Starting a commercial FM radio station from scratch, is it possible?

Are you talking terrestrial radio or Internet streaming? Streaming is a lot easier, but you need massive bandwidth to service a small audience.

Terrestrial gets to a lot more listener base, but is complicated by the licensing laws of your country. Basically, you have to apply for a licence, and put up justification (how many sponsors you could attract to fund the operation, how many listeners you expect, music/program format etc). It is a massive undertaking just filling out the paperwork. If you get through all of that, you then need to present plans for the studios, transmitter site, expected radiation patterns etc. It may well be that the FM spectrum in your area is already over-crowded (meaning there are no  more adjacent frequencies that can be allocated). It is, in short, very time consuming, possibly expensive in paying professionals to carry out the relevant surveys, plus, you can't just get away with broadcasting from your bedroom on Realistic equipment. It all has to be "broadcast spec", from the play back equipment to the mixing desks, the entire broadcast chain and the final aerial array. This is why all stations hold on to their licences so tenaciously. Once the authorities revoke a licence, it is rarely ever re-issued.

'Not sure about the rest of the world — However at least in terms of licensing (yet alone the costs of building out!) in the United States, getting ANY new FM signal on the air is a major headache these days. The Low Power FM filing window ended months ago, and the FCC's last one was like…. A decade ago.

A large number of religious broadcasters occupy the entire lower portion of the FM band, but what's irritating is that one small broadcaster might buy up multiple stations in an area, and then broadcast the SAME THING! It's like… Guys, that's cool. Do your thing, but you could at least let someone else do their thing too?!!! 🙂

I have seen this happen… Including a Community College that sold their 100+ Watt signal in Southeastern Pa. to a religious broadcaster…. Who already had a good signal in the same area…..

Meanwhile, the local community NPR station — Which is more or less stepped on in terms of listenership by Penn's [My bad, a tad below 3KW] blowtorch coming out of Philadelphia — Can't even increase their power, so they have bad multipath right next to their studio. Or, in their coverage area. (As a side note, they also feed their web stream off of the FM output of an Optimod 8500, and then run it at 128kbps mp3 stereo with a bad encoder. :).

Maybe the FCC will open up some new frequencies, if that's even possible. I mean it's not like most car radio can go below 87.7FM anyway, right? — I thought I saw something about it. But if you get a frequency that nobody can access….. It becomes only marginally better than that joke that is iBOC / HD Radio.

I have also seen a University lose a Class-A FM License to a religious broadcaster because the FCC looks at the number of people served. The other guy had a better antenna placement idea than the University. It was a number's game.

Ironically, this was the same broadcaster that did the whole Community College thing I mentioned earlier….. And the Community College did not want to sell their license to the University, but was almost taken over by a local PBS Affiliate who had a conflict of interest with multiple parties…. Yeah.

It's a brutal game, but fun to sit back and watch! 🙂

*Laughs.*