Kickstarter.com is a website where people can post about projects that need funding.  Other folks can look at the projects and pledge money to them.  If a project meets their target goal for pledges then the money transfers.

I was working on a Kickstarter project for our transmitter and studio equipment.  Things went pretty well until I got to the payment part.  Kickstarter uses Amazon for their payment handling.  That’s good.  I went to Amazon Payments, put in all sorts of information, gave them our bank account info, I thought we were ready to go.  But then they told me that, since I selected “non-profit” as our business type, I had to have a 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS.. and send them a copy.

Well.

When we started this thing we created a non-profit corporation in the State of Mississippi.  We added the recommended paragraphs to our incorporation documents that the IRS wants for 501(c)(3) charity non-profits.  But we also saw that the IRS says you can act as a 501(c)(3) for 27 months or until you gross more than $5000 over one year.  Until that time you do not need a determination.  If someone walked in here today and wanted to give us $50, I could tell them truthfully that we are a charity and their gift is tax-deductible.

The problem is that the IRS wants $400 to  get the letter of determination.  And we don’t have $400 that we wanted to spend on that.   So we didn’t.  And we don’t have the letter of determination and Amazon Payments won’t let us be a non-profit on their system.

That kind of grinds my bunions.  I told Amazon Payments they were discriminating against small non-profits, and they are.

So now I have shifted my focus to Indiegogo, another crowd-funding website.  They don’t use Amazon Payments, so I won’t fall into that again.  They give a discount to registered 501(c)(3) organizations and I saw that trap waiting for me and didn’t step in it.  A discount would be nice.  But, again, $400.

I have not made it all the way through the Indiegogo setup yet, so there may be something waiting to crush me.  But I hope not.  My next big endeavor is to create a video that presents our project.

I did quite a bit of work on the scheduling system yesterday, trying to figure it out.

For single pieces  (not chapters or serials in some way), I have divided them by length and put them into 5 different buckets:

• short : less than 4 minutes
• m1 : 4-10 minutes
• m2 : 10-20 minutes
• m3: 20-30 minutes
• long: more than 30 minutes

The scheduler works by whole hours.  So I wanted to come up with a scheme that would fill an hour but not use up all of my library of short works to do it.  I think I arrived at a pretty good system.  At least,  I understand it better.

The scheduler does not go through and find an item that is just the right size.  It picks randomly from the size bucket that I put in that spot.  When the top of the hour approaches it finishes what is running then jumps to the start of the next hour as soon as that item is done.  That means we will miss the real wall-clock hour mark by +/- the size of a small item.

Of course  we can put in station ID and someday have underwriting messages and blurbs about upcoming features, etc.  That kind of padding may help get me closer to real top-of-the-hour.

Well anyway, I messed around with it yesterday and got a scheme for doing a Long, then some mediums (depending on how the time is progressing) and fill the last little bit with shorts.  It works out that M3 mediums don’t fit in.  So I will have another hour scheme which uses two M3 slots followed by shorter slots and ending with some shorts.  Our hours will be loaded toward the front with longer selections.

For serials, book chapters, things like that, I plan to schedule those manually to fill up an hour as much as I can then let the scheduler use shorter pieces to finish up.  You can tell I will need a _lot_ of short pieces to keep from being too repetitious.

Right now we are planning to have 8 hours of “new” material every day, some of those hours will be the next chapters of books we are working through and some will be just random from the library. Then we repeat that two times to make 24 hours.  We’ve been thinking about how to keep things moving along but not go so fast that a person missing their regular timeslot is then missing large chunks of the story.  I’m also considering having some kind of re-cap day, maybe weekends (?) where we run through the chapters again?  Just feeling our way along about this.  I guess it is possible to have some combination of repeats during a day and over multiple days.  I’d love to hear comments about this.

Check that box!

The WMFH-LP.org website is where we will put our broadcast schedule and the link to our live stream.

Also, it is the place we will receive feedback from our listeners.

But the first job for the website is to act as a repository for information about our station and the progress we make toward getting it built and on the air.

One of the big hurdles is funding.  We are roughing out a budget for our start-up costs.  So far we are in the $10k range and still creeping up as we find the bits and pieces we need.

Just today I was investigating something called RDS.  If you have an FM radio in your car, you probably have the feature where it shows the name of the station and maybe even the title and artist of the song that is playing.  That is called RDS.  We like RDS.  We consider it a must.  When people tune in to the middle of a chapter from War and Peace, we would like them to see “War & Peace  chapter 12  Tolstoy” on their radio display.  That would be very cool, and very useful.  An RDS box adds that information to our transmission  costs about $2k.

It seems like every piece of a radio station costs another $2k.  Why is that?  It must be a magic number in the radio world.

But never mind that now.  We have a website!