Ofcom, the independent telecommunications regulator and competition authority for the communication industry announced the award of five new community radio licences for the South East region of the United Kingdom, including one for Insanity Radio, the official Students’ Union Radio Station of Royal Holloway.

After applying for a licence almost four years ago, during Ofcom’s shake-up of the analogue radio wave spectrum, Insanity Radio has finally been successful, in its second application for a frequency licence. Over five station managers have been involved in the license application, which could pave the way to a permanent presence on FM, as well as signal the end for the station’s low-power AM frequency, 1287.

With cross-campus elections looming for the next station manager and assistant station manager, this licence has arrived at a pivotal point in Insanity’s thirteen-year history.

The station began as the Radio Society in Spring 1997, after Ed Harry had sent four delegates (Richard Clarke, Ian Joliet, Simon Delany and Karen Williams) to the annual Student Radio Conference in Edinburgh. Insanity Radio was officially formed a year later, taking its name loosely from the fact that Royal Holloway’s founder Thomas Holloway also opened the Holloway Sanatorium, a hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill.

After broadcasting exclusively online, the station started broadcasting under Restricted Service Licences in 1998, which meant that broadcasts on AM and FM radio could only be for 28 days at a time, twice a year. The station originally operated from a studio in Founder’s Building with a satellite dish outside a window on the building’s roof, before being forced to move out of Founder’s in 1999, where the Insanity moved into its current location in the Queen’s Annexe.

Community radio services ‘typically cover a small geographical area’ to be provided not-for profit. These services focus on the ‘delivery of specific social benefits to enrich a community’. In its application Insanity pledges to broadcast a service ‘for students and other young people in Egham and the surrounding area’. The station will ‘include education-orientated output as well as providing a public forum for important student-related issues’ with particular focus on the local area. It will also aim to ‘develop the relationship between student and non-student residents’.