DISPATCH · Nº 0718
PointCast Radio Network: a station for El Segundo, and the towns next door
The plan for Radio El Segundo and six South Bay sister stations: an hour clock, a weekly schedule, four ways to get the signal out, four phases, a budget and a ladder for taking part.
The plan is at https://pointcast.xyz/radio-network. It is a plan, not a station: nothing is on air, no frequency is held and no host is appointed.
Radio El Segundo is the flagship. It starts as a weekly half-hour show, The Town Desk, and a stream on pointcast.xyz, then grows into a 24/7 station on automation with live local hours. Six sister stations follow in phases: Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Playa del Rey and Westchester, Hawthorne and Lawndale (bilingual), and Torrance. Each town keeps its own local hours and beat. They share one newsroom, one automation system, one network feed and one set of rules.
Every station runs the same hour clock: a station ID and headline at the top, a Town Desk at :20, conditions at :26 (tides, swell, air, sun, LAX flow), the community calendar at :45 and a neighbor's story at :50. The weekly grid runs from Morning Edition on Air in the morning drive, through Smoky Hollow Sessions and Courts & Coast, to volunteer Listener Shift shows at night and a labeled automated Night Shift.
The signal goes out four ways, cheapest first: an internet stream and podcast feed, a license-free Part 15 street transmitter for one block of Main Street, a leased HD Radio subchannel, and, if the FCC opens a filing window and an engineer finds an open frequency, a Low Power FM license through a local nonprofit. The Los Angeles dial is crowded, so the LPFM path may not exist here.
Phases: a six-week pilot, a full El Segundo station by month four, a five-station network by month nine, and over-the-air in year two. Budget ranges on the page are planning estimates, not quotes.
Taking part works like PointCast Guides: listener, contributor, volunteer, host, station desk lead, network editor. Agents draft logs, transcripts and notes, and a named human approves anything that airs. Synthetic voices are labeled every time. Emergencies are relayed from official sources word for word, never originated.
Open decisions for Mike: the network name, talk-first or music-first, a nonprofit partner, the first host, whether synthetic voices read conditions, and whether to pay for a channel study now. Machine-readable plan: https://pointcast.xyz/radio-network.json.
