Congress green lights expansion of LPFM

LPFM stands for Low Power FM.   A low power FM station is allowed to use 10 to 100 watts of power – at most they can be heard 5 miles from the transmitter.  LPFM is intended for stationary listening, not in your car – A local station that covers a college campus, the parking lot of a mega-church, or a small community that can’t support a full power FM station.

The expansion of LPFM has been fought since its inception by the NAB – you could make the case the NAB has been fighting against the principle of non-commerical local radio since the 1930s.   Democrats in Congress and several of the members of the FCC commission have made this a big priority item.  It passed Saturday during the lame duck Congress and will be signed by the President

As of today, there are 858 of these things already licensed – mostly in rural areas far from interference to big city FM stations.  The new rules will allow them everywhere, although existing FM stations still have preference.  

About half of the existing LPFMs are religious – Seventh day Adventists and Catholic lay groups are big participants.   One of the rules of LPFM is you have to actually originate local programming – you can’t just be a repeater 24 hours a day for a satellite feed.   About 1/4 are “Community Groups” – think ACORN or LaRaza.  This is the group that the Democrats want to empower – stations more likely to play anti-American Pacifica programing and support Democratic political initiatives.    The remaining 1/4 are a mixture of ex-radio people who wanted a station of their own, local artsy-fartsy groups, small towns sponsoring a government run station, schools who didn’t want the responsibility of a real FM station, and assorted people who are happy running a radio station with 3 listeners.

Many of these LPFM stations stream onto the internet, which really increases their potential audience with the credibity of a government issued license that establishes who is responsible for the station.    Poke around in the List of LPFM stations and give a listen to a few of them to see what LPFM sounds like (LPFM stations are not required to be on 24 hrs/day, so some of them will be down).   Be sure to select several different format types (religious, community, government, etc…)

Given the way the current administration does things, I expect preference to go to so-call “disadvantaged” groups – racial minorities, women, labor unions, gay activists – who probably already have the paperwork filled out ready to go.   It would be nice if the TEA party folks realized the opportunity here and join the land rush for LPFM.   LPFM stations are not constrained to only the Non-Commercial 88-92 Mhz band, which is part of why the NAB resents their presence in “their” territory.

Real world interest in LPFM under the existing rules is very small.  Of the 4,261,754  listen requests this year, only 704 have been for LPFM stations, or just  a little over 1/100th of 1% of listening.