"Fresh Toast"

[Mr Bojangles]

I listened to this "programme" on STAR last night - I think I'm still recovering from just how shockingly awful it was. Do the station programs go through any vetting process? As while I've enjoyed most of what I've heard on STAR this, this was... cack. If it's not used already, I'd suggest "Fresh Toast" as the perfect form of audio-torture for war crimes suspects. My ears feel as though they have been violated, and I'm not sure they'll ever recover. There must exist something better than the vomit-inducing, nauseating, cretinous thing that is, "Fresh Toast".

[Hennessy]

I won't repeat my views on the subject of STAR FM or the budget it takes up for relatively little return, but I wouldn't imagine quality checks were high on the list for a station that doesn't even have a proper radio transmitter. Get that sorted and maybe other improvements (like shows that target the interests of the listener instead of the vanity of the host) will follow.

[Fawksie]

I know the committee haven''t appreciated some of the things I've said about STAR on here in the past, so let me make it clear than anything hereinafter is my own opinion and not representative of the Broadcasting Subcommittee yadda yadda yadda

Have you got an idea of the cost of running a "proper radio transmitter", Hennessy?

Take for example a one-month FM Short-term Restricted Service Licence with a radiated power greater than 1 watt such as STAR has done in the past, we have the following costs:

• £400 non-refundable Ofcom application fee (no VAT)
• £70 per day Ofcom licence fees (no VAT)
• £345 per month transmitter/antenna rental fee, plus labour for an engineer to install the antenna (exc. VAT)
• £36.16 per day PRS music licence fee (exc. VAT)
• £61.68 per month MCPS music licence fee (exc. VAT)
• £35 per day PPL music licence fee (exc. VAT)

If you ignore VAT which I reckon the Association claims back, and you say that a month is 28 days, and you exclude the aerial guy, that comes to £4469.88 for one broadcast. We can do two of those a year.

If you're interested I'll work out costs for a Long-term RSL, which is what I believe Queen's Radio in Belfast are licensed under. If you think STAR eats money now, imagine what it would do with just 2 months of "proper radio" a year.

[What?]

Fawksie, would you try to get the new playout system working? To be honest you're the only one I have much faith in...

There is a lot of quality output on STAR and instead of complaining about it on an unofficial forum you could direct your complaint to radio@standrewsradio.com

[Hennessy]

I know the committee haven''t appreciated some of the things I've said about STAR on here in the past, so let me make it clear than anything hereinafter is my own opinion and not representative of the Broadcasting Subcommittee yadda yadda yadda

Have you got an idea of the cost of running a "proper radio transmitter", Hennessy?

Take for example a one-month FM Short-term Restricted Service Licence with a radiated power greater than 1 watt such as STAR has done in the past, we have the following costs:

• £400 non-refundable Ofcom application fee (no VAT)
• £70 per day Ofcom licence fees (no VAT)
• £345 per month transmitter/antenna rental fee, plus labour for an engineer to install the antenna (exc. VAT)
• £36.16 per day PRS music licence fee (exc. VAT)
• £61.68 per month MCPS music licence fee (exc. VAT)
• £35 per day PPL music licence fee (exc. VAT)

If you ignore VAT which I reckon the Association claims back, and you say that a month is 28 days, and you exclude the aerial guy, that comes to £4469.88 for one broadcast. We can do two of those a year.

If you're interested I'll work out costs for a Long-term RSL, which is what I believe Queen's Radio in Belfast are licensed under. If you think STAR eats money now, imagine what it would do with just 2 months of "proper radio" a year.

Well surely those figures prove what I've been saying that STAR FM is a waste of money. If you can't work it because it's not cost-effective scrap it, otherwise you're effectively pouring money into a hole when it could go on other projects!

I'll still retain my view that it exists purely as a vanity project, but even if it is some hugely expensive training program for students interested in radio to dabble with then it's still not worth it. Forming a partnership with a successful local commercial radio station to help students gain experience with broadcasting would be a far better idea, as an example off of the top of my head.

Thanks for those figures Fawksie, I wasn't aware just how much was being wasted.

[Fawksie]

Fawksie, would you try to get the new playout system working? To be honest you're the only one I have much faith in...

We're working on it! Kieran's doing most of the bug fixing since I'm fairly terrible at coding, and nearly all the 5-1 studio support. Things would be a hell of a lot worse without him.

Hennessy, can I make it clear that that kind of money is not being spent on STAR currently, because we haven't done RSL broadcasts in (over?) two years. The cost of pure internet streaming is very much lower, involving only music licences. A yearly fee of £107, £214 or £536 exc. VAT depending on how many listeners we have (I can't remember which bracket we're in) and 0.0578 pence per track per listener.

[Haunted]

Take for example a one-month FM Short-term Restricted Service Licence with a radiated power greater than 1 watt such as STAR has done in the past, we have the following costs

How much for less than 1 watt?

[Fawksie]

Take for example a one-month FM Short-term Restricted Service Licence with a radiated power greater than 1 watt such as STAR has done in the past, we have the following costs

How much for less than 1 watt?

The £70 per day Ofcom fees go down to £35. But I haven't found transmitters under 5 watt available to rent, and Ofcom won't bother issuing sub-watt S-RSLs unless you're in the middle of London or somewhere like that.

[Mr Bojangles]

What about AM? Are Ofcom licences cheaper for that? It does seem an extortionate (read unviable for STAR) amount for FM. Honestly, though, I'd support anything as long as it involved getting the cretinous troglodytes who present "Fresh Toast" off the air.

Has anyone else listened to this or am I the only person to have suffered?

[Hennessy]

Some quality checks needed at the moment. - Will Smith's "Miami" is apparently a tune I should go home if I don't want to hear. Well I think I'd rather listen to Kingdom FM actually.

[RandomMusings]

Some quality checks needed at the moment. - Will Smith's "Miami" is apparently a tune I should go home if I don't want to hear. Well I think I'd rather listen to Kingdom FM actually.

I quite like Kingdom FM actually - it's the only station that I can pick up on my shower radio.... it's easy listening with a high repetition rate!

[Hennessy]

Some quality checks needed at the moment. - Will Smith's "Miami" is apparently a tune I should go home if I don't want to hear. Well I think I'd rather listen to Kingdom FM actually.

I quite like Kingdom FM actually - it's the only station that I can pick up on my shower radio.... it's easy listening with a high repetition rate!

Exactly. Easy listening, not pretentious BS or pet tunes nobody has ever heard of. What's wrong with running STAR FM like a business? If it's going to cost so much it might as well return a profit.

[Fawksie]

What about AM? Are Ofcom licences cheaper for that?

"Long-term restricted service licences (LRSLs) are for broadcasting within a defined site or location only and not for the wider surrounding community. The broadcaster must operate within a clearly definable single site, i.e. where an unbroken boundary line can be drawn, within which all property is part of the host establishment, and there is no permanent resident population. Both commercial and non-commercial sites are eligible for LRSLs. Examples of establishments eligible to be served by a long-term restricted service might include hospitals, campuses, schools, marinas, army barracks or shopping centres."

Since the University is spread out across the town, this presents a problem. Broadcasting to the entire town is unacceptable since it's not a single site. A case could be made for broadcasting to the North Haugh, but any coverage of the rest of the town would be purely accidental and could not be advertised or mentioned specifically on air.

"For both AM and FM licences, there is likely to be some overspill of the signal into areas beyond the licensed site during daylight hours. However, it is a condition of the licence that this overspill area is not acknowledged, either on-air or in off-air promotion and publicity. No service should be directed at listeners living outside the licensed site."

Queen's Radio's studio is in the Students' Union opposite the University's famous Lanyon Building. QUB is scattered across Belfast in a similar fashion to St Andrews. If they nominated the Union as their single site, then they would likely have been forced to use an induction loop system and not low-power AM. The only thing I can think of is that they nominated the Lanyon Building, libraries, Physics department and so on across the street from the Union, in order to qualify for L-RSL.

L-RSLs last between 1 year and 5 years and are renewable at the end of the licence term subject to review and payment of an additional £200 renewal fee on top of the normal application and licence fees.

Licensing costs:

• £200 Ofcom application fee
• £375 per year Ofcom licence fees
• £345 per year PPL music licence fee if we have a library of fewer than 10,000 tracks, larger libraries incur larger charges which must be agreed with PPL (our library is currently ~6000 tracks)
• £400.46 per year PRS music licence fee if we do not sell advertising or receive sponsorship
• or £1066.40 per year if we do
• £174.12 per year MCPS music licence fee

Then there's the transmitter. A suitable site on the North Haugh would have to be given over. Planning permission would be required. Radica Broadcast Systems, who by all accounts are the go-to guys for LPAM, quote a list price of £10,000 for a transmitter/antenna setup including installation and commissioning, though they have said off-record that the price quoted to an individual student station would be "substantially cheaper". They don't do the "civils" work, i.e. laying cable duct, building the hard-standing for the mast, so that's an extra cost. ITS would have to provide a line from the studio to the transmitter. Servicing/checkup of the mast and transmitter is then required every two years or so at a few hundred pounds a go.

[Haunted]

Well bugger it then, just keep it online. The majority of the target listeners will all have access to it and it seems extortionate to put it on radio for the few benefits that offers.

[allday_dj]

Right... let's clear a few things up. The licencing restrictions are true. Also, Ofcom would *never* allow a long term FM licence in St. Andrews (their map says Leuchars could though). So LPAM would be the only long term option.

The content issues are out of my domain so to speak. I would very much love to mainstream STAR a bit more however, that is up for argument.

Finally STAR's playout setup is just plainly weird in the world of small radio stations. The "choice" of OS is strange and we are using a system thrown together by some students in Warwick and is plainly broken. We've reduced the amount the system is used but alternatives are being investigated.

[What?]

Right... let's clear a few things up. The licencing restrictions are true. Also, Ofcom would *never* allow a long term FM licence in St. Andrews (their map says Leuchars could though). So LPAM would be the only long term option.

The content issues are out of my domain so to speak. I would very much love to mainstream STAR a bit more however, that is up for argument.

Finally STAR's playout setup is just plainly weird in the world of small radio stations. The "choice" of OS is strange and we are using a system thrown together by some students in Warwick and is plainly broken. We've reduced the amount the system is used but alternatives are being investigated.

Great. I just hope nothing was paid for this bugged and crocked system Warwick gave us.

[Lid]

Regarding a transmitter that's less than a watt, it's easy enough to fool many transmitters into producing less than a watt.

If the transmitter has an accessory port that's used for communicating with an amplifier, it's usually quite easy to put a low-current positive voltage across this, and fool the transmitter into thinking it's over-driving the amp, and therefore back off the power a bit. I've had 300mW out of a transmitter whose supposed least power is 5W.

Regarding all the licensing of music - how does VHF compare to online broadcast?

[Fawksie]

Nothing was paid, it's open source software. It was assumed that since they've been using it for the past two or three years without fault, then we would be able to as well. However from the number of bugs we've found and fixed so far, it's a bloody miracle that Warwick got it to run for longer than half an hour. I'd dearly love to know how they're doing it.

Lid: I posted details of online licensing fees above, but I'm not aware of what the actual cost is in STAR's case. I daresay you could obtain such information from the Association if you're interested.

[allday_dj]

Regarding transmitters.... there's nothing stopping us doing it ourselves as long as the kit has the correct CE markings on it. However, we would still have to have the site "commissioned" at some point. There's also the studio -> transmitter link to think about as well (assuming we don't just plonk the antenna on top of the union). Microwave links would cost an extra radio licence whereas phone / data links tend to be the norm (we've got ethernet to almost everywhere in the university at high enough speed).

Music fees go much higher in price on a LPAM/FM broadcast. On the subject of LPAM/FM, we can have "satellite" sites IIRC but they have to be propely synchronised and will cost extra kit plus licencing.

[David Bean]

So what was this programme actually about?

Also, given the increasing popularity of digital radios and the apparent profusion of such stations, has anyone considered going down that route?

Anyway, it's probably only a couple of years until someone decides to take the leap of converting STAR into a full-blown streaming television station.