Three Steps To Starting Your School’s Radio Station
School radio creates one of the most interesting communities a student can find around campus. From the cool parties, music appreciation, and development of soft-skills, to the excitement and thrills that come with live air production, the radio is a very important outlet for students.
School radio will help people overcome their shyness, become better speakers and presenters, help with time management, and even launch people’s careers. This is why it is important for your college or high school to start a radio station. This article is how to do just that. Stream Semester sat down with KCPR’s Broadcast Engineer Specialist, Thomas Morales, and learned what a school needs to start a radio station.
KCPR is a student-run radio station at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo. It has been on air since 1968 and has produced minds such as musician Weird Al Yankovic, comedian Eric Schwartz, and news reporter David Kerley. Thomas Morales is charged with the maintenance and operation of Cal Poly's legendary non-commercial, educational radio station KCPR-FM.
In order for your school to start a radio station, you need to determine if you want to be a traditional terrestrial FM station, belong to a sub-channel or another station, or be a web-based radio station.
Terrestrial FM Station: The road to set up an FM station is a long one. Most of the FM frequencies are already snapped up, but that isn’t to say that there aren’t blank frequencies available for non-commercial educational radio stations. It requires FCC intervention, which means you have to go through the Federal Communications Commission to broadcast to that frequency. This can also be expensive and complicated.
Sub-channels: Sub-channels are a quick, easy, and creative way to get your station up and running. If you find a benevolent and generous FM station or commercial broadcaster that has a sub-channel, then you can use that. All the heavy lifting is done for you and all you are doing is providing an audio stream. Your school radio station would be one of these ancillary channels under the main station.
Web Based: This is the most likely scenario if there is no current infrastructure for your school, and it is relatively affordable. We are going to focus on web based radio stations for the rest of the article. Now let's start a radio station the affordable way, so you can create the community your school deserves!
Step One: Define Roles and What Kind of Station You Want To Be
A radio needs to have a few key roles, but ultimately it's up to you to decide what they will be. First off, it helps to have a passionate audio engineer to help out whenever trouble happens. Next, you need a general manager to make decisions, curate the culture, and direction of the station. Finally, you need some DJs or talent to be on air. There are other roles as well, but these are the main ones.
Having a plan of attack of what your station is going to sound like is imperative. You don’t want to swing your station in different directions, or you will have a problem of gaining an audience. Some questions to ask yourself are: Is it a music station, talk station, community voice station? Who are you? What do you want your station to reflect? Deciding these early helps create a solid fan base, culture, and community for the station.
Step Two: The Right Gear
The right gear for the station doesn’t have to be expensive or overly technical. Thomas says: “If you want to get going, there are some really awesome freeware options. There is a site called www.radiodj.ro. This will be the heart of the station and it is rather respectable for being free. It will do a full audio library of anything you feed it, you can set up events like top of the hour station ID or other rotations. Automate RSS feeds so it automatically plays on a schedule. You can do a lot with it. It will want to set up an SQL database but the nice thing is that there is a lot of support on the site. The community is great. Once you have it up and running, it works very nicely. It runs on a Windows machine.”
Now, let’s start adding in more gear. You will need a properly sized mixer. To “size a mixer” means you determine how many sources you need: CD player, turn-table, mic inputs, etc. A mixer has multiple inputs for multiple sources. This allows you to switch between mics, music, phone calls, etc. There are many mixers out there and even some other more specific options. The Behringer series is a decently priced option for starters.
Another option you can use is the RodeCaster Pro. It is an all in one product, it has 4 mic inputs and bluetooth sync so you can take phone calls. It also has recording capabilities, 4 outputs for headphones and buttons for you to map sound effects and jingles that you feed into the buffer memory. You might need to get creative with this unit, because there are only the 4 inputs, but it’s a great option for talk shows.
Next, you need microphones. Shure SM-58s give you a nice clean full sound, and they don’t blow your budget. You will need some mic stands or desk stands and some XLRs. If you can fit it in the budget, the Shure SM7B and a preamp will work as well.
Step Three: Getting the Radio Show Out There
Now that you have your base studio, you need to get your show out into the world. In order to publish your show, you need to encode it. There are a couple of free software encoders that encode audio. You can use Virtual Audio Cable, which is free. This allows you to feed the computer output back into an input. This becomes another audio source on your computer that you then pop into an encoder. This is great if you want to do it all in one box.
Then, you need to have a publishing point. This is where you might need some IT folks to get involved. You can either set up your own distribution like ICECAST that takes the audio stream that you encoded and it will distribute it. Then, you also need an audio player on your school site.
Road Blocks:
Before you start your school radio station, it’s important to be aware of some road blocks you will likely run into.
First, it is important to have some web knowledge to make your radio show work. For example, you need open ports on a network. This is where the school network IT folks can help. If they are protective of the network, it might be a tough sell for them for them to open up ports on their network. They will be concerned about how much bandwidth the streams will take. No one wants their network to be compromised.
A workaround is to use www.cir.st, which does all the heavy lifting for you. This opens up the gateway for you to be featured on apps such as Alexa, Google Home, and IHeartRadio. The whole point of a school radio station is to provide exposure, so something like this allows your voice to be heard everywhere and gives your listeners options.
Next, how do the artists that you feature get paid? You need to pay license fees. You can’t just play anything you want. If you are doing online radio only, www.soundexchance.com is the place to go to. If you are doing a terrestrial radio, you need to get ASCAP, BMI, cSAC to make sure those fees are paid.
Another thing you need to know about is The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Essentially, it criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It does have provisions in there for fair play and fair use, but you do have to make sure you play by the rules or you will have a lawyer knocking at your door asking for some money. Always make sure you are playing legally obtained music that are legit copies of the music.
You also need to find someone who is very passionate about the station you set up. Find someone who is going to see through all these challenges and roadblocks and will overcome them. See the vision and see it through.
Community Engagement
To get a station started at your school, you need to sell it as a community resource. There is a little bit of a song and dance and buy in to make it happen. Some colleges around the country took to the air to speak to their student body to get a lot of valuable information out in one go. During this most recent COVID-19 pandemic this proved very valuable in getting people the right information quickly.
Radio can help kick start students’ careers, build confidence, instill a love of media, a love of music, and it can create lifelong friendships. Plus, it isn't that hard to get a school radio station started! Essentially, if you can create a home theater, you can get a radio station up and running at your school!