How to Build and Run a Radio Station
A practical guide to building and running a real radio station. Internet, FM, or both. Field notes from a career in radio.
This site is about building a real radio station. Not a playlist. Not a podcast feed. A station. Internet-only, FM, or both. The underlying work is the same: signal flow, infrastructure, scheduling, programming.
Everything here comes out of nearly 30 years inside radio. Aigars Sukurs - the author - first entered radio in 1998 and went on air in 2000. He hosted at Radio 3 (Cēsis), Rietumu Radio (Liepāja), and Radio SWH Rock (Rīga) until 2008. He returned to radio in 2010, now on the engineering side, and has been behind streaming, servers, and RCS Zetta/GSelector at Latvijas Radio since 2014. Four stations built or rebuilt along the way - Radio 101, Rīga Radio, Latvijas Radio 5, and his own Radio Nemiers. The examples reference real choices, real failures, real fixes. Where a decision could legitimately go either way, both directions are named.
Radio Nemiers is a playground for automation. A place to test ideas that would die in corporate radio. In big radio networks, new concepts can get stuck in meetings, rules, and "best practices". Here they can go live in days, not months.
- Aigars Sukurs, The Why
Read this as one engineer's path, not as gospel. Think, evaluate, ruminate before you copy. This site is not Radio Nemiers's documentation. It is the debt its builder pays back to the community that taught him.
How this site is organized
The site has ten sections. Foundation is live. The rest is in active writing. Bookmark the site and come back as each section ships.
- Foundations. What radio is, the four-layer map, the Radio Nemiers case study, and your first stream.
- Starting Out. Scope, identity, and the "do you actually want this" question before any software.
- Music Library & Metadata. The library is the station. ISRC, tagging, ingest.
- Programming & Rotation. Categories, clocks, dayparting, the RCS Master Control mental model.
- Streaming Infrastructure. Signal flow, Liquidsoap, Icecast, Wowza, HLS, monitoring.
- Web, Mobile & APIs. Player, site, API, CarPlay, Android Auto.
- Legal & Royalties. Licensing, copyright, regional differences, the paperwork that keeps you online.
- Listeners & Distribution. Directories, growth, retention, the audience contract.
- Hosts, or Not. The live-vs-automated trade-off. Why Radio Nemiers chose full automation.
- Operations & Compounding Practice. Best practices, on-call, incident logs, the discipline layer.