Penistone FM was formed in 2005 as a not for profit voluntary group. Later our legal status changed to meet Ofcom requirements and we are now a Company Limited by Guarantee. This means we have no shareholders and any surplus funds are ploughed back into the station to develop it.
We applied for an FM community radio licence to the industry regulator Ofcom in June 2007, the Ofcom Radio Licensing Committee met in December 2007 and decided due to lack of FM frequencies they would award us a licence but on the AM waveband and proceeded to allocate 1475 kHz.
Whilst the award of the licence was a major achievement, Ofcom received 201 applications and only awarded 122 licences across the UK; we were naturally disappointed with the allocation of an AM frequency.
Not deterred, we kept an eye on the situation and a frequency became available when a community radio station fail to make it to air nearby in Chesterfield, after some persuasion, Ofcom allocated the frequency of 95.7 FM.
That’s when the hard work really began, hours and hours of planning, fundraising, grant applications, contract negotiations, DIY, painting, swearing, wiring, hammering and some training too. All the blood sweat and tears lead to the launch of the station in mid 2009.
Ofcom had to visit the transmission site in order to check our technical compliance, this visit occurred on the 27th April 2009 and was a very nerve racking time, however thanks to the professionalism of our contracted engineer Paul Godley, all was fine and we passed with flying colours.
We had set a date of 9th May 2009 for our 4 week test transmissions to begin, you can see the video of the start of the test transmissions below, and then we launched on Saturday 6th June at 9:57.
The first song of our test transmission was Robbie Williams – Let me Entertain you, the last song, Europe – The Final Countdown. Our launch song was Take That – Greatest Day