Mountain Spirit's Blog

By Randall Richards, Mountain Spirit Media

Former University community radio host Jay Barnett and I have been putting our heads together for the past year on how to create a local radio station where we could re-broadcast interviews and internet content onto the FM band here in Wanaka, New Zealand. In effect, our goal has been, to do an end-run around the mainstream media’s iron grip on free speech, and their constant barrage of “The Single Source of Truth” narrative.

Enter Reality Check Radio, a recent initiative by Voices for Freedom. “RCR” has a great line-up of experienced, seasoned professional media anchors and interviewers as well as young gun content providers on the front lines of New Zealand’s information war.  Of course, hearing great interviews with guests from all over the world, informed and intelligent interviewees is great for the converted, but how do we get the messages out beyond the echo chamber?

Citizen Low Power FM (LPFM) Radio is just that. It’s one very effective way to reach that 35% of fence-sitters, who once hear the truth will recognize it when they hear it, and be drawn to hear more. They can smell it.
How does it work? It’s easy, legal, inexpensive and easy to set up.
There a few ground rules though:
– Choose from within a range of FM frequency bands allocated for local community radio on either the bottom or top end of the FM band.
– Don’t use a frequency that’s already being used. Refer to the online resource that shows what local community operators are already broadcasting in your area, and avoid using that frequency, Simply choose another one that is free within the allowed spectrum.
– Have an announcement hourly that states the operator’s name and contact info (in this case of re-broadcasting a streamed interview from Reality Check Radio or the like, that’s taken care of as it’s usually embedded in the interview somewhere.
– Use a wattage on your transmitter that’s no more than 1 to 1.5 watts in power.
That’s about it.
But how does this work?

The theme of this article is  “See one, do one”. The purpose is to give you enough information to purchase the needed gear and easily set up your own low power FM station in your house or even outside on a hill top. The linear range of these units are “line of sight” averaging between 5-10km depending your location and that of the antenna. Since the range isn’t huge, it’s important to find the highest ground or in our case, we may put one our moored boat with a battery pack. Currently the community station we’ve just fired up is in someone’s home, but we’re working on improving the antenna set-up for better coverage. By setting it up on the roof with a coaxial extension cord we should see better results. But the important thing is we’re live!

Simple setup streaming from the internet onto a tablet, phone, or computer, plugged into the small FM transmitter

Closeup of transmitter, which also has a direct line-in for a mic. The tablet plugs into the AUX

So what’s needed? Below are some links to the basics including a review of what to buy and what to avoid in FM transmitters. We’ll be most likely installing one in our house, (once I check with the rest of the family, of course) with a roof-top antenna of some sort. Because of our location, we’ll have great reach of the Hawea Valley, but won’t interfere with the main town’s transmitter so we’ll stick with 107fm here at Mountain Spirit

Simple hookup of the transmitter on a bookshelf.

Ok, here’s the fine print from the NZ Government’s Radio Spectrum Management page on low power FM broadcasting which confirms what Jay has shared about the parameters one needs to follow. The Radio Heritage Foundation’s page on Low Power FM stations, (LPFM) was a list of who’s on what frequency in your town. The LPFM Society of NZ seems like a great site for resources and to help further the cause of community broadcasting and transmitting.

Lastly here are some links provided by Jay on where and what to purchase in order to get your own community station going, so you can re-broadcast Realty Check Radio, your own content, or that which you pick off the internet.

Caption FM Dipole Antenna High Gain Outdoor Antenna

Jay writes: “Here is a full kit. I think this transmitter is much better quality than mine and for a bit extra money.” FM Radio Transmitter Long Range And GP-2 Antenna with Cable Completed Kit

Screenshot of Voices for Freedom’s landing page, featuring a cool promo shot for Realty Check Radio . NOTE: Neither the author nor Mountain Spirit Media are affiliated with VFF nor RCR. This screenshot is included under the “publish first edit later/asking forgiveness easier than getting permission” principle.

Thanks to Jay Barnett for his hours of volunteer work, co-facilitating the occasional workshop with me on, not only LPFM, but emergency preparedness talks on Walkie Talkies and VHF radios, and for providing the guts of this article through messages and discussions. Here’s Jay showing the basic LPFM setup of tablet plugged into the small FM transmitter

Thanks also to Gerry Pyves for his leadership as local Wanaka VFF Coordinator over the past difficult year and a half, through mandates and lockdowns, and his good natured approach and enthusiasm for LPFM. He recently passed the torch of VFF leadership in Wanaka on to a wonderful new coordinator.
For more info on the author head over to www.mtnspirit.nz/msm

Update: Sept 2023:
We’ve temporarily set up this FM unit in Hawea, New Zealand, about 15min from Wanaka, with a few minor tweaks from when this article was originally written:

We’ve added a Logitech Bluetooth Adapter as an interface between the phone/tablet and the FM transmitter. It is normally used to allow you to receive live streaming, but in this case we’re using it to transmit the live stream. Notice also the antenna is not attached to the transmitter. We’ve introduced an 5m/15′ coax cable to the extend the antenna to be cable-tied outside the house, giving us much better range and coverage.

This way, the phone can be anywhere in the house, in this case on my bedside table, taking a charge and out of the way of the transmitter in another room. Any guesses as to what the little device is next to the phone? Like my choice of night-time reading?
A couple of recent important notes from Jay:
1. Be sure to turn plug the antenna into the transmitter before turning on power. Otherwise you can damage the unit.
2. Plug the input cable coming from the phone/tablet into the AUX not the MIC.
3. Adjust the output volume on the unit by using an FM radio and referencing the volume compared to other stations and see where your levels compare to theirs.

Note: This blog post was mistakenly taken down on 20230918 and I’ve had to reconstruct it and repost under a different url. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to retrieve all the text and images.
Sorry for any inconvenience. Randall