WEMA-lp is ready to transcend internet radio and take to the airwaves. They have the construction permit, the FCC license, and a chosen tower location in Fort Washington, Maryland. When permission is granted from state and county authorities, their antenna will mount 150 ft in the air.
Then, WEMA-lp will hit the ground running. With the backing of their non-profit, the Excellence in Music Academy, the DC area team will enhance their mission to educate music students, empower youth, and roll the 94.3 dial with some good gospel music as part of what they call, the community soundtrack.
Stephanie Schubert speaks with WEMA-lp Station Manager and Excellence in Music Academy instructor Henry Harris about the ups and downs of starting a radio station, being inspired at the Grassroots Radio Conference, and night outs.
Stephanie:
Hi Henry, it’s nice to chat with you. Pacifica is happy to welcome WEMA-lp to the affiliate network! You are also a new station, having just applied for your LPFM license in December 2023. So, your antenna is the project right now? It sounds like your first attempt had a hiccup.
Henry:
Thank you, Stephanie.
Yeah, we do have a tower site. We’re working on getting the antenna placed on the tower.
Originally, when we first got the construction permit in February of 2024, we were excited. We had an assignment to place the LPFM on a different tower. But it was cost prohibitive. I mean, they wanted a whole lot for us to be on that tower. I don’t think we would have been broadcasting too long paying that monthly cost (almost 1,600) just to have the antenna on a tower with no ownership.
So, we put in to move to another tower, which is right across the road from the first tower, but this particular tower, of course, was owned by the local government, which was a county. Now it’s a very unique situation, because the county owned the tower, but the state is also caught up in the ownership as well. So, we’re dealing with two government entities, and it’s taking us some time to get permission.
The county said we had to provide our own shelter, which was an outdoor, outside box or a bigger shelter, and we had to provide our own electric contract to the electric company. And we would also have to provide, of course, our own internet connectivity.
So, we went out to the site and we did a site survey. And when talking to one of the engineers that’s contracted to take care of the tower, they said, ‘Hey, we got three shelters out there.’ We couldn’t go into the [first] shelter that the county had because it’s part of Homeland Security.
There was another shelter that was hardly used, but that was owned by the state. So, we said, ‘Hey, you know, you got this great big shelter.’ The technician took us in; it was about the size of a garage. They had one piece of equipment in there. Normally, if it’s not a secure space, you can go through the process of getting in that tower. So we put in an application. We had to put in a justification. They have heat in there; they have electricity in there. They said, ‘Mister Harris we’ll charge you $10 a month,’ or whatever they want to charge because we’re a 501 c3 which means that may give us some leniency.
So if [the state] comes back and says, ‘Okay, it’s a go,’ we go back to the county and say, ‘Hey, it’s a go.’ Then we can get the contractor or the engineer to place our antenna up on the tower. They have agreed to give us about 150 feet. The tower is 300 feet tall, so that’s halfway up the tower, which is great for us, because, you know, with LP radio, the higher you go, the better the signal.
We’re in the number three market, which is the Washington, DC market, and the spectrum was real tight.
Stephanie:
I was curious about that for your area.. It must be tricky to make sure you’re not interfering with other media.
Henry:
Yeah. When we moved across the street, we put in to have the FCC give us permission to move. We had to pay for another adjacent analysis to show we wouldn’t interfere. And they approved that.
The analysis person put in for the two bay antenna, and the FCC accepted that. So, we’re in the center of Fort Washington, right? Which means that we will be able to reach from the center point all the way up to what we call The Beltway, and a little bit across The Beltway into Washington, DC, to the north and to the west. So there’s a big circle.
Stephanie:
It sounds like if sharing the little garage shed works out, this could be a good situation for you.
Henry:
Yeah, all the problems you know, by the wayside, but it’s just taking a long time. And that’s something to note. When you’re dealing with the local or state government, it just moves so slow. But in the end, the cost factor would really help out. And I would say that to everybody, even the ones who have the construction permits, who are trying to get online and they don’t want to put up their own antenna. A local government antenna may be a good move for you, because in our county, they put up what they call the public safety network. So they put towers all over the county (so the police and the fire [departments] can talk to each other).
Stephanie:
You said you have the equipment you need so when you hear back from the state you will be off and running.
Henry:
Yeah. Matter of fact, the station is broadcasting now, in what we call the beta mode. We’re not doing any talking yet. It’s just playing music. It’s community radio, so we’re doing all genres of music. We do gospel, like in the morning. And then it switches over to contemporary jazz, and it goes from contemporary jazz to R&B to about six or seven o’clock. Then, later on, it reverts back to the 70s and 80s and 60s music. We call our slogan for the station the community soundtrack, because we want the station to sound like the community. So even if we’re playing gospel, we’re not just playing just regular gospel; it’s gospel that’s mixed with what K-LOVE
(Christian radio) plays. You know, Christian music too. You know, like, some of those groups, like Third Day…
Stephanie:
Like modern Christian music? You’re saying this is a strong vibe in Fort Washington.
Henry:
Yes. And that’s what we wanted. When I came to the Grassroots Radio Conference, [2024, New Orleans] that’s what I saw. I saw a community of people. And so if you’re going to do radio that’s primarily focused on music, we wanted the music to represent the community.
Radio has become too commercialized and is only chasing the top 100. When I heard Sharon Scott (WXOX Louisville) talk at the conference about some of the stuff their DJs are doing, I thought about what we were trying to do in Fort Washington. If we have somebody that’s a record collector, okay, and they have a suitcase full of LPs, and it’s jazz, we want them to pull that suitcase into the station, and do a couple of shows, because there’s an audience for contemporary jazz.
And then there’s another generation out here that’s up and coming, And you might say, well, they want to hear certain music too. But a lot of them, I’ve heard singing the songs of the 60s and 80s. And you have to ask them, ‘How do you know that song?’ And they say, ‘‘Well, my parents used to play those songs all the time.’ So people want to hear songs that came out in the early 60’s and 70’s and so forth. So our station is going to be built on the community soundtrack.
Stephanie:
I understand that the EMA in WEMA stands for Excellence in Music Academy, the non-profit that funds the radio station. Can you talk about that?
Henry:
|Yeah, that is about teaching artists how to create a legacy with the content that they create. We teach artists the business of music.
Stephanie:
It was created in 2011?
Henry:
Correct. When we started teaching the classes online, back then we were called the Excellence in Christian Music Academy, but there were a lot of people that came to us and said, ‘Hey, I’m not saying I’m not a Christian, but I mean, you know, I just bleed different or whatever. Can I still take the classes?’ So, then we made it neutral and made it the Excellence in Music Academy.
Stephanie:
Do you have a background in teaching, Henry?
Henry:
Yes, well, I’m not actually teaching school, but I got my master’s degree from Berkeley College of Music. I also have a master’s degree in nonprofit management, but I’ve never actually taught. I’ve just done a lot of presentations, different conferences and teaching online. I wanted to teach college music business on the college level, but it just seems that most colleges require you to have a PhD. But there is no music business that offers a doctorate degree. I’ve been told by some of my professors to go and get a doctorate in something else, but then that defeats the whole purpose.
Stephanie:
Yeah.
Henry:
They said maybe I could get a doctor’s degree in business, you know what I mean. And then teach music, but I was just hoping that it was a doctor’s degree in the music business. But, yeah, that’s my background, and I teach it.
Stephanie:
The Excellence in Music Academy sounds like a real hands-on place.
Henry:
Yeah. Another segment of the nonprofit takes these same artists that went through our teaching program and takes them out to do concerts at the nursing homes and senior citizens facilities. And we call those night outs. Because we have classes where we teach artists about the music business. We give them a certificate at the end of the class, but then we’ll have a concert at the concert hall, not too far from us. And it may be a $25 charge for regular people to come in, but for senior citizens, they would all come in free. And we call it a concert night out for them, so they can dress up, put on their furs, and then they’re walking with a walker, but they’re so excited to come out and have a good time with the music.
The concert also gives the artist the opportunity to practice performing as if they were on television. Because we’ll say, ‘Okay, If you’re going to do two songs, you got eight minutes. You go in, you come in, stage left.’ You know, practice those different things. You can’t go out there taking a water bottle because you don’t do that on television. So we try to get them to practice these things to help get their music career off the ground. And so then at the same time, if they produce quality content, we take the content and we play it on the radio. That’s why I was so excited to meet the gentleman from Maine that came to the grassroots convention [in New Orleans] that talked about how his station was recording live concerts, and then he took that live concert back and edited a little bit, and he played that on the station. Which is good.
Stephanie:
Yes, getting that live flavor is fun.
Henry:
This is my idea of community radio. And when I learned about Pacifica, it kind of all came together. I said, ‘Okay, now I know what WPFW [in DC] is really about.’ Because when I used to listen to WPFW, I’m not going to say there weren’t trained announcers, but they were just regular people, right, going in, playing music, talking about the music, talking about the artist, about the culture and the social scenes. That’s what I saw in community radio.
Eventually, all of us would like to have a regular powered station. But, this [low power FM] is a great start, because we had internet radio before, but it was never like this, because I can listen to [our terrestrial] station using CarPlay now, and it sounds just as good as some of them other stations on the air.
Stephanie:
Did the seed for starting a radio station come directly out of the Music Excellence Academy?
Henry:
Oh, that came out of the internet radio because we had an internet radio station called Spirit co One playing in the early 2000’s before a lot of radio stations even thought about using the internet. The format was gospel.
It was fun doing it, but the nagging point about this was that everybody that we came in contact with in radio would say, ‘You don’t have a radio station. You got a hobby.’ Because they used to look at internet radio as just a jukebox. But it’s so funny that here we are in 2025 where the majority of radio stations out here today are jukeboxes. I mean, they’re voice tracking. The FCC made it so that you don’t even have to go to the studio to look at that public file? Right? They told them, ‘Put it online.’ So these big conglomerates, they’re big, but they may not even have a studio.
So the seeds were birthed out of the fact of people saying, ‘Oh, you just got a hobby.’ So I said, ‘Okay, one day we’ll have a true radio station,’ and that’s what we worked towards. But what happened was we didn’t have a 501 c3 in place, and we missed every open door to put in for the applications: 2003, and 2013. One of the stations that actually got a license back in 2013 was a station not too far from here. They were broadcasting out of some space in the church, and they said that they no longer wanted to have that space because I think one of the operators passed, and they didn’t have nobody to keep it up and running. So we found that out, and they said they would donate the station to us. But little did I know that if you could get the station donated to you, you can’t have your 501 c3 office more than 10 miles from your antenna. It depends on what market you’re in. So, an objection was filed, and we didn’t get the station.
When I found out who filed the objection, I said, ‘Hey, I’ve talked to you before about trying to get a station up and running.’ They said, ‘Hey, I know. But we feel that low power radio should be local, and you’re not within the guidelines,’ and that’s what they did, they filed an objection. But that was a blessing in disguise, because when the objection was filed, this [FCC] window for
2023 opened up, and we decided to withdraw from the transfer assignment and put in for the new station.
And there were two frequencies open in this area, and we got one of them. They squeezed us into Fort Washington.
Stephanie:
Ooh, you got a lucky strike!
Henry:
That’s how it all got started, but at the same time, we continue to teach the music business.
And then we saw some of the injustice that [commercial] radio was doing for independent artists. They wouldn’t play them. Radio is too commercial. I realized that with low power radio, we don’t have to worry about commercials. We just deal with sponsors, but at the same time, they won’t play a whole lot of independent, up and coming artists, because if you’re not with a label, and if you’re not doing X, Y and Z, then you’re not going to get played.
Stephanie:
So, it’s your priority to champion local artists.
Henry:
Yeah, and that’s what we should always do. We bring in the community leaders, and we bring in other members of the community and talk to them at the same time. I’ve been talking to people that want to do health programs. We’ve been talking to people that want to do community economics, like the South County Economic Development Association. So, I’ve talked to the elected officials that have helped us get through this antenna process. I promised to have them come in and talk about different things that’s unique to Fort Washington.
Stephanie:
So, what’s the next step?
Henry:
Once we put that antenna up, we’re on the move. We’re putting different things in place- I probably won’t go too far in that on some of the other things that we do in order to try to secure grants and funding. But I know in our state, you can get your elected officials to help you to put in what they call bond initiatives. Local bond initiative, I don’t know if your state does the same thing…
Stephanie:
I’m not familiar with that myself.
Henry
It’s sort of like an earmark. In other words, if you have a radio station that needs a building, then you can go and ask your state representative or Senator and say, ‘Hey, would you put us in for a local bond initiative, and maybe get a few thousand to help us secure the land?’ and they could put in a non-reimbursable grant and you’re in. They might put it in for $10,000, and you’ve got up to seven years in order to use it.
Stephanie
Does every state do that?
Henry:
I’m not sure, but I do know you can Google it. So, what happens is sometimes the budgets may be tight where they can’t do so much. But each official can attach those bond initiatives to the budget in each of their districts. And sometimes they have to spread it out. You can’t be the same people getting it all the time. But they can help you with that.
My approach, and the board’s approach is to put in the infrastructure first. Let’s put this antenna up, and let’s send the signals to the antenna and make sure that stuff is working. Then we pop the surprise.
Stephanie:
Then you come out strong.
Henry:
Come out strong, fundraising, doing everything we need to do, bringing content. Because the other educational piece that we’re going to do with the project is to train young adults on how to be announcers or to be a DJ.
Let’s say you had a son getting ready to go to college, and they wanted to be a DJ. We have a program where we teach them about how good it is for them to say, ‘Okay, Mom, I’m going on the air on Wednesday at seven o’clock. Spread the word to all your friends.’ And so you got everybody sitting by the radio, waiting to hear this new announcer.
Stephanie:
And then young people will see themselves represented too.
Henry:
Yeah. That’s correct. And to hear yourself on the air is exciting, just like hearing the record on the air for the first time. Just that small slice of time absolutely does a lot for an artist and for the person that’s on the air. That’s what I envision. We will train up and coming announcers to put them on the air. I’m not saying that that’s the only thing that will attract their parents, but at least if their parents come on the air and listen, they may say, ‘Hey, let me tune in and see who they’re going to have next week.’ It’s just good to have fun with radio.
And if you’re 100 feet in the air on a tower that was put up by the local government, and the reason why they picked the location is because of their reach? We can get out there. I believe it, because I listen to a station that has the same numbers that we have, 94.3, and they’re on the other side of Maryland. I want to say they’re not too far from Silver Spring, Maryland. I turned them on one day. I was coming from across town in DC, and I could hear them loud and clear. And I listened to them just about all the way to our demarcation line, where we cross over to our signal, and that’s when they started fading out.
Stephanie:
Interesting. You could have a radio brotherhood…
Henry:
Maybe. Like I said, once we get up and running, we can reach out to the other station and say, ‘Hey, we can promote each other. So if our signal works till we get to the edge of the beltway and your signal kicks in, they never have to change the radio.
Stephanie:
That sounds fun.
Henry: Yeah. They’re 94.3 just like us.
Stephanie:
Do you have anything else that you want to add before we go?
Henry:
I just hope some of the stuff that we talked about would help the next broadcaster that comes along. because I network and try to attach myself to different organizations and networking groups. Because when I first thought about low power radio, the first group I reached out to was Prometheus and they said, ‘Hey, Mr. Harris, why don’t you just come on and travel with us.’ And I said, ‘Wow, I don’t know if I can do that…’ If I had just gone across the country with them and their radio bond raising- I’d probably be a lot further along than I am now, as far as knowing what to do and how to do it.
And when we were at the conference, me and my wife went over to the local station there [WHIV New Orleans], and we saw how they were doing things. So, the objective is, like I said, to get up and running, get everything going on, and so that when they say, ‘Who would like to host the Grassroots Radio Conference?’ We’ll be in a position to do it.
Stephanie
Oh, that’s exciting. It would be lovely to visit Fort Washington. And thank you for talking with me, Henry. I appreciate your time.
Henry:
Thank you for having me.
Photo of Henry Harris used with his permission.