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Comment by solomonb | Hacker News Reader

To be clear this is an FCC licensed LPFM station.

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. : (

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Even with a smaller pool of listeners compared to 10 years ago, there are still a lot of people listening to FM.

Within your coverage area, you’re one of maybe 60 stations. That’s far better than being one out of 150,000 discoverable internet radio stations.

When you get on the air, be sure to set up RadioDNS and DTS Autostage, with service following, and Amazon Radio Skills Kit. They are great tools for converting on-air listeners into “captured” online listeners.

Thank you! I'm going to take a note about doing this.

Have you got more than a few cars within range ;)

Any of which have an FM radio?

You may be able to serve alot more of them than you are having on the internet from around the world.

If you have little or no talk or commercials during rush hours there could very well be no other choice for commuters that is anything like that.

Cool! I recommend setting up RadioDNS first. DTS Autostage will pull your initial info from there, so all their data will be from what you put in the .si file.

I'm probably looking at this a little naive, no doubt. It's just that (in my fantasy) a pure good ole radio could be a great medium for enthusiasts and odd balls (#cyberpunk). But as soon as there is an internet stream then the actual radio is going to be a gimmick. The whole experience changes if you actually _have_ to use a radio to listen. Of course, your audience is limited by design ... so, realistically there just might not be a sustainable audience in your FM radius. Anyway, cool project!

I agree that there is a strong allure to being strictly terrestrial. I actually started such a station 15 years ago under the Part 15 rules for unregulated broadcast band transmission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCHUNG_Radio

Almost immediately (like within the first week or so) everyone involved demanded an internet stream and now that station has two internet streams lol.

I've been thinking about setting up another part 15 station at my house as a personal project but for something like KPBJ the goal is to be a community resource. Terrestrial broadcast is super important to me and helps cement the station's place in our local community but we also want to be accessible to those who are not in this immediate area or who don't know how to use a radio (yes in 2026 that is an issue!).

This whole thread makes me think of Pump Up the Volume. As a teen, we used to get together in one location and everyone would tune in to the same station and leave doors open or windows down so music was everywhere just like scenes in the movie. Doing that with streams makes this impossible. Even with the popularity of streaming, if there was a station with a show that catered to the teen hang out like this I can see it regaining popularity.

The biggest problem is failover configuration and the needs of programmatic advertising insertions. So most providers will have you carry at least a 60 second buffer to start, but possibly closer to 120 seconds in most observed cases. Then as you listen an ads are inserted, or removed, the amount of delay between your audio and the live edge changes.

We could solve this, however, the royalty rates on music and other content are so high, that it would be insane to pay for that as well as the bandwidth and not get programmatic revenue back from it.

How many listeners actually have a radio these days? How many people under 30 listen to radio? Under 20?

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