From a Porch in Montana, Low-Power Radio’s Voice Rises

Text of H.R. 1147: Local Community Radio Act of 2009

The floor of the broadcast booth at KXZI radio, which is, truth be told, really just Scott Johnston’s front porch, slopes gently down toward the yard, as 90-year-old farmhouse porches tend to do.

Mr. Johnston, once a folksinger, says that small stations like his, if royalty payments for Web-streaming remain affordable, could have equal footing to compete with the biggest stations in the world.

Mr. Johnston’s antenna, out by the big cottonwood trees that line the road, is not as fortified as it might be either. Unsupported by wires, it sways in the wind, so that when a storm front strikes northwest Montana, the station’s signal fluctuates. And even in the best of times, 100 watts go only so far — the music cannot be heard even in nearby homes because the signal does not penetrate walls very well.

Mainstream media it is not.

“I think some of my neighbors don’t even know I exist,” said Mr. Johnston, a bearded 58-year-old who looks more like the folk musician he once was than anybody’s idea of a media mogul.

But low-power noncommercial radio stations like Mr. Johnston’s, which emerged about 10 years ago in a brief window of eased federal regulation intended to foster competition with the big corporate radio chains, might be soon about to roar, some communications experts say — or at least squeak loudly enough to be heard.

A bill now before Congress, and considered by some low-power radio advocates to have a good chance of passage this year, would potentially double the number of licensed, low-power stations from about 800 now to perhaps 1,600 or more.

At the same time, technology is shifting the boundaries and definitions of what it means to be local, and even what it means to be radio. Internet streaming and digital wireless reception are combining in ways that could allow almost any station, even one broadcast from a front porch, to be heard anywhere in the world from the next generation of hand-held devices and smartphones.

Source/Full Story @: NYTimes.com
Technorati Tags: H.R. 1147

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