Introduction

Geography

The first and foremost layer of a radio community is the geographic spread of its listeners. Before the digital era, this was dependent on a station’s terrestrial signal and its location. Figure 0.1 is a simplified explanation of how a signal travels from WFHB’s air room to listeners via the Bloomington radio tower on the roof of the downtown studios.

Figure 0.1: A diagram of signal transmission at WFHB’s downtown facilities. Single arrows indicate direct transmission, while double arrows indicate indirect transmission (a receiver must intentionally pick up the signal). Public domain icons designed by Pixabay users mcmurryjulie and Mk_al.

A station with more watts of transmission power broadcasting a signal in clearer terrain can broadcast to a much wider range over radio frequencies than one with a low-power transmitter. Figure 0.2 shows the coverage range, on a clear day, of each of WFHB’s four radio towers (discussed in greater geographic detail in chapters one and two), with each concentric boundary around the central tower representing the gradual weakening of the signal with greater distance from the transmitter. The odd shapes and ragged contours are partly shaped by terrain; a perfectly round circle would only be present in case of an extremely tall tower able to bypass all hills. Also contributing to these shapes are deliberate adjustments made to the antennae to keep them from interfering with nearby signals on similar frequencies.

Figure 0.2: Coverage maps of WFHB's signals. Clockwise from top left: WFHB-FM at Radio Ridge, W264BP-FM in Nashville, W292DD-FM in Ellettsville, and W251AG-FM in downtown Bloomington. Note that the scale for WFHB-FM is different from that of the other three maps because of its significantly wider broadcast range. Images used with permission from Radio-Locator.com.

Typically, a station’s amount of power is correlated with the funds available to it; for-profit outfits tend to have more power than non-commercial ones, especially fully independent community stations. For licensed stations in the United States, these parameters must be determined when filing a radio operating license with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulatory government body that issues such licenses and thus is responsible for preventing signal interference between officially registered stations.

Widespread internet access has shifted, but not eliminated, these dynamics. Now, many stations have live webstreams that are accessible outside of the terrestrial broadcast area, making them potentially available to listeners around the world. Figure 0.3 shows the basic route of a signal from WFHB’s air room to internet listeners.

Figure 0.3: A diagram of signal transmission at WFHB’s downtown facilities to the station’s webstream. Single arrows indicate direct transmission, while double arrows indicate indirect transmission (a receiver must intentionally pick up the signal). Public domain icons designed by Pixabay users mcmurryjulie and Mk_al.

Internet-only stations, meanwhile, call into question the foundational affordances of radio, but, as Andrew Bottomley argues, employ radio logics as examples of a “nonmusic sound medium that is purposefully crafted to be heard by an audience” involving various levels of participation and audience cocreation (2020, 3). As the idea of radio exceeds the technicalities of radio waves, then, so do its spatial dimensions exceed the once-assumed boundaries of the listening area.

Of course, the possibility of stumbling upon a certain radio station online is much lower than the possibility of discovering the same station when tuning in while in close physical proximity to the terrestrial broadcast origin point. Low-budget, low-power stations typically do not have many resources to expend on extensive outreach beyond their target listening communities, especially when the stations are terrestrial and prioritize geographically local interests. Because of this, even a potentially dispersed non-commercial radio community typically centers around people with some connection to a station’s physical spatial setting. Broadcasts from a community radio station should thus primarily appeal to/serve the needs of listeners invested in whatever they define as their locality.