San Joaquin Delta College Returns To The Airwaves

On January 1st, San Joaquin Delta College rebooted onto the FM airwaves after a 20 year lapse.  The station had been on the air when Radio TV department head Will Story was a student, but the administration had axed it in the mid- 90s.  When he came back to lead the department, Professor Story vowed to get the radio station back on the air, and took his sabbatical to wade through all the paperwork of applying for a LPFM and procuring funding. He recruited former student Governor Don Maszewski to lead the effort and be the new radio station …

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Tlingit Tribe in Yakutat Alaska

In early November, I went to work on a new station for the Tlingit Tribe in Yakutat, Alaska. The station is being spearheaded by Gloria Benson, who works on social services for the tribe. The new studio is in a building that was once the school for the town, but is now the courthouse and planning department.  Yakutat peaks at about 780 residents.  There are no roads that go from yakutat to anywhere- the only way in is by airplane, or there is a ferry during the summer. It is about 30 miles from a gigantic glacier. A major …

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Dine Policy Institute

Construction has gotten to the halfway mark with the Diné Policy Institute.  This school, in Tsaile, Arizona, was the first indigenous owned and operated college in the United States.  I worked with the team there to build a metal framework to attach to their existing railing at the top of the dome on their beautiful 1970s era main college building.

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Better Antennas For Low Power Radio

In order to get the low power radio bill through the political logjam that we call the United States Congress, we had to agree to some pretty draconian standards to prevent interference to existing stations– standards far more stringent than most commercial stations have to abide by.  We accepted this unfair compromise because we knew that in real life, interference from 100 watt transmitters would almost never be

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Rootio Builds A New Kind Of Community Radio In Uganda

This spring, Petri traveled to Uganda to work with an exciting new project in community radio, Rootio ( Rootio.org). Spearheaded by Chris Csikszentmihalyi,  this project aims to develop a new type of small community radio station that is deeply conneced to the mobile phone networks. Different stations will take different forms, but the smallest of the new stations will have no studio– all talk shows will be conducted using the

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A Two-Hop Link for Radio Voz

Just returned from another round of work on the new radio station for Radio Voz, the radio station of Idaho Community Action Network in Burley, Idaho. This 5600 watt station is a progressive, Spanish language voice in one of the most conservative states. It has an incredibly passionate and loyal audience, even though it is just over a year old now.

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Fun in Montreal at the AMARC 30th Anniversary

Pete Tridish and April Glaser drove to Montreal to attend the 30th Anniversary Conference of AMARC, the World Association of Community Broadcasters. AMARC is officially based in Montreal and it was wonderful to see old friends from community radio stations around the world as well as to meet new people who have established exciting stations in places like South Africa, India, and Western Canada.

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Radio in Nicaragua for the Mulukuku Co-operative

Our first project in Nicaragua was at the Maria Luisa Ortiz co-operative in Mulukuku, a station that was started with the assistance of our friends at Radios Populares. You can see a great video about the launch of the station here. They run an amazing clinic. They wanted us to check out their antenna, which has trouble when it rains, so we climbed up and redid a bunch of the connections.

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