…is that Vic might be able to help us get the deposit. He said he’ll e-mail right after the 25th (Christmas Day). So hopefully, hopefully, he’ll be able to donate the deposit to us. We’ll either pay him back or let him consider it a donation. That’s his decision, though.
-Jake
Something we were doing in the old blog were “personal posts,” or posts from individuals in FCYB saying what they were up to and stuff. I’m thinking we’re going to continue doing that, it was interesting to see a blog post suddenly appear from someone other than me 🙂
Also, something I realized. I was tweaking the categories of this blog, cleaning them up and renaming them to fit better. As I was doing this I realized that there is so much going into this project. Finances, FM Radio (which in itself has a gazillion and one things), Legal stuff, meetings, public relations, and technology are our categories right now. And this is just the beginning. Pretty soon there might be a Programming category…or a Scheduling category…or something…I’m not really sure. It’s exciting to see though!
-Jake
How do you like it? We changed the theme of our web site to something a little “spiffier,” if I may say so myself. It took Don and I a few minutes to figure everything out with the new theme and making it behave as before, but hey, I think it’s worth it.
So we here at FCYB have been asking ourselves: is FM radio really worth it? Dodging bullets and trying to pull strings, is it all really worth it?
To start, the signal we’d be getting isn’t a great one. I’m not sure how well the signal works past Harmony, but I remember listening from a church that’s just a hair south of Harmony and I was hearing Martini on the Rockies, not KKNZ. Secondly, is this deal even legal? “Leasing time” on an LPFM station 24/7 sounds an awful lot like an LMA…and I’m sure it would seem the same way to the FCC as well. And last, but certainly not least, it’s expensive. On $3,500, we could run the station for a solid 8 months over the Internet (oh, that’s with studio space). Sure, we lose casual listeners, but we’d gain loyal listeners, and in the end, loyal listeners are the ones that support the station.
So it’s an interesting toss-up between the two. $3,500 is hopefully what we’re getting for our settlement money from Wren Communications. That pays for nearly a whole year of rent (11 months and 20 days) by itself. And it pays for all kinds of stuff….meh the possibilities are incredible with $3500 and Internet radio.
I suppose we’ll know in the next few days what happens.
Wow, a lot’s been happening. I need to keep this thing updated more 🙂
To start, our group on Facebook has exploded. We get about 20 more people added into it every day, and people are inviting their friends. Right now there are about 120 pending invitations.
We got a contract from Wray Fitch in Washington, DC for the release of our application for the Red Feather Lakes station. We then get our nice, big, fat check from Wren Communications, only to then turn around and give it all to Fireside on January 15.
Also, there’s a potential for arranging studio space in the basement of one of our member’s homes. More details on that soon.
Other than that, we’ll probably have one last face-to-face quick meeting before Xmas break starts (probably on that Friday), and it’ll be happy holidays till the new year!
We’ve recently started a forum for our own collabaration, and one board is called “Public Feedback,” where anyone can post without registering. If you’d like to post a comment to our staff for discussion, send it here:
https://fcyb.org/forum/posting.php?mode=newtopic&f=10
Input is appreciated!
We’ve come up with an idea to raise money. If we can get 300 parents to pay $10/month, our big expenses are covered. There are roughly 344 high school teachers in the district, which means that 87% of teachers would have to subscribe in order to pay for the station.
On the parent side of things, there are supposedly 25,000 students in the Poudre School District. Assuming an average family has 3 kids that means there are 8,333.333 families that the PSD serves. To make numbers smaller to assume the worst, that means there are 8,000 families in the PSD. If only 300 families need to have active membership for our expenses to be paid, that means only 0.375% of families would absolutely have to join, well below the average 3% of people who actually donate/subscribe to such a solicitation.
There are roughly 6,000 high school students in the PSD. Assuming there are 2 teens in high school from each family at any given time (which isn’t necessarily true, but it gives a worst-case scenario), there are 3,000 families in Fort Collins with a student attending high school. That means 10% of high school families would have to “join in” to this plan, which is well above the average 3%.
Assuming the 3% figure is accurate, 10 teachers will pay $10/month to the station. That leaves 290 subscriptions to go. 290 divided by 0.03 is 9,666.666, which means we’ll likely have to market to 10,000 families in order to achieve our desired donation amount. Ten thousand families 120% of the number of families in the district.
So basically, our financial situation sucks.
Monday morning at 7:45 AM in the PHS Counseling conference room, there are probably going to be quite a few more people than normal, and most of them will be newcomers to what’s going on. For this reason, we won’t have a set agenda, but here are just a few of the topics we’re going to go over:
Minutes and any activities will get posted Monday afternoon.
It has been determined that our non-commercial/educational full service application was rendered mutually exclusive by another application from WREN Communications, Inc. I don’t think it’ll matter, though, because I’m pretty sure we’re going to move to the really tall Clear Channel tower a little further north on 287.
We’ve also determined that we don’t need to obtain a letter from KRMA, since our 63 dBu interference f(50,10) contour won’t enter the 47 dBu f(50,50) contour of KRMA. It was either 63 or 60.5…something like that I can’t remember the exact number off the top of my head.
We also got our classified ad put in today. Woohoo $72 for a legal notification. Not exactly fun stuff.
Before we were even broadcasting, Office Evolution donated 10 hours per month of conference room time. Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to meet over the summer to get the station on the air. Many thanks to Office Evolution for this in-kind donation.
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