By Camille T. Taiara

For the past few months, self-taught broadcast engineer and "pirate" radio guru Stephen Dunifer and a cohort (who prefers to remain unnamed) have been holed up in an inconspicuous West Oakland warehouse, fiddling around with off-the-shelf electronics equipment. Pliers, soldering irons, and clipped wires litter the worktables where Free Radio Berkeley volunteers assemble low-power radio transmitters. An industrial drill press, a spectrum analyzer, and small cardboard boxes containing RCA plugs, antenna adapters, and all manner of gadgetry line the metal shelves along the four walls.

This is where the duo recently launched their latest weapon in the ongoing grassroots media revolution: a kit that allows anyone with the audacity and the resolve to run his or her own low-power TV station.

"There's an incredible world of video out there that's never broadcast," an enthusiastic Dunifer told the Bay Guardian, adding that today more than ever, mainstream TV has acted as the chief propaganda tool of the powerful in this country and played an important role in rallying support for the Bush administration and its war on Iraq. Dunifer sees his new technology as merely part of a larger drive to create alternative, just, and sustainable communities.

The LPTV setup is marvelously simple: a cable TV modulator is connected to an amplifier and hooked up to an antenna. Plug a DVD player into the system and you've got everything you need to go on the air.

"The new Mitsubishi modulators made it a lot easier," Dunifer said, explaining that they respond to a wider frequency range and carry all three TV bands – both low- and high-band VHF (which correspond to channels 2 through 6 and channels 7 through 13, respectively) and UHF (channels 14 on up). "I'm sure the FCC will be amused."

As with low-power FM radio, the high cost of equipment and application fees required by the Federal Communications Commission make it virtually impossible for a community group to obtain an LPTV license. Even if a group had the money, it couldn't get a license to operate in most urban areas, where big broadcasters dominate the spectrum.

"What we've done is essentially short-circuit the whole thing and come up with an inexpensive way to do it," Dunifer explained.

Dunifer and his crew calculate that in rural areas, a 75-watt system – costing about $500 – could broadcast over a distance of four or five miles. In San Francisco, where the airwaves are clogged with traffic from megawatt broadcasters and the topography interrupts weaker signals, would-be guerrilla TV producers would need at least four times more power, essentially doubling the cost.

The only real catch is that viewers would need an antenna to tune into an LPTV broadcast, whereas most people these days receive their TV signal via cable or satellite. Those viewers would have to hook up an antenna to their TV and essentially tell their sets to look for the signal that way – by flipping a switch, if their sets are equipped with one, or hooking up an easily accessible switch box to their home system. Those who still have an analog system or who've made the switch to HDTV – which also uses an antenna – could simply run across a nearby LPTV station's broadcasts while channel surfing.

But Dunifer's group hopes that, with some outreach and word of mouth, soon TV viewers might seek out their neighborhood TV station like Web surfers log onto their favorite alternative news sites.

Dunifer doesn't know of anyone who's launched a "pirate" TV station in the United States just yet, and only time will tell how far the fight will go over this new tool in the struggle for local, community-based, independent media. Already a group in Berkeley has expressed interest in launching a channel.

"Right now," he said, "it's in a very embryonic stage."

E-mail Camille T. Taiara