Some sage advice - Short term radio license

Hi Cam,

My understanding is that they issue a 28 day exemption, and you can broadcast for any amount of time up to 28 days. You can't apply for a shorter amount of time, so you just use as much as you want of the 28 days. That means you can broadcast for 1 day, 1 weekend, 1 week, or the whole month. Ideally you should tie the broadcast to the event as much as possible, but I think they're fairly lax in terms of how closely you must tie it.

In Nelson we had 3 of these trial periods prior to getting our licence - 1 was just for a weekend, the other 2 we used for the entire 28 days. We did tie them all to events, though fairly losely. I think I recall someone from the CRTC noticing during the 3rd one that we weren't doing enough in relation to the "event" (which was the celebration of the release of our first CD project), so we upped the amt of programming focused on the CD, its artists, related interviews, etc. I think we also only broadcast for half days, 'cause we couldn't find enough volunteers to fill up full days. I think the weekend-long one involved broadcasting live from a festival, and I think the first month was tied to an arts festival that was actually only taking up one week of the month, but we dedicated a good chunk of the programming to focusing on arts during the other 3 weeks too.

Anyway, the rules are here:http://www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/2000/PB2000-10.htm(look for this heading: Exemption order respecting low-power radio: Limited duration special event facilitating undertakings) They're very vague. You could call Zoe or Terry at KCR in Nelson (250.352.9600) to get more details - they were instrumental in setting up all 3 of the special event broadcasts in Nelson so they can tell you what the practicalities were. If even the folks at the CRTC said they won't check without a complaint, then I'd say you're pretty safe, especially if you do your best to provide some scheduled content that's relevant to the event.