Volunteering to do that meant that I was obliged to involve myself in the process of getting the station on the air, and again, there were warning signs that I should have heeded.
For a start, there weren’t many people involved. Committee meetings seemed to spend a long time discussing fairly trivial matters. Most alarmingly, the committee had great difficulty finding (and keeping) secretaries and treasurers.
Alarming because if there was one job that Hughesy definitely didn’t want it was Secretary or Treasurer.
Still things rolled along quietly, applications and submissions were submitted, grants received and equipment bought and GEM-FM hit the airwaves around Easter 2001.
There had been a couple of test broadcasts before that, but once I got back from the BluesFest jaunt it was a case of trying to get the thing going in something approaching a satisfactory manner.
Nobody involved had any experience with running a radio station, so everybody was flying blind.
The first thing, as far as I could see, was to get enough on-air presenters through the training process to have a human in the studio during what you might think of as the peak periods - weekday afternoons and evenings and right through from morning to midnight on weekends.
Given the Townsville experience, I wasn’t keen on setting up a lengthy training process, so I put together a simple orientation leaflet explaining what the station was about, along with the rules and regulations that applied at the time.
Presenters needed to have a fair idea of what they couldn’t do, so the orientation leaflet was followed by a longer document based around media law and some traps that might ensnare young and enthusiastic players.