations. The transmitters were then moved closer to the big town and the wattage was ramped up. Now, the local 50MW station became the metro 100MW station. Lots of towns around Austin lost their local stations that way. Now, many of the station ID’s say things like “This is KRAP-FM, Hooterville-Austin”.
It’s all part of the homogonizing (sp?) of America.
I was on the steering committee of a community pirate station like the Santa Cruz one 1996-1998 in Philadelphia. We were hoping to get busted as a legal test case, but after 2 years that didn’t happen properly for reasons not worth bothering with here.
Most radio licenses are extremely expensive, and go up as the wattages get higher. There was a movement in the FCC, packed with revolving door industry personnel in the 80s-90s, to move from low (or lower) wattage community-based stations to dividing the dial among that cost millions to operate. This put radio out of reach of most community group ownership. In the laste 90s there was a small but nationwide movement of pirates who were lobbying for microbroadcast community licensing; to some extent we won this victory over the industry and lower wattage licences are somewhat more easily obtained and slightly cheaper. More work needs to happen in this direction.
How did we win? Well, the legal philosophy is that we were hardly “freeloaders” in the sense that according to all of the major telecommunications acts running back to the 1920s, the US airwaves are the common property of the American people, like national parks. Our argument was that the bar for access to some of the braodcast spectrum was being priced out of the league of community groups who wished to use radio for non-commercial purpose, and this was unfair. Essentially we were trying to establish squatters’ rights on community property because we thought the FCC wasn’t following its mandate to allow citizens the same right to use as large corporate entities like Clear Channel( :mad: ).
There are rules by the by that higher wattage stations have to be manned and operating 24/7, which also puts costs out of reach for community groups.
You may be surprised to learn that NPR was at the forefront of the industry (Nat’l Assoc. of Broadcasters…booooooo!!!) attempt to squash microbroadcast community licensing. They appear(ed?) to be very threatened by us; god forbid the public have access to public radio. :rolleyes: :smack:
I don’t know what’s up with Santa Cruz these days; they had a rep as one of the more reliable, active and venerable pirate operators out there. I assume there’s a good reason they didn’t have a license but instead of posting a WAG I suggest doing a web search on SC and “mircobroadcasting” or “pirate” news. Maybe the Radio Volta (the legal stepchild of our station, RIP… Radio Mutiny) website has some info?
- Crandolph, the former “Mr. Peabody” of Radio Mutiny back when we used noms de guerre !
This is the way FM stations have always been assigned in the U.S. First a channel has to be allocated to a specific community. Initially multiple parties can compete for a licence to use that channel, but afterwards you have to buy the licence of an existing station. The following is a link to a list of the U.S. FM Allocations – note this is by channel number, where the FM channels 201-300 correspond to the frequencies of 88.1 - 107.9. [Example: Channel 250 equals the frequency of 97.9 mhz] The additional A. B. C etc. class information refers to the maximum power that can be used by that allocation.
So . . . about how much would it cost Radio Free Santa Cruz to get licensed? And, what other hoops would they have to jump through? E.g., would they have to buy space on the dial from some licensed station that’s willing to sell, as Fat Bald Guy and whitetho said? Or could, if they’re using a bandwidth nobody else in that metro area is using, why couldn’t they just get a new license to use it?
Also – does anybody know whether this is a case of selective enforcement? That is, are there any right-wing pirate radio stations which have been left alone while Radio Free Santa Cruz has been busted? For that matter, are there any right-wing pirate radio stations?
Economically, the only way that something like Radio Free Santa Cruz could ever get on the air is as a low power FM station:
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/lpfm/index.html
However, I don’t think Radio Free Santa Cruz would qualify, because these are only available to “available to noncommercial educational entities and public safety and transportation organizations”. Thus Radio Free Santa Cruz would need to get a standard license. My belief is in any case, these are always not cheap. And, in all but remote, sparsely populated areas all available frequencies are taken. I don’t think Santa Cruz fits that bill. Thus, getting on the air would mean buying an existing license. Think rather big $ for that. The broadcast FM band was not designed for the little, indi stations like Radio Free Santa Cruz. 
Crandolph, did the pirate radio station you worked for pay royalties for the music they played?
Absolutely valid question and important to the issue, but as far as I can remember I never heard anything I had ever heard before played on Radio Free Santa Cruz, which of course doesn’t mean that much, but I do know they played a lot of locally recorded/live/no royalty needed for various reasons music.
We did not, but then we were all volunteers who paid for all of the equipment out of our own pockets. There was no advertising, but we read free community PSAs. We didn’t make money with our programming, we lost it. Not sure if this meant we were within the law on this but we all felt it was moral.
If anything we gave artists free exposure; almost nothing on major labels, and when it was it was usually stuff that’d been out of print for decades. You didn’t get a show on our station by playing stuff you could already hear on the dial. By the by, half or more of the station wasn’t music at all. We had public affairs, community news, live old timey radio plays, poetry (local folks), a gardening show, a technology show, a kids’ show, an evening bedtime story ( 
!!!) etc etc.
I don’t know. It seems this station was operating on the legal principle, “it was just sitting there.”
There’s a big difference between “common property” and “come and take it”. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get a letter asking if you could use my share of the bandwidth for your broadcasts.
You were definitely not within the law.
And the people whose work you were stealing apparently were the people who could least afford it.
According to the FCC, this pirate station might not be eligible for a low-power license.
Basically, I’m reading this to mean that those stations who flout the law would be ineligible for licensure on the basis that they can’t prove ignorance.
If the FCC truly cared about the politics of radio broadcasters, NPR, Pacifica, most college stations, and Air America affiliate stations would be off the air in a heartbeat. But those stations are licensed, and Radio Free Santa Cruz and the others in your GD thread were not.
FCC licenses are like driver’s licenses in that they are intended to control certain things. The state wants to make sure that the only people on the road are people who have proven their driving skills. Likewise, the FCC licenses stations to ensure the stations’ compliance with applicable law, which is a great deal more involved than just frequency allocation. A properly licensed station will protect that license at all costs.
So, after all that, it looks like your question is moot.
Robin