I Got A Low Power TV Station Approval Today

I found out this morning that I’ve been approved to build a low power television station on Channel 36 in Tonopah, Nevada. I have three years to get it on the air. It’s going to be a relatively low-cost build, largely because I already have a lot of the broadcasting equipment sitting around from a failed attempt to do this same thing 10 to 15 years ago in the Hawaiian Islands.

That earlier station ultimately failed because of local building codes. In a very unusual local zoning situation that I’ve never seen anywhere else, the local codes had special provisions specifically targeting Low Power TV stations. These rules were actually much, much stricter than the codes for full-power stations. It's possibly an first amendment issue, but because the laws were written decades ago and only affected a tiny handful of independent hopefuls like me, no one ever challenged it.

What those codes did was function as a way to keep the airwaves reserved for big-money broadcasters. Unless you had millions of dollars to drop on a full-power facility, you were locked out. I tried contracting with a grandfathered-in broadcast site, but the costs for the first year alone would have been more than I could reasonably make back over the lifetime of the station.

It was a hard lesson, but it’s one of the main reasons I ended up pursuing Tonopah as a site to build my commercial FM radio station. Out here, the building codes and zoning processes are super reasonable.

I’m still figuring out exactly what I’ll broadcast on Channel 36. Over-the-air television seems to be in a downward spiral these days for anything other than live sports. When I was trying to get my foot in the door in Hawaii, OTA TV was experiencing a bit of a renaissance with the early wave of cord-cutters. Now, the quality of programming has dropped significantly. It feels less like a video delivery system that is ad-supported, and more like a dedicated ad delivery platform that delivers video on a secondary basis.

It might be kinda cool to run it as a functioning performance art project, like https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/ . There aren't a lot of copyright advantages to running music formats on subchannels like there are with FM radio, so that's not a big motivator. I have an ambient music internet station where I own the compositions and sound recordings, so that might end up there.

Anyway, it's not at the top of my list of priorities, but it's kinda cool and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to build it out. The only other TV station in town runs old TV shows, and it's only a couple of years old. So, there's not really an existing OTA audience at the moment. The biggest audience is probably the RVers coming through town (and there are quite a few of them), but even with that, you're competing with Starlink.