This is the Coast Celebrates A Year On-Air

Today we are celebrating our first birthday by revealing some of our plans for the next 12 months.

A year ago, we set out to provide a full local radio service for the Yorkshire Coast with local news, information, events, and local presenters.

It’s been an amazing year and the support that both the audience and local businesses have shown for the station has been heart-warming.

We’ve managed to hit the ground running with a full daily radio service for the Yorkshire Coast, we’ve worked with Saint Catherine’s and the Scarborough Business Ambassadors to deliver Bring a Pound to Work Day, with Scarborough Athletic to launch This is the Coast Extra and with hundreds of local groups and organisations to provide daily news and information about life on the coast.

In the next year we will build on that progress and one of our main ambitions is to help bring DAB Digital Radio to more areas of the Yorkshire Coast.

OFCOM have announced that later this year they intend to seek applications from people interested in building and operating what they call a “Small Scale DAB Multiplex” for the Yorkshire Coast.

Today we can reveal that This is the Coast will spearhead an application to build and operate the service.

The DAB Multiplex will cover an area from Whitby in the North to Bridlington in the South and will broadcast as far inland as Pickering.

It will be able to transmit between 20 and 30 radio stations.

We obviously want to broadcast This is the Coast on the new transmitters but a DAB multiplex for the Yorkshire Coast will provide many more opportunities.

We will enhance our “This is the Coast Extra” service to provide a news and speech service which could include bringing commentary on Scarborough Athletic games to DAB. We will also look at ways of developing the technology to enable more local sports clubs to gain access to the airwaves.

Over the coming weeks we will be talking to other local broadcasters about getting involved in the project. Some of them will be other commercial stations, some will be volunteer lead community stations.

OFCOM stipulate that a number of channels on the Multiplex will need to be reserved for Community Radio stations. There are currently two community stations in Scarborough and the creation of the DAB multiplex could allow others to set up in Whitby, Filey or Bridlington.

Over the coming weeks we will be talking to the existing stations about how they can be involved in the project. We are working on a finance plan that will enable the community stations to access the DAB platform at little or possibly no cost.

We’ll also be talking to a number of quasi-national stations about adding their services to the platform, it could see specialist country music, dance or jazz stations being available on the Yorkshire Coast for the first time.

This project is about creating a broadcast platform for the entire Yorkshire Coast and helping the area maintain it’s identity.

Over the last few years, the broadcast industry has seen almost all of it’s local radio stations get amalgamated into national stations, we want to help re-create a strong local broadcasting industry. The pandemic has demonstrated just how important local news and information is and how important it is to have outlets where the community can come together and share local information.

In the next 18 months Scarborough Borough Council will disappear and be replaced by a North Yorkshire wide body. In the East Riding discussions continue about the future shape of local government. We feel it’s more important than ever that the Yorkshire Coast should have strong broadcast ecosystem, so that the communities’ voices can be heard, local issues can be explored, and local groups, businesses and individuals can have a platform where they can reflect living on the Yorkshire Coast.

The last year has been quite a journey, thank you for your support, we hope you’ll join us on the journey to come.