I want to start a radio station for my community! Tell the FCC that you them to make room on the airwaves for your community radio station!

The FCC promised to give out radio licenses all over America in 2000 to low power community radio groups. This made the big broadcasters so mad that they got a law passed against giving out any LPFM licenses in big cities. We are working hard to get that law repealed, and then the FCC will be able to give out those urban channels. Only problem is, in the mean time, the FCC allowed some incumbents to apply for all the channels that were supposed to go to the new low power stations! These incumbents wanted to be able to repeat their signal with a "translator" station to make it go further, on a small transmitter that is identical to the ones that low power stations use. In 2003, the FCC received thousands of applications for translators, most of them far, far away from the stations that applied for them.

But the FCC can still fix this. First, they froze the translator applications, and now they have dismissed a bunch of them that were submitted by obvious speculators. Now, they need to establish a fair balance between the right of your community group to have one single channel for a local community radio station versus the right of existing stations to repeat themselves on 2nd, 3rd, 97th and 821st channels across the country. We think it should run like the school lunch line-- every one gets at least a reasonable opportunity for a first portion, before anyone gets seconds.