It gives us great pleasure to announce that OfCom’s licensing committee have decided to award a full 5 year FM broadcasting licence to FromeFM. The formal announcement from OfCom was issued at 11.00am on Weds 23rd 2011.
We’d like to thank everyone who has played a part in making this happen – presenters, techies, supporters, sponsors, funders, contributors, current and ex members, councillors, colleagues in the creative industries of Frome and members of the general public who, for some strange reason, seem to quite like what we do and carry on listening.
FM will enable us to boldly go where no local radio station has gone before. Neither the BBC nor MoreFM (it’s almost an anagram of FromeFM – coincidence or conspiracy?) delivers local current affairs to people in Whatcombe Road, or produces drama penned by writers in Great Elm or plays music composed in Alexandra Road.
Our ‘key commitments’ from the application will be published on the FFM website once we’ve agreed the final wording with OfCom. The commitments will be the yardstick by which our FM service will be judged. They will tell you what the FM service will sound like and how we intend to develop our programmes.
To make more shows and better shows, we’re going to need more people but … If we broadcast, then they will come.
The answers to your next 2 questions are as yet unknown – OfCom have allocated a frequency to us, but they just haven’t told us what it is yet. And the launch date for the new service is dependent upon OfCom engineering, planning permission for the transmission site and going through a detailed pre-launch plan. However, Armstrong, Aldrin and the other one are now in the Command Module and the countdown is about to start. I think we’re looking at Spring 2012 for blast-off.
So, brilliant news – and once again congratulations and thanks to everyone for making this happen.