About the station / 102.7 FM / Leith, Edinburgh
It started with a borrowed mixing desk, a low-power licence and four people who were sick of hearing the same forty songs. The first broadcast went out on a Tuesday night in October 2011 from a damp room above a chandlery. Roughly nine folk were listening. Two of them phoned in.
We have moved twice since then, learned how to fix our own transmitter and put out well over five thousand hours of live radio. The desk is better. The stubbornness is exactly the same.
Studio one, Bonnington Mill, a Thursday night
13
Years on air without a single advert break for a bank
Northlight exists because a lot of good music made in Scotland never reaches the people who would love it. Bands from Dundee, fiddle players from Lewis, a producer working out of a spare room in Govan. Someone has to play the records, read out the gig listings and answer the phone at half eleven at night.
Every presenter here is a volunteer with a day job. Nobody auditions with a demo tape in a fake accent. If you can talk honestly for two hours and you know your records, we will find you a slot. That policy has given us a night gardening show, a Gaelic language hour and a Sunday programme run entirely by sixth-year pupils from Trinity Academy.
“Community radio only works if the community can actually get into the building. Ours has a doorbell and it gets used.”
We hold a community radio licence and file our accounts publicly every year. Anyone can read them.
Written into our licence commitment, and honestly the easiest promise we have ever had to keep.
The practical bit
Our FM transmitter sits on the roof of a mill in Bonnington and covers Leith, Edinburgh city centre, Portobello, Musselburgh and, on a clear night with the wind behind it, most of the north Fife coast. A relay at Burntisland fills in the gaps across the Forth. Beyond that, the stream carries us to Shetland, Toronto and a fishing boat somewhere off Peterhead that emails us most winters.
Roughly half of what we need comes from listeners paying a few pounds a month. The rest comes from small local advertisers, the odd arts grant and our summer ceilidh fundraiser. Nobody at Northlight takes a wage from advertising, and we turn down anything we would not recommend to a neighbour: no payday lenders, no gambling apps.
Two part-time staff keep the lights on and the licence in order. Everything you hear on air is made by volunteers, from the folk show to the Saturday football phone-in. We train new presenters in blocks of six weeks, twice a year, and no previous experience is needed. Meet the current lot on the presenters page.
The desk is staffed On air 24 hours. Studio desk Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm. Request line open 7pm to midnight. Bring a demo, bring a record you want played, bring your band. Address is Unit 7, Bonnington Mill, 72 Newhaven Road, Edinburgh EH6 5QG, buzzer marked Northlight.
Northlight Radio keeps going because people pay in, advertise with us or turn up on a Wednesday to learn the desk. Any of the three is welcome. Tell us which one you fancy.
