Curtis Blankinship visits with Free Radio Berkeley founder Stephen Dunifer
10 min read
Curtis Blankinship: Right, so I’m sitting here with Stephen Dunifer from Free Radio Berkeley. You’re going to try to do 35-watt transmitters?
Stephen Dunifer: As a manufacturer, you’re allowed to self-test for Part 73 compliance. So basically the plan is to have a line of transmitters ranging from 25 or 30 watts up to 600 watts, four different units, and run those through testing and hopefully they’ll meet spec.
And then from that point we’ll be Part 73-compliant, which means the transmitters are totally legal for any broadcast FM broadcast service, except for LPFM applications.
Curtis Blankinship: Well, so who would use these?
Stephen Dunifer: There’s going to be actually a new window opening for translators, which require something in the 250-watt range.
Curtis Blankinship: So they’re a repeater. A translator is like a repeater.
Stephen Dunifer: Right, right. There’s going to be a whole window opening and we’re going to largely focus on outside the country because all the current designs, a lot of people in developing countries, whatever, are using a lot of cheap translators from China and they don’t survive. I mean, they don’t last.
Because they make the same design error whatever that every other manufacturer does. As you notice in the box you just loaded, we put all our heat sink and everything, all the cooling is on the outside. (Yeah)
And what most everyone else does, I can’t think of any other exceptions, but is they insist on putting the heat sink inside the box with the fins down, which, it’s really silly.
Because a transistor is not 100% efficient. They’re like 70% to at most 80% efficient. So if you have a 100-watt transmitter, you’ve got to put about 150 watts or so into it in terms of power, because the difference is going to be heat. Heat has to go somewhere.
And when you put a heat sink inside the box, the fins down, which radiate the heat so then they put a fan or two in the box trying to pull air underneath the fins in the hope that they won’t get a hotspot that’ll degrade over time the transistor.
And plus, when you put a fan there, you’re going to suck in dirt and insects, and the filter get clogged pretty soon.
Basically Part 73 gives us cover to fully manufacture here without them questioning anything. I mean, it’s compliant with FCC 73, so they can’t say, well, your transmitter is actually going to somewhere in the U.S.
That was the thing that got Ramsey Electronics a long time ago. They said export only. That didn’t work well for ’em.
Curtis Blankinship: So you’re compliant here, but exporting anyway. (Yeah.)
Stephen Dunifer: Well, and we can sell the translators, anybody else that needs the small stations, even commercial ones, need small backup transmitters in case the big unit goes down.
Curtis Blankinship: So, or you can get more distance to go further.
Stephen Dunifer: Right, if you’ve gotten a translator allocation. Yes, the point being that in an air condition, it’ll survive. But when you take it into a mud hut in Mali with 110 degree in the shade, these transmitters will die very, very quickly.
Curtis Blankinship: Well, and so what are they doing in Mali, in a hut with your transmitter in Mali?
Stephen Dunifer: Most of ’em were various liberation struggles. So, and we had, was it Cameroon, I guess Cameroon, we had a 600-watt unit running. It was running 24-7 until a political coup took it off the air.
Curtis Blankinship: But they didn’t take it off the air because they weren’t following (No, no) journalistic standards or—
Stephen Dunifer: No, it was, taken off is at the point of a gun, basically.
Curtis Blankinship: Right. Well, so what do you think about, journalistic standards of NPR? Does a 35-watt, I’m going to use the word pirate radio station, need to follow journalistic standards of National Public Radio?
Stephen Dunifer: No, not necessarily, but.
Curtis Blankinship: And isn’t it the whole point? (Yeah.) You can’t get, NPR is not giving us because of these standards.
Stephen Dunifer: Well, not standards. There’s no, it’s a self-imposed censorship. There’s no standard that—I mean I remember when, after the initial court ruling, it basically stopped the FCC from proceeding legally against myself.
We had just had shortly moved before the ruling came out, had moved the station into a ripped-out bathroom as a studio.
So when the ruling came down within several days the station went 24-7 with about 25 or 30 different programmers. And I remember that it was pretty crazy.
(Former California Gov.) Pete Wilson was not well liked. And some guy went on the air and went and said, ‘I’ll give such and such to the first person who’ll bring me,’ you know, ‘Pete Wilson’s head on a stake,’ you know, so there’s no—
Curtis Blankinship: But that isn’t why they shut you down. It is just an overreach of power—
Stephen Dunifer: It was the FCC and the National Broadcasters Association. But anyway, the point is the only journalistic standard you have to worry about are just, you know, libel laws or defamation laws, and that’s applicable to whatever medium you are expressing yourself in.
So, if whatever you say on air as a fact, you know, what you perceive to be a factual statement, can stand up to a legal challenge, that’s the only real issue.
I mean, you can insult every politician in the world over the air, and that’s free speech. I mean, that’s, you know, unequivocally. And they’re public figures, so public figures, you know, aren’t as protected.
Curtis Blankinship: Well, and I’m trying to stick to what’s called solutions journalism, too. I’m not trying to take people down as much as I’m trying to give activists information that they can use to do activism.
Stephen Dunifer: Yeah. Well, there’s nothing libelous about that.
Curtis Blankinship: But I mean, do I need to indemnify my reporters?
Stephen Dunifer: No, no.
Curtis Blankinship: What they’re worried about at the low-power FM is that they’re going to sue the entire station.
Stephen Dunifer: I wouldn’t worry about it, basically. I mean, quite frankly, I mean if some local you know, whoever it is that being discussed, they’ll just give you more publicity. I mean—
Curtis Blankinship: Right. Any publicity is good publicity.
Stephen Dunifer: Yeah. I wouldn’t, I just wouldn’t worry about it basically.
Curtis Blankinship: So what do you think is going to happen with radio now? The internet—well, are you familiar with these mesh networks?
Stephen Dunifer: Oh yeah. Well, mesh, I mean, it’s two different kinds of mesh. You have the wifi mesh networks like New York (City) Mesh, which provides internet service to a lot of disadvantaged communities in New York City.
In fact, when Hurricane Sandy hit, all the major internet providers went down. And New York Mesh remained on the air, so to speak, (Wow) still providing internet service to a number of neighborhoods.
So, I mean, that’s basically taking repurposed wifi routers, flashing them with new code (open source code is available), and creating a wide-area mesh coverage. Community-based. Mm-hmm. There are community-based mesh networks all over the world.
Then there’s the LoRa mesh, which is a different mesh, but it’s not high bandwidth. It’s only like text messaging and that sort of thing, or basically low data rate transmission.
I have a design, I’m working on a sensor platform. It’s going to have a LoRa mesh radio module, and it’s going to be able to connect to other sensor platforms in a network and be able to relay sensor data back to a main collection node.
So if Node A can’t communicate with the main aggregation node, it hops its signal over to node C, which hops back over to D or G, whatever. Then G relays that signal, you know, to the main node.
Curtis Blankinship: So the whole thing doesn’t shut down just because one node is—
Stephen Dunifer: Right. Yeah. So if one node goes down, you route around it. It’s the same concept for internet traffic.
Curtis Blankinship: Well, so activists want to use this during a demonstration to communicate with each other (Yeah), like, in November or if there’s a general strike. Does the Army shut things like that down? Don’t they need to leave emergency services going and be well, 900, can they shut it down at all?
Stephen Dunifer: Well, 900 MHz is LoRa frequency. In theory you could try to jam it, but then you might end up interfering with cell service. There’s a certain portion of cell band that still operates in that general vicinity.
Curtis Blankinship: Even if they try to jam it, you can just move over to something else.
Stephen Dunifer: Because it’s more diffuse, it’s a little harder to deal with. There’s no central signal to jam. It’s all hopping around over a mesh. (Mm-hmm.) So it would be a little more difficult to deal with.
Curtis Blankinship: Well, so theoretically, can’t I get rid of these oligarchical internet people, and just can’t we just stop using the internet and start using mesh networks (No), and go all over the world with mesh networks linked together. You can’t do that?
Stephen Dunifer: You still need the internet backbone. You’ve got to have a communications backbone
Curtis Blankinship: Well, I’m glad you’re still around and still rocking and rolling . And so you’re getting people that are helping you.
Stephen Dunifer: I’ve got one younger person, Charlie, he’s finishing up his school down at UC Irvine. He’s really into the engineering electronics and stuff. So he’s been working with me for a while and continuing with a few other folks, you know, the website freeradio.org.
I had to rebuild the site because the original host disappeared and the site went down and had to rebuild the whole thing. So I’m still working on it, but it’s pretty functional right now.
Curtis Blankinship: All right. And just one more thing I just, I don’t know if you want to go on record. So, Free Radio Berkeley has never been sued for libel and they weren’t shut down for libel. It was just a power grab, basically by the FCC.
Stephen Dunifer: FCC and National Association of Broadcasters.
Curtis Blankinship: Is there any censorship element that the national broadcaster are intentionally trying to censor? Is that why they’re doing it?
Stephen Dunifer: It is always been censorship by regulation. They use regulations as a cover, you know, basically. That’s not unusual for a specific industry or interest group, corporate entity to capture whatever federal agency.
And they write the regulations such that it’s impossible for anyone else but a small group of interest to be able to comply with.
Curtis Blankinship: Right? (Yeah.) $12,000 to test in a low power FM (Yeah) transmitter. Yeah, who has that kind of money?
Stephen Dunifer: And now it’s such a narrow market, you have to amortize that cost over however many units you could sell. I mean, it’s just many ways what you have is, in this country, is a basically interlocking sets of corporate cartels.
I mean, whether it’s in broadcasting, pharmaceuticals, whatever, you’ve got a small group of corporate interests that are setting the rules and I mean, even the building materials trade industry sets the standards for what building materials are used that profit them the most.
Curtis Blankinship: I’ve had personal experience of that with fire alarms.
Stephen Dunifer: You know, the whole thing, you go back to the late ‘60s, early ‘70s when geodesic domes became a big thing and you know, people couldn’t build a dome house, because the local building codes didn’t cover it.
And they, you know, because of their whole bunch of other construction techniques that use a lot less material, they’re a lot cheaper to put up. It’s all structured to benefit a particular corporate cartel.
No matter what it was—graywater or, you know, FM broadcasting, it doesn’t— it’s all the same creature.
Curtis Blankinship: Why hasn’t Trump shut down low power FM? He’s shut down, you know, he’s shutting down CBS and then isn’t bothering with us.
Stephen Dunifer: It’s not on his radar, I guess It’s not significant enough.
Curtis Blankinship: Well, a lot of them are religious stations, I think too, aren’t they?
Stephen Dunifer: Yeah, they glommed on, so they were the worst. And the religious broadcasters were always some of the worst actors.
Curtis Blankinship: All right. Thank you very much. Keep doing what you’re doing and I hope you’re around for a lot longer.
Stephen Dunifer: I keep trying.
Curtis Blankinship: And yeah, you are instrumental in free speech, so thank you.
Stephen Dunifer: Sure. You’re welcome.
Curtis Blankinship: For KEPW News, I’m Curtis Blankinship.
You can hear Curtis Blankinship Saturdays at 4 p.m. with Talk Is Cheap on KEPW 97.3 Eugene PeaceWorks Community Radio.
