Stafford FM is a local community radio station serving
Stafford
Stafford () is a market town and the county town of Staffordshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It lies about north of Wolverhampton, south of Stoke-on-Trent and northwest of Birmingham. The town had a population of 70,145 in ...
,
Staffordshire,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...
. It broadcasts on 107.3 FM and online. The station was one of two to apply in 2014 for an FM
community radio
Community radio is a radio service offering a third model of radio broadcasting in addition to commercial and public broadcasting. Community stations serve geographic communities and communities of interest. They broadcast content that is popul ...
licence to cover Stafford. The other was
BFBS
The British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS) provides radio and television programmes for His Majesty's Armed Forces, and their dependents worldwide. Editorial control is independent of the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces themselv ...
.
On 3 October 2014,
Ofcom
The Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom, is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom.
Ofcom has wide-ranging powers acros ...
announced that both applications had been successful and that 5-year full-time licences will be awarded.
History
1990s
There have been a number of volunteer-run radio broadcasting projects in the area at intervals over nearly 20 years, and many of the volunteers have taken part in several of them. An experimental project called the Stafford Broadcasting Society, organised by the late Robert Leighton (an electronics engineer and part-time presenter on Radio Caroline) carried out a
restricted service licence (RSL) broadcast in the mid-1990s, using a transmitter near
Hopton.
2001-2003
Stafford FM was first set up in 2001 to do 28-day RSL FM trials, serving Stafford and the surrounding area from studios in Gaol Mews and a transmitter near Hopton. It aimed to gain a permanent small-scale commercial radio licence from the then regulator, the Radio Authority. A total of four RSLs at six-month intervals were carried out between 2001 and 2003. By then the Radio Authority had been replaced by Ofcom, which announced that no more small-scale
commercial radio
Commercial broadcasting (also called private broadcasting) is the broadcasting of telev