Current Station News

News Department

After reviewing surveys recently circulated throughout Rockland and Camden and online, we learned that is what is most important to local residents is local news. You can now hear our community calendar every morning and we are working up a plan to present a comprehensive news show in the near future.

Equipment Upgrade

We have been operating with more or less the same equipment since we began broadcasting in 2002. After years of constant use, the wear and tear is considerable, and it has begun to effect production quality. We are seeking to upgrade and replace a few key items to keep up with the growth we are experiencing creatively.

Volunteer Opportunities

Our traditional open door policy is in full swing. There is an abundance of creativity, talent, technical expertise and enthusiasm in the Midcoast Area, and the WRFR beehive is a great environment for collaboration. We welcome all community members with an interest in local radio to take advantage of our free training and join the WRFR team.

Membership Opportunities

For the first time in our history, we are making it possible for members of our listening community to become members of our development community. That means you get to have a personal stake in the sustainability of local radio in your area.

Fundraising

We are working with a grant writer and looking for considerable sums that we hope will help us realize our potential and sustain our growth.

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Events

The fun we had all at our Halloween dance party and at our recent anniversary party has sparked an interest in hosting more events throughout the year. We are planning to have more of a presence and at local farmers markets, festivals and events, and to provide remote broadcasts wherever possible. And we are brainstorming for the next community dance idea.

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Low Power Radio News

Don't forget to check out what is happening around the country with other low-power stations! Visit our Links page to browse their websites.

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Local Radio

By Joe Steinberger

Jam Session

Rockland’s local radio station, WRFR-LP at 93.3 FM, is seven years old this month. The LP stands for low power. WRFR broadcasts at just 100 watts, compared to the 10,000 watts and more that high-power stations radiate.

The idea to allow low-power stations like WRFR to exist was conceived by the Federal Communications Commission as a small antidote to the growing concentration of radio station ownership in the hands of a few large corporations. WRFR’s birth, however, was nearly aborted by those very powers. The National Association of Broadcasters successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Radio Broadcast Protection Act. It so well protected the radio powers from this potential low-power competition (their word was “interference”) that only a small fraction of the thousands of applicants were allowed their tiny foot in the door.

We were lucky to get the license. Rockland is a small city with only a few full-power stations in its vicinity, so we were able to meet the Act’s super-strict interference requirements. We were also lucky that we got WRFR when we did. When WRFR started broadcasting in 2002 there were three other radio stations broadcasting from studios in Rockland. Today WRFR is the only one, indeed it is the only one for three counties around. WRKD, the AM station that began local radio here in the 1940s and used to have its studios on Main Street (and whose call letters stand for Rockland) moved its studios, and those of its younger sister WMCM-FM, 35 miles away to Augusta, where they now share studios with a number of other stations jointly run by their new corporate owner.

Though the studios have moved away, the transmitters and antennas are still here, four of them, pumping out the big-time watts. They are so powerful that they would not, in any case, be really local to Rockland. WMCM, for example, at 16,000 watts, reaches audiences 60 miles away in Lewiston, Bangor and other cities larger than us, so that Rockland is only a tiny part of its listening area.

WRFR, meanwhile, has for seven years been broadcasting its modest 100 watts of local radio from an antenna atop a pole beside its studios at 20 Gay Street in downtown Rockland. Thirty-five volunteers run the station, under the management of another volunteer, yours truly, the station’s founder, janitor and chief cheerleader. The station broadcasts 24/7, overnight with automated music selected by the volunteers, and with about eight hours each day of live local programming.

Support for the station comes from local business sponsors, now 75 strong. Although the station’s non-commercial charter does not allow it to promote or endorse businesses, the rules do allow WRFR to provide information about its sponsors — details of the products and services they offer, their location, phone number, Web address, etc. — so that the station’s rotating sponsor announcements function effectively as advertising for small local businesses that otherwise would have no cost-effective way to use the broadcast media. Advertising on a full-power station would mean paying a steep price to get their message to an audience that mostly lives too far away to respond.

Maintaining WRFR has not been easy. Money has often been very tight, equipment wears out or gets broken, floors get dirty, trash builds up, and it is not easy to make it all work when no one is paid and volunteers do not always do what needs to be done. Despite the hurdles, though, the station is today stronger than ever. We continue to learn and to improve. Local music, local ideas, the discussion of local issues, the dissemination of information of local importance, all have a venue that would not otherwise exist.

This story of WRFR is preamble to another story. This week a bill has been introduced in Congress to repeal the Radio Broadcast Protection Act and make it possible for thousands more low-power FM radio stations to be licensed nationwide. Its 20 sponsors in the House of Representatives hope that new political leadership may mean an end to the era in which lobbyists for powerful entrenched interests could, among other travesties, prevent communities across the country from having their own local radio stations.

Just 10 years ago Rockland’s commercial radio stations were owned by people who lived here, people who cared about their community and who made sure their radio stations served that community. This was the case 10 or 15 years ago in towns and cities across America. Corporate power and corrupt politics swept that away, along with much of the individual ownership and responsibility that made this country great.

The concentrated wealth and power that is represented by the National Association of Broadcasters is only one small part of that gross concentration of wealth and power that has, with its unchecked greed, now brought our country to its knees. The de-concentration of the media, though, is an excellent place to begin standing up again.

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