Radio Plymouth has been awarded the long-overdue FM licence for Plymouth. It follows a two year wait since the licence was first won, to be then handed back to Ofcom.
The losing applicant was UKRD, who had proposed a station branded as Pirate FM.
When the licence was first advertised, five bids were submitted; Macquarie won the licence in March 2006 and proposed to launch Diamond FM – a rock-based format.
The two submissions for the licence – first awarded in 2006, and then handed back last November by Macquarie – were the only two received by the second deadline of 1st May.
Radio Plymouth is 65% owned by the London Media Company, with the remaining shares held by individuals. It will provide "a locally-focused station specifically for Plymouth, with a full service of news and local information, entertaining speech, features and conversation and a wide variety of music from today and the previous four decades."
The licence is for a service to cover Plymouth, which has an adult population (aged 15+) of around 250,000. However, the exact coverage will be determined by the location of the transmission site and other technical characteristics.
