About Retroradio

Retroradio answers one question: what reaches you, and who licensed it.

Coverage, not licences

Most radio directories list a station under the city named on its licence. That is not where people hear it. A community page here lists a station because its signal is estimated to land on that town — so Clinton, Iowa shows the Davenport signals that reach it, and says how far out each transmitter sits.

Reception is modelled, not measured. The estimate uses the nominal service radius for a facility's class, which is a coarse stand-in: terrain, buildings and your antenna all beat the model. Every page says so.

How it is built

Facility records come from FCC public filings — call sign, service, frequency, class, ERP, antenna height, licensee and transmitter coordinates. Those coordinates are joined to Census place centroids to work out which communities a signal reaches, which is the join that turns a licence table into a coverage map.

On top of that sits the work that is not in any filing:

• Streams are verified before they are published. A URL that answers with a finite file is a jingle or an archived clip, not a live broadcast, and it is rejected. A station with no working audio gets no play button rather than one that fails.
• Relays are resolved to their parents. A translator carries another station's programming; where it does, it inherits that station's audio and format. Where it runs its own distinct feed, it inherits neither — labelling it with the parent's format would name the wrong programming.
• Formats are read conservatively. Genre comes from the lead of a station's encyclopedia article, which states the current format; later paragraphs recount every format it ever had, so they are ignored.
• Links are checked by where they end up. A station website is judged by its final host after redirects, because that is how an expired domain quietly becomes somebody else's site.

What it will not do

The expensive mistake in a directory like this is wrong audio — a play button that plays a different station. Several rules exist only to prevent it, and each one costs coverage: a stream whose mount names another call sign is refused, a shared feed is marked as a network feed rather than presented as a local signal, and a relay pointing at a distant parent nothing else claims is held back. Fewer play buttons, and the ones that are there are right.

Advertising

This site carries advertising, which pays for the hosting. Ads never affect which stations are listed, how they are ranked, or what is said about them — the listings come from public filings and verification, and no station pays to appear or to be described a particular way.

Who runs it

Retroradio is built and maintained by Justen Linker. Corrections are welcome and usually acted on — a stream that has moved, a station relabelled, a relay pointing at the wrong parent. Write to operator@the-retroradio.com, or see the contact page.