Recent legislation, a limited budget and a host of other problems are making waves for the university's only fully student-run radio station, WAKE Radio.

According to Business Manager Hugh Labusohr, the problems piling up against the Internet-only broadcast could lead to extreme hardships in the near future and even put the station out of operation altogether.

Labusohr explains that many of the issues causing difficulty for WAKE Radio revolve around its broadcast form.

As an internet-only station, WAKE Radio has to find unique ways to solve some of the traditional problems faced by FM broadcasts, not the least of which is finding music to air.

"Since we're an Internet broadcast, record labels really have no incentive to give us CDs," Labusohr said. He explained that to compensate for this dilemma, the station has previously submitted play lists of the music it broadcasts to the College Music Journal. "Since we're not a member of the FCC, we report to the CMJ," he said.

This registry, Labusohr explained, in effect validates the station's broadcast and, thus, encourages record labels to send it their music.

The problem that WAKE Radio will soon be forced to face is that the CMJ has decided to discontinue accepting play lists from Internet-only stations. This will, according to Labusohr, make the process of collecting music exponentially more difficult.

"It would be very hard to convince record labels to keep giving us CDs when we're not reporting to anyone," Labusohr said. "Right now we don't buy any of our CDs. All our CDs are given to us."

According to Labusohr, any music the station receives comes from the CMJ or as a result of calls to record labels made by the station's music director; however, the former method accounts for most of the station's collection.

A second problem with which WAKE Radio may soon have to cope also relates to its Web-based nature.

"Recently Congress passed HR 5469 and it was signed into law," WAKE Radio DJ junior Will Moseley said. "This act not only levies for per song per listener royalties on Web-based broadcast streams, but also requires retroactive royalty payments from 1998-2002."

Labusohr worries that the penalties incurred by the new legislation may be too much for his underfunded station.

"It's going to get put under, especially considering that the school isn't going to give us enough money to begin with," he said.

Labusohr reports that this year Wake Radio operated on about ,075 and the financial outlook for next year is not much better.

"I put in a significant budget increase request in the fall when the SBAC had hearings," Labusohr said. "They basically said that I was overprepared and that I gave them more information than they needed and that they wanted to get me out of the meeting as quickly as possible because they were busy." The final budget awarded to the station only included a increase from this year.

Both Labusohr and junior station manager Brett Baxter said they had hoped that they could take their broadcast to the FM dial, but, as Labusohr explains, the chances of such an expansion are slim.

"Our adviser basically shot down any hopes of going FM," he said.

Citing the fact that the university already has one FM station, WFDD, the financial capital required to start an FM broadcast and overcoming a FCC halt on licensing, Labusohr says that James Banks, that station manager of WFDD, told him and Baxter that a move to FM anytime in the near future is unfeasible.

There remain a few possibilities that Labusohr and Baxter are entertaining. For example, Labusohr says that he and Baxter have discussed broadcasting via the university's cable television system. Such a broadcast would require students to use a special cable splitter and connect their TV's to their stereo receivers.

"The problem is that a lot of students on campus don't have that nice of a stereo system," Labusohr said. "Other ideas were for us to broadcast in Shorty's and perhaps the new coffee shop via the cable system."