November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

Media Maverick: Stephen Dunifer and Free Radio Berkeley

(Page 2 of 2)

May-June 1998
by Will Hermes 
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The station, which was operated out of Dunifer's home, signed on the air in April 1993, but after the FCC got wind of it, Dunifer took it on the road, broadcasting from the hills of Berkeley via a backpack-mounted transmitter. After some legal back-and-forth between the FCC and Free Radio Berkeley's attorneys (which included an unprecedented $20,000 fine against Dunifer), the current stalemate was reached, and Dunifer moved the station more or less above ground, to a commercial office building near the Berkeley-Oakland border. Its broadcasters (who each contribute $10 a month to help cover rent and operating costs) deliver programming like Street Spirit, a show for and by local homeless people, and Capitalism: The Suicidal Octopus.

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The legal issues won't be resolved for a while ("I'm guessing around 2005," Dunifer chuckles), but that hasn't stopped him from getting the word out. Dunifer's transmitter sales and manufacturing operation, part of a Free Radio Berkeley outreach project called IRATE (International Radio Action Training Education), help support both him and the station. He and his comrades will soon be sending a team to Haiti to train and supply equipment to community broadcasters there, and they are about to launch the Adopt-a-Transmitter program, designed to help raise the $1,000 to $2,500 it takes to equip a community with a 20- to 75-watt station.

Dunifer looks forward to the day when a simple registration process supervised by a voluntary, locally based microbroadcasting board will permit numerous community-oriented radio stations in every major city. But until then, he maintains, "it is our intent and purpose to see thousands of transmitters taking to the air in an all-out, no-holds-barred movement of electronic civil disobedience."

You can contact Free Radio Berkeley at 1442A Walnut, Suite #406, Berkeley, CA 94709; 510/464-3041; and frbspd@crl.com. Their Web site is at www.freeradio.org 

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