About Triangle

The first Triangle FM broadcast was a project run by Forest Community Media that brought Community Radio back to the Forest of Dean following the demise of Forest of Dean Radio in 2009.

The project had funding from “Awards for All” for training ten young people in radio skills and helping them make and broadcast radio programmes.  Actually 14 young people (and a team of adults) were trained and went on to setup and manage the station and produced and presented the station’s scheduled programmes. This training was supported by the Student Radio Station (Tone Radio) of the University of GloucestershireThe project broadcast on the FM band covered the Cinderford area and ran fom the 26^th to the 28^th of November 2010.

Because of the success of that effort a second project using the same "Triangle FM" branding broadcast in late 2011. This time it lasted for 10 days and focussed on getting publicity for the various groups, clubs and charities working in the area.

The project leaders are mostly ex-Forest of Dean Radio volunteers who became passionate about Community Radio through that project and want to continue volunteering in that field.

The Project Leader for Traingle 2010 and Triangle 2011 was Roger Thorne.  Roger lives in Cinderford and is one of the Directors of Forest Community Media.  Roger works as a Project Manager for a local company.

The Technical & Finance person is Martin Harrison. Martin also lives in Cinderford and is a Director of Forest Community Media.  Martin was the technical guru behind Forest of Dean Radio, is an electronics engineer by trade and also runs his own stage lighting company.

Triangle FM is set up as a series of community projects run by the not-for profit company Forest Community Media. The first project was completed in November 2010, the second in November 2011.

We use radio as a way of getting people involved in their community, and in doing so to learn and improve a wide range of skills, improve connections to those those around them, and build on their confidence.  Each project is seperately funded and aims to at least break-even.We hope that over time we can develop funding streams that allow more people to get involved and learn the range of skills that come from making radio.

Before the first project we spent time looking at Community Radio in UK in an effort to find out what works, what doesn’t, what is practical to achieve and what isn’t. They found that the experience of current community radio stations is that listeners respond best to a fairly mainstream sounding station which is extremely local in that it is presented by local people and is focussed strongly on local events, people and organisations.  “Quirkyness” is accepted, but only within a framework of good quality output. So the model for the first project's broadcast was built around “Breakfast”, Drivetime” and so on. The feedback that we had after the project was that it worked well, that the community of Cinderford would like more similar projects and broadcasts and would like to see as much of the community involved as possible.

This is down to the licences that are available together with the costs involved.   Radio broadcast licences are regulated by Ofcom in the UK and they offer two kinds of licence to Community Radio groups.

The first is a full-time five year "Community Radio" licence. Ofcom award these licences to groups who can demonstrate that they can provide significant "social gain" and can put forward a solid five year business plan. There are also restrictions about how these groups can be funded.  In addition Ofcom only invite applications at intervals. There have been two rounds so far, with a third announced in early 2011.  As you can imagine it requires a lot of planning, organisation and funding to broadcast full-time for five years, and a group would need to be very confident to take this on. To be frank our group is not ready to think about this at the moment.

Instead we operate under with using a short-term “Restricted Service Licence” (RSL) which allows us to for a period of up to 28 days within a restricted area (in our case only in Cinderford) .  There is a fee of £400 to apply for one of these, and then daily charges for each day you actually broadcast. We are allowed only two of these a year.  Our first broadcast in 2010 was for only three days, that being manageable for a completely new team and kept the cost down to an affordable level. Our second broadcast lasted 10 days in November 2011.

As time goes by we hope to increase the length of our broadcasts as more people get involved and we become more experienced.  In between broadcasts we will be offering on-line "broadcasts" via the website, and also putting up podcasts for on-demand listeners.