NCE Station Startup Resources

Suppose you've spent years preparing, applying for and finally winning your construction permit from the FCC.  Now you have three years to get on the air and you're not sure what to do.  We first recommend taking advantage of the many resources in the Station Support section of this site.  Starting a community radio station involves many of the same components regardless of your wattage. You will need to figure out your station's mission, how to structure the station governance, how to  fundraise, produce programs, broadcast, set up a studio and so on.  The National Federation of Community Broadcaster hosts a Community Radio Conference every year, which in 2009 featured an intensive on Building a Community Station from the Ground Up.  We helped host this intensive and recommend going to the NFCB site to download some of the resources from the intensive.  The topics covered included everything from equipment, to governance and operations, to legal issues.  The NFCB also has an extensive archive of webinars on their site, find them here. 

In June of 2010, the Radio For People Coalition (which Prometheus is a part of) hosted another intensive exclusively for new NCE stations, to address the issues and challenges for full power stations, at the NFCB conference in Minneapolis.  If you feel like you have more questions about where to get started and you have a construction permit, contact someone from the Station Support team as soon as possible at stations(at)prometheusradio.org.