Show HN: I'm launching a LPFM radio station
I've been working on creating a Low Power FM radio station for the east San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. We are not yet on the broadcast band but our channel will be 95.9FM and our range can been seen on the homepage of our site.KPBJ is a freeform community radio station. Anyone in the area is encouraged to get a timeslot and become a host. We make no curatorial decisions. Its sort of like public access or a college station in that way.This month we launched our internet stream and on-boarded about 60 shows. They are mostly music but there are a few talk shows. We are restricting all shows to monthly time slots for now but this will change in the near future as everyone gets more familiar with the systems involved.All shows are pre-recorded until we can raise the money to get a studio.We have a site secured for our transmitter but we need to fundraise to cover the equipment and build out costs. We will be broadcasting with 100W ERP from a ridgeline in the Verdugos at about 1500ft elevation. The site will need to be off grid so we will need to install a solar system with battery backup. We are planning to sync the station to the transmit site with 802.11ah.I've built all of our web infrastructure using Haskell, NixOS, Terraform, and HTMX: https://github.com/solomon-b/kpbj.fmThis is a pretty substantial project involving a bunch of social and technical challenges and a shoe string budget. I'm feel pretty confident we will pull it off and make it a high impact local radio station.The station is managed by a 501c3 non-profit we created. We are actively seeking fundraising, especially to get our transmit site up and running. If you live in the area or want to contribute in any way then please reach out!
25 points by solomonb - 13 comments
If this is completely non-commercial and you have an amateur license you could probably use AREDN as a backhaul instead of HaLow. We've gotten wifi going from a panel in Elysian up to Wilson on AREDN.
100w from the Verdugos should be pretty substantial. I regularly make 70cm FM contacts on 446.500 from Elysian Park down to San Diego at 5w.
The technical side, while interesting, is relatively clear to me. The legal side, including cost, is something I have no idea about.
In our case we created the non-profit in anticipation of applying for this license. We got really lucky and no one else applied for the license and it was awarded to us.
At the moment we are only airing a few new shows per day and filling the rest of our airtime with content from archive.org and other free sources (chosen by all our hosts), but over time more of the schedule will fill with original content.
Also I am /much/ more interested in terrestrial radio but the reality is that the vast majority of listeners are online and not using a radio. : (