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Radio One, Inc. Business Information, Profile, and History

5900 Princess Garden Parkway, 7th Floor
Lanham, Maryland 20706
U.S.A.

Company Perspectives:

Our strategy is to expand within our existing markets and into new markets that have a significant African-American presence.

History of Radio One, Inc.

Radio One, Inc. is the largest broadcasting company targeting African American audiences in the United States. The publicly traded company, based in Lanham, Maryland, owns and operates 70 radio stations, making it the seventh largest radio broadcasting company in the country. Major markets served include Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. In addition, Radio One programs "XM 169 The Power" for XM Satellite Radio, and partners with Comcast Corporation on a cable television channel targeting African Americans. Radio One is majority-owned by founder Catherine Hughes, the company's chairperson, and her son Alfred C. Liggins III, who serves as president and chief executive officer.

Founder's Radio Career Beginning in the 1970s

Hughes was born Catherine Elizabeth Woods in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1947, the child of academically oriented, African American parents. Her father was the first African American to earn an accounting degree from Creighton University, her mother earned a master's degree in social work, and her mother's father founded Piney Woods Country Life School, a Mississippi private boarding school for African Americans. Hughes herself became the first African American to attend Omaha's Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart. Although as a child she was known to carry a transistor radio everywhere she went, she was a good student. When she was 16, however, Hughes became pregnant, at a time when there was a greater stigma attached to teenage pregnancy. After her mother kicked her out of the house, Hughes married the father of her child, Alfred Liggins, Jr., but they were divorced after two years and she had to raise her son on her own while finishing high school. She went on to college, with stints at Creighton and the University of Nebraska, Omaha, but she dropped out before receiving a degree to pursue a radio career. While attending college she took a job in 1969 with a black radio station in Omaha, KOWH, where she performed well at a number of tasks and came to the attention of Tony Brown, the founder of Washington, D.C.'s Howard University's School of Communication. He first took her on as an administrative assistant in 1971 but soon made her a sales director at the school radio station, WHUR-FM. Within two years she was named general manager of the station.

During her time at WHUR, Hughes developed a highly popular format called the Quiet Storm, a late-night show that played urban contemporary love ballads. She was frustrated that university officials would not license the concept to other stations, not believing that Quiet Storm possessed staying power. The station was wrong, as Quiet Storm would become a mainstay around the country, the most listened to nighttime radio format. In the word of Hughes, "They basically threw a million-dollar baby out the window." Moreover, the experience created a desire in her to find a way to gain total control of her ideas and career. In 1978 Hughes became president and general manager at a new Washington, D.C. gospel radio station, WYCB-AM. Her stay was short, just six months, but Hughes learned how to grow a station from scratch. She decided, along with her second husband, Dewey Hughes, to buy and operate her own radio station.

The couple cobbled together $100,000 from their savings and $450,000 from investors, including $300,000 from Syndicated Communications Inc. (Syncom), an African American-owned venture capital firm that invested in African American-owned media. Although an experienced broadcaster, Hughes was naive about many aspects of business. When Syncom principals Herb Wilkins and Terry Jones initially asked her about her business plan, Hughes replied, "My plan is to become successful in business." Although embarrassed, she succeeded in getting their support. But she still fell short of the money she needed and turned to the banks for a loan. She was rejected by more than 30 banks before a Puerto Rican female loan officer, during her first week at Chemical Bank Corp., agreed to lend her $600,000. In 1980 Hughes and her husband started Almic Broadcasting, which a decade later would become known as Radio One.

The new company paid $950,000 for a Washington, D.C. 1,000-watt AM station, WOL, which could be acquired cheaply because it had recently been involved in a payola scandal. Against the advice of her backers, Hughes converted WOL to a 24-hour talk and news format, the first of its kind aimed at an African American audience. Although in the long run, she would be proven correct that there was indeed a market for such a station, Hughes did not understand that the talk format was the most expensive to operate, and WOL struggled for years to turn a profit. Hughes and her husband soon had difficulty meeting the monthly debt payments. To keep the station afloat, the couple lost their house and car, and Hughes even sold a rare family heirloom, a white-gold pocket watch made by slaves, which fetched $50,000. Finally the station cost her her marriage. Hughes's husband insisted that she either move to California, where he hoped to break into the music business, or they get a divorce. She chose to file for divorce and bought out his share of the business.

Struggles in the 1980s

Hughes endured considerable hardship as she nurtured Radio One to profitability, though she also found the challenge exhilarating. She drummed up advertising by going door to door to area merchants, and kept creditors at bay by making sure to at least send in a token amount of money along with a note explaining her situation. She filled in at the station as much as possible, running the switchboard, and picking up talk show guests in an old Chevy Nova. She and her son began to live out of the office, cooking on a hot plate and showering at the homes of friends. In 1982, after she had run the station for 14 months, the bank insisted that she would have to begin playing music or face foreclosure. They eventually reached a compromise that allowed WOL to keep the morning drive as a news, talk, and information show, but the bank refused to pay a salary for the slot. To get around the stricture, Hughes became the unpaid host of the show. According to Broadcasting Cable, "In her days as a talk-show host, Hughes was a firebrand in Washington's black community. Politicians picked her show to make major pronouncements. She led the criticism against then mayor Marion Barry's imprisonment on drug charges and organized a much publicized protest against the Washington Post for featuring a black rapper accused of murder on its first cover. She refused a grant--Maryland's first to a minority owned company--to protest the General Assembly's plans to expel a black state senator accused of ethics violations. And she faced charges of anti-Semitism and prejudice against whites and Hispanics."

In 1986 WOL finally turned the corner and became a profitable station. In that same year, Hughes attempted to buy a second radio station, WKYS, by forming a "community corporation," which managed to raise only $500,000, an effort that fell short. In 1987 Hughes succeeded in adding another property, buying WMMJ for $7.5 million. It became Radio One's first FM station, and was also the first FM station on the East Coast to adopt an urban adult contemporary format. Once again Hughes had to contend with input from the banks that financed the deal. At their insistence, in an effort to attract a white audience, the station installed the Evergreen computer system that programmed the station with music from mainstream white artists such as Barbra Streisand, Barry Manilow, and Neil Diamond. After watching the ratings decline for some 18 months, Hughes pulled the plug on Evergreen and began to rebuild the station's audience.

By now Hughes was being assisted by her son, Alfred C. Liggins III, whom she had been grooming to become a hard-working entrepreneur since childhood. When he was just 12 years old she made him take a job cleaning rabbit cages at a pet store. After he graduated from high school, he wanted to get involved in the record business, but she convinced him it was a better idea to work for the family business that he could one day take over. Therefore, in 1985 he became a salesman for WOL, but he was paid no salary, forced to survive on commissions alone. As a result, he learned how to work with advertisers and found ways to drive their businesses while growing his own. In 1993 he succeeded his mother as chief executive, although she remained heavily involved as the company's chairperson. During the early 1990s she also retired from her daily talk show, which she had only taken on as a necessity.

Radio One benefited from legislation in 1992 that loosened ownership restrictions in radio. Under the so-called duopoly rule, you could now own two AM and two FM stations in the same market. At the cost of $4.7 million Radio One acquired Baltimore's WWIN-AM and sister station WWIN-FM from respected African American broadcaster Ragan Henry. A year later Radio One added two more Baltimore stations, WERQ-FM and WOLB-AM, for approximately $9 million. The company's acquisition strategy was simple yet effective: Buy underperforming stations on the cheap in the top 30 markets for African American listeners, then turn them around. By 1994 Radio One generated $17.6 million in revenues.

Radio One added to its portfolio of radio stations in 1995 with two purchases. It paid some $34 million for WKYS-FM, a Washington, D.C. station that the company had failed to buy in a 1990 attempt and resulted in the loss of a $200,000 deposit. Radio One also entered the Atlanta market with the $4.5 million acquisition of WHTA-FM. Revenues reached $23.7 million in 1996 and improved to $32.4 million a year later, and $46.1 million in 1998. Although the company posted net losses in two of those years, broadcast cash flow, an important measure in the industry, showed strong growth, improving from $9.8 million in 1996 to $13.5 million in 1997, and $21.6 million in 1998.

Ownership rules were loosened even further with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed ownership of more local stations and eliminated the cap on the number of stations a company could own nationally. Although Hughes expressed concerns that deregulation would lead to just a handful of companies controlling hundreds of radio stations, making it even more difficult for minorities and women to become owners, she also knew that if Radio One was to survive it had to continue to grow. During the second half of the 1990s the company went on an acquisition binge, adding stations and entering new markets. The company, in 1996, also moved its corporate offices from Washington, D.C., to the Maryland suburb of Lanham. In 1997 Radio One paid $20 million to buy WPHI-FM to enter the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania market. A year later the company completed several acquisitions, including the $3.8 million purchase of WYCB-AM, a Washington, D.C. station; two San Francisco stations at the cost of $22 million; the $26.5 million purchase of Detroit's WWBR-FM; and the $34.2 million acquisition of Bell Broadcasting Company, which brought with it three more Detroit radio stations. Furthermore, during 1998 the company began taking steps to go public, an idea that had been taking shape for several years.

Rapid Growth in the Late 1990s

It was a watershed year for Radio One in 1999. The company added a bevy of stations to its portfolio, including single operations in Atlanta, WAMJ-FM; St. Louis, WFUN-FM; and Boston, WBOT-FM. The company also bought a pair of Cleveland stations, WENZ-AM and WERE-AM, and three Richmond stations, WKJS-FM, WARV-FM, and WDYL-FM. To help finance these deals Radio One completed an initial public offering of stock in May 1999, underwritten by Credit Suisse First Boston, Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., BT Alex. Brown, Banc of America Securities, and Prudential Securities. The company netted $172 million, the most ever by an African American company. Hughes also held the distinction of becoming the first African American woman to serve as chairman of a publicly traded company. Not only was the company able to pay down a considerable portion of its debt, it was now in a better position to borrow money under better conditions, and to use stock to make acquisitions and reward employees. Radio One soon returned to the markets for a secondary offering, grossing another $77 million.

The buying binge continued for Radio One in 2000. It paid $1.3 billion to Clear Channel Communications, the broadcast giant that needed to divest some stations because of antitrust concerns, to acquire 12 stations in six markets: Cleveland, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Greenville, South Carolina. Also in 2000 Radio One paid $40 million to acquire three Indianapolis radio stations and a low-powered TV station from Shirk Inc., as well as six radio stations in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia, from Davis Broadcasting for $24 million in cash and stock. Because of its broader footprint, Radio One was now able to offer package deals to advertisers looking to reach the urban market on a national basis. To handle this business, the company formed a small national sales staff operating out of Washington and Detroit. Because it was now emerging as a major player in the radio industry, Radio One also attracted the attention of ABC Radio Networks, which in 2001 established an alliance with the company and ABC's Urban Advantage Network (UAB), geared toward the African American market. By devoting some of its commercial time to UAN, Radio One increased its national penetration, and UAN was now able to reach 93 percent of the African American market.

The impact of adding 21 radio stations in 2000 was evident on Radio One's balance sheet. Revenues grew to $155.7 million in 2000, almost double the $81.7 million generated a year before. In 2001, with a full year of contribution from the new stations, that total grew to $243.8 million. Also during the year, Radio One bought 15 stations from Blue Chip Broadcasting Inc. for $135 million in cash and stock. New stations included one in Minneapolis, a pair in Cincinnati, three in Columbus, four in Dayton, and six in Louisville. In addition, Radio One adjusted the mix of its portfolio in 2001 by selling a few stations, including WDLY-FM in Richmond, WJMZ-FM and WPEK-FM in South Carolina, and WARV-FM in Virginia.

Not content to merely own and operate a string of radio stations, Liggins harbored a goal of building a media company with wider scope. Acquiring a low-powered television station with cable penetration was in keeping with this goal, as was striking a deal in 2002 with XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. to provide a channel on the nationwide subscription-based radio service. But Liggins's dream was to launch an African American targeted cable television station to rival Black Entertainment Network. In 1999 he had realized that while Hispanics had several channels, African Americans had just one station, BET, aimed at them. He began seeking partners and finally found one in Comcast Corporation. The two companies agreed to establish TV One L.L.C., a cable TV network, 40 percent owned by Radio One, that would target an older and more affluent age group than BET, 25-to-54. Whether TV One would begin a new chapter for Radio One, marking a seminal point in its growth as an African American media empire, remained to be seen, however.

Principal Subsidiaries: Bell Broadcasting Company; Radio One Licenses, L.L.C.; Satellite One, L.L.C.

Principal Competitors: Clear Channel Communications, Inc.; Cumulus Media Inc.; Infinity Broadcasting Corporation.

Related information about Radio

The transmission of sound signals through space by means of radio-frequency electromagnetic waves. In 1888 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz produced and detected radio waves, developing the equations made by James Clerk Maxwell. Guglielmo Marconi constructed a device to translate radio waves into electrical signals, and in 1901 transmitted signals across the Atlantic Ocean. Prior to World War 1, radio messages were sent between land stations and ships, and between land and aircraft. In 1918, a radiotelegraph message was transmitted from Wales to Australia. Radio broadcasting became routinely available during the 1920s, when such institutions as the BBC (1922) came into being. Since the 1920s, radio transmission has improved enormously. The introduction of transistors (1948) and integrated circuits revolutionized receivers, and higher radio frequencies have been introduced (for example, FM or frequency modulation). The development of stereo has proved particularly suitable for the broadcasting of music. Both FM and AM (amplitude modulation) radio depend on analog technology. Most radio broadcasters are now developing digital audio broadcasting, which offers a higher quality of sound and allows a massive increase in the number of radio channels that can be fitted to the world's electromagnetic spectrum. Wavebands for international communication now rely on satellites for transmission. The clockwork or wind-up radio, commercially marketed since 1996, has further revolutionized the scope of radio broadcasting. Needing neither batteries nor electricity, its power-source is an internal spring-driven generator powered by hand, enabling people in remote parts of the world where affordable energy is scarce to keep abreast of current developments.

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Radio is the wireless transmission of signals, by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of light.

Radio waves

Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, created whenever a charged object (in normal radio transmission, an electron) accelerates with a frequency that lies in the radio frequency (RF) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. In radio, this acceleration is caused by an alternating current in an antenna. Radio frequencies occupy the range from a few tens of hertz to three hundred gigahertz, although commercially important uses of radio use only a small part of this spectrum.The Electromagnetic Spectrum, University of Tennessee, Dept. margin-top: 4px">

ELF - SLF - ULF/VF - VLF - LF/LW - MW - HF/SW - VHF - UHF - SHF - EHF
Electromagnetic radio spectrum

Other types of electromagnetic radiation, with frequencies above the RF range, are microwave, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. Since the energy of an individual photon of radio frequency is too low to remove an electron from an atom, radio waves are classified as non-ionizing radiation. The word 'radio' is used to describe this phenomenon, and television, radio, and cell phone transmissions are all classed as radio frequency emissions. The word appears in a 1907 article by Lee de Forest, was adopted by the United States Navy in 1912 and became common by the time of the first commercial broadcasts in the United States in the 1920s.

Invention

The identity of the original inventor of radio, at the time called wireless telegraphy, is contentious. The controversy over who invented the radio, with the benefit of hindsight, can be broken down as follows:

Guglielmo Marconi was an early radio experimenter and founded the first commercial organization devoted to the development and use of radio. Further refined as a lightning detector, he presented it to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society on May 7, 1895.
Reginald Fessenden _{www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/59.html} and Lee de Forest invented amplitude-modulated (AM) radio, so that more than one station can send signals (as opposed to spark-gap radio, where one transmitter covers the entire bandwidth of the spectrum).
Edwin H. Armstrong invented frequency-modulated (FM) radio, so that an audio signal can avoid "static," that is, interference from electrical equipment and atmospherics.

Early radios ran the entire power of the transmitter through a carbon microphone. While some early radios used some type of amplification through electric current or battery, until the mid 1920s the most common type of receiver was the crystal set. In the 1920s, amplifying vacuum tube radio receivers and transmitters came into use.

Brief history

In 1893 in St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made devices for his experiments with electricity. www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/collection/people.php?taid=&id=1234597&lid=1 The descriptions contained all the elements that were later incorporated into radio systems before the development of the vacuum tube. He initially experimented with magnetic receivers, unlike the coherers (detecting devices consisting of tubes filled with iron filings which had been invented by Temistocle Calzecchi-Onesti at Fermo in Italy in 1884) used by Guglielmo Marconi and other early experimenters. Tesla is usually considered the first to apply the mechanism of electrical conduction to wireless practices.

In 1896 Marconi was awarded the British patent 12039, Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus there-for, for radio. In 1897 he established the world's first radio station on the Isle of Wight, England. Marconi opened the world's first "wireless" factory in Hall Street, Chelmsford, England in 1898, employing around 50 people. Around 1900, Tesla opened the Wardenclyffe Tower facility and advertised services. Tesla claimed that Wardenclyffe, as part of a world system of transmitters, would have allowed secure multichannel transceiving of information, universal navigation, time synchronization, and a global location system.

The next great invention was the vacuum tube detector, invented by a team of Westinghouse engineers. On Christmas Eve, 1906, Reginald Fessenden used a synchronous rotary-spark transmitter for the first radio program broadcast, from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible. The first radio news program was broadcast August 31, 1920 by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan. The first college radio station, 2ADD, renamed WRUC in 1940, began broadcasting October 14, 1920 from Union College, Schenectady, New York. The first regular entertainment broadcasts commenced in 1922 from the Marconi Research Centre at Writtle, near Chelmsford, England.

One of the first developments in the early 20th century (1900-1959) was that aircraft used commercial AM radio stations for navigation. This continued until the early 1960s when VOR systems finally became widespread (though AM stations are still marked on U.S. aviation charts). In the early 1930s, single sideband and frequency modulation were invented by amateur radio operators. Radio was used to transmit pictures visible as television as early as the 1920s. In 1954, Regency introduced a pocket transistor radio, the TR-1, powered by a "standard 22.5 V Battery".

In 1960, Sony introduced its first transistorized radio, small enough to fit in a vest pocket, and able to be powered by a small battery. In 1963 color television was commercially transmitted, and the first (radio) communication satellite, TELSTAR, was launched. In the late 1960s, the U.S. long-distance telephone network began to convert to a digital network, employing digital radios for many of its links. In the 1970s, LORAN became the premier radio navigation system. Soon, the U.S. Navy experimented with satellite navigation, culminating in the invention and launch of the GPS constellation in 1987. In the early 1990s, amateur radio experimenters began to use personal computers with audio cards to process radio signals. In 1994, the U.S. Army and DARPA launched an aggressive, successful project to construct a software radio that could become a different radio on the fly by changing software.

Uses of radio

Many of radio's early uses were maritime, for sending telegraphic messages using Morse code between ships and land. One of the most memorable uses of marine telegraphy was during the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, including communications between operators on the sinking ship and nearby vessels, and communications to shore stations listing the survivors.

Radio was used to pass on orders and communications between armies and navies on both sides in World War I; The United States passed on President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points to Germany via radio during the war.

Another use of radio in the pre-war years was the development of detecting and locating aircraft and ships by the use of radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging).

Today, radio takes many forms, including wireless networks, mobile communications of all types, as well as radio broadcasting. Read more about radio's history.

Before the advent of television, commercial radio broadcasts included not only news and music, but dramas, comedies, variety shows, and many other forms of entertainment. For more, see radio programming.

There are a number of uses of radio:

Audio

AM broadcast radio sends music and voice in the Medium Frequency (MF?0.300 MHz to 3 MHz) radio spectrum. AM radio uses amplitude modulation, in which louder sounds at the microphone causes wider fluctuations in the transmitter power while the transmitter frequency remains unchanged. Transmissions are affected by static because lightning and other sources of radio add their radio waves to the ones from the transmitter.

FM broadcast radio sends music and voice, with higher fidelity than AM radio. In frequency modulation, louder sounds at the microphone cause the transmitter frequency to fluctuate farther, the transmitter power stays constant. During unusual upper atmospheric conditions, FM signals are occasionally reflected back towards the Earth by the ionosphere, resulting in Long distance FM reception. FM receivers are subject to the capture effect, which causes the radio to only receive the strongest signal when multiple signals appear on the same frequency. FM receivers are relatively immune to lightning and spark interference.

FM Subcarrier services are secondary signals transmitted "piggyback" along with the main program. In some countries, FM radios automatically retune themselves to the same channel in a different district by using sub-bands.

Aviation voice radios use VHF AM. (Use of FM would result in stronger stations blocking out reception of weaker stations due to FM's capture effect). Aircraft fly high enough that their transmitters can be received hundreds of miles (kilometres) away, even though they are using VHF.

Marine voice radios can use AM in the shortwave High Frequency (HF?3 MHz to 30 MHz) radio spectrum for very long ranges or narrowband FM in the VHF spectrum for much shorter ranges. Fidelity is sacrificed to use a smaller range of radio frequencies, usually five kHz of deviation, rather than the 75 kHz used by FM broadcasts and 25 kHz used by TV sound.

Civil and military HF (high frequency) voice services use shortwave radio to contact ships at sea, aircraft and isolated settlements.

TETRA, Terrestrial Trunked Radio is a digital cell phone system for military, police and ambulances. Commercial services such as XM, WorldSpace and Sirius offer encrypted digital Satellite radio.

Telephony

Cell phones transmit to a local cell site (transmitter/receiver) that ultimately connects to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through an optic fiber or microwave radio and other network elements. Satellite phones come in two types: INMARSAT and Iridium.

Video

Television sends the picture as AM and the sound as FM, with the sound carrier a fixed frequency (4.5 Mhz in the NTSC system) away from the video carrier.

Digital television uses quadrature amplitude modulation. Although many current and future codecs can be sent in the MPEG-2 transport stream container format, as of 2006 most systems use a standard-definition format almost identical to DVD: MPEG-2 video in Anamorphic widescreen and MPEG layer 2 (MP2) audio. High-definition television is possible simply by using a higher-resolution picture, but H.264/AVC is being considered as a replacement video codec in some regions for its improved compression. Loran systems also used time-of-flight radio signals, but from radio stations on the ground. VOR systems (used by aircraft), have an antenna array that transmits two signals simultaneously. When the VOR station is collocated with DME (Distance Measuring Equipment), the aircraft can determine its bearing and range from the station, thus providing a fix from only one ground station.

Radar

Radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) detects things at a distance by bouncing radio waves off them. Some can superimpose sonar data and map data from GPS position.

Search radars scan a wide area with pulses of short radio waves.

Emergency services

Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRBs), Emergency Locating Transmitters (ELTs) or Personal Locator Beacons (PLBs) are small radio transmitters that satellites can use to locate a person or vehicle needing rescue.

Data (digital radio)

Most new radio systems are digital, see also:Digital TV, Satellite Radio, Digital Audio Broadcasting. The oldest form of digital broadcast was spark gap telegraphy, used by pioneers such as Marconi. This is very wasteful of both radio frequencies and power.

The next advance was continuous wave telegraphy, or CW (Continuous Wave), in which a pure radio frequency, produced by a vacuum tube electronic oscillator was switched on and off by a key. A receiver with a local oscillator would "heterodyne" with the pure radio frequency, creating a whistle-like audio tone. Strictly, on-off keying of a carrier should be known as "Interrupted Continuous Wave" or ICW.

Radio teletypes usually operate on short-wave (HF) and are much loved by the military because they create written information without a skilled operator. Microwave dishes on satellites, telephone exchanges and TV stations usually use quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). A special bit pattern is used to locate the beginning of a frame.

Systems that need reliability, or that share their frequency with other services, may use "corrected orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing" or COFDM. Modern COFDM systems use a small computer to make and decode the signal with digital signal processing, which is more flexible and far less expensive than older systems that implemented separate electronic channels. COFDM is used for WiFi, some cell phones, Digital Radio Mondiale, Eureka 147, and many other local area network, digital TV and radio standards. Microwave ovens use intense radio waves to heat food. The microwave frequencies used are actually about a factor of ten below the resonant frequency.) Diathermy equipment is used in surgery for sealing of blood vessels. Induction furnaces are used for melting metal for casting. Conceptually, spacecraft propulsion: Radiation pressure from intense radio waves has been proposed as a propulsion method for an interstellar probe called Starwisp.

Other

Amateur radio is a hobby in which enthusiasts purchase or build their own equipment and use radio for their own enjoyment. Several forms of radio were pioneered by radio amateurs and later became commercially important, including FM, single-sideband AM, digital packet radio and satellite repeaters.

Personal radio services such as Citizens' Band Radio, Family Radio Service, Multi-Use Radio Service and others exist in North America to provide simple, (usually) short range communication for individuals and small groups, without the overhead of licensing. Various plans included transmitting power using microwaves, and the technique has been demonstrated. These schemes include, for example, solar power stations in orbit beaming energy down to terrestrial users.

Radio remote control use sof radio waves to transmit control data to a remote object as in some early forms of guided missile, some early TV remotes and a range of model boats, cars and aeroplanes. Large industrial remote-controlled equipment such as cranes and switching locomotives now usually use digital radio techniques to ensure safety and reliability. Energy autarkic radio technology consists of a small radio transmitter powered by environmental energy (push of a button, temperature differences, light, vibrations, etc.).

References

Leigh White, Buck Fuller and the Dymaxion World (refers to Waldo Warren as the inventor of the word radio), in: The Saturday Evening Post, 14 October 1944, cited in: Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (eds.), Your Private Sky, Lars M端ller Publishers, Baden/Switzerland, 1999, page 132.

Chronology

Key Dates:
1980: The first radio station is acquired.
1987: The second station is acquired.
1993: The founder's son succeeds her as chief executive.
1999: The company is taken public.
2000: A dozen Clear Channel stations are acquired.
2004: A joint venture is formed with Comcast to launch a cable TV network.

Additional topics

Company HistoryBroadcasting

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