February 28, 2006

Pirate Radio Station

Very cool story from the BBC about Raghav Mahato and his $1 FM radio station: (DIY means do-it-yourself - ie: home built)
The amazing DIY village FM radio station
It may well be the only village FM radio station on the Asian sub-continent. It is certainly illegal.

The transmission equipment, costing just over $1, may be the cheapest in the world.

But the local people definitely love it.

On a balmy morning in India's northern state of Bihar, young Raghav Mahato gets ready to fire up his home-grown FM radio station.

Thousands of villagers, living in a 20km (12 miles) radius of Raghav's small repair shop and radio station in Mansoorpur village in Vaishali district, tune their $5 radio sets to catch their favourite station.

After the crackle of static, a young, confident voice floats up the radio waves.

"Good morning! Welcome to Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1! Now listen to your favourite songs," announces anchor and friend Sambhu into a sellotape-plastered microphone surrounded by racks of local music tapes.

For the next 12 hours, Raghav Mahato's outback FM radio station plays films songs and broadcasts public interest messages on HIV and polio, and even snappy local news, including alerts on missing children and the opening of local shops.

Raghav and his friend run the indigenous radio station out of Raghav's thatched-roof Priya Electronics Shop.
Screw trying to get internet to these areas (there are some people spending a lot of effort working on cheap small internet terminals), simple old radio is much more cost-effective and carries the programming that people really want. We should be drop-shipping hundreds of small FM stations to India, China (the government would just love us...), Iran, Iraq, South America. Leave them in the hands of the people and see what happens. Here is Sambhu the DJ and Announcer:
pirate_radio_sambhu.jpg
Posted by DaveH at February 28, 2006 10:23 PM