the idea first got planted in my brain when a friend said he wanted to start one and call it big bird radio. he never did but the idea of my own station festered around in my brain for many many years. radio though seemed to be something untouchable, this thing out there that only these large stations were capable of using. i could hardly afford the power bill as it was, how was i going to pay to run a station. little did i know it would cost me more to make toast in the morning. sure i had seen “pump up the volume” and heard of pirate stations, but they seemed just as mysterious if not more so, as if it was some kind of secret club that one day i might get let in on if i ever met the right person.
 basically the radio sucked where i lived, playing the same hits from the 70’s and the same songs over and over and over again and again you know. i got sick of hearing everyone complain about it and decided to do something about it. so i went to the library and got every book on radio, be it ham or cb or fm that i could find, and everything on electronics i could find and skimmed through them, then dashed around to radio shacks getting supplies and tools, spent all night etching a circut board, learned not to solder in a small room with no ventalation and somewhere around 10am the next morning the transmitter was built
i plugged it in and it didn’t short out so i won a bet with flux. it was full of static though and only went maybe a hundred yards at best. still it was like i had scored for the immaculate fix, i couldn’t sit still, i just ran around like a school girl in love, jumping up and down on the sofa putting my earphones on and off over and over again.
trying to work out the glitches i then stumbled upon someone in washington state via the internet who built a better transmitter for me. we pieced together an antenna with some pvc pipe, an old broom stick, an so-239, and some copper coat hangers. soon it was hoisted and taped to the top of a tree in the backyard with 100 feet of coax running from it, across the yard, and into the bedroom. we did a live tuning with it broadcasting and proceeded to drive all over town listening to it laughing. it was like a ghost, creeping it’s signal into every house reaching out to every radio, saying i am here, just listen, just tune in, here i am.

we had total coverage of the university campus, which despite having broadcasting classes didn’t even have a station. we laughed until we cried, and those in our radius everynight from midnight until 6am would have something else to listen to if they wanted. we had in a very small way changed the airwaves around us. a part of that mysterious ether now belonged to us.
we had of course broken about every rule of responcable broadcasting, our signal leaked all over the dial, at one point even leaking onto some t.v. channels, we were tuned right over top of some other station, lines and cables were practilly unshielded, and connections weren’t water proofed. but we had done it.
over time we got it worked out, it stopped being a chore and became routine to keep everything running well and stopped being guess work. we started hooking up the audio ports from the vcr and broadcasting movies, then started broadcasting our band’s practice sessions(alot of people probably wished we had not done that one.) but our listeners grew in numbers and soon we had other local bands coming over and either playing live or doing interviews between homemade demos they had done. in other words we had become something for the mostly college community around us, adding to it and giving a louder voice to people in the area that needed to vent, rant, speak out, or just hear their band on the radio which they probably wouldn’t be able to have done through regular channels.
of course the station had its ups and downs. at its high point it motivated so many people there was talk of multiple microtransmitters all sharing a frequency and bouncing each others signals around to give us wider coverage, sadly this never came true having fallen into the all talk and no action that so often happens.
i ended up leaving the area and the station went with me. lots of people talked but unfortunetly nobody ever picked up where our beloved frequency13 had left off. would it have been nice to go back and find someone still broadcasting? yes...but someone probably is sitting around watching t.v. who heard it or heard of it and the idea is now festering in their brain as well until they have had enough.