Project TUPA
Transmitters Uniting the Peoples of the Americas
Free Radio Berkeley's International Project
Click here to go the TUPA website
New Book Published by FRB
A Popular Guide to Building A Community FM Broadcast Station
A graphic guide written and illustrated by T.J. Enrile
Click here for details
Moving Onto the Airwaves - A Graphic Free Radio Manifesto
Click here to view or download as 11 X 17 fold-over
Click here to view or download as four 8 1/2 x 11 pages
Please print and distribute
Free Radio Berkeley 2008 Workshop Schedule
Click here for details...
Note: All workshops are held at FRB's shop in West Oakland not the Berkeley address, which is for mail only.
Summer Radio Camps
0 to 40 Watts in 4 Days
A four day workshop that teaches you how to build a 40 watt FM broadcast transmitter (and other related items such as antennas) and set up a low power community radio station capable of covering a broadcast radius up to 10 miles depending on terrain and antenna height. With an emphasis on direct, hands-on learning, you will learn how to solder, identify electronic components, assemble a 40 watt transmitter from a kit of parts, build and tune an antenna, properly setup and test broadcast equipment and much more. Further, you will be given an overview of basic electronics and broadcast engineering. A workshop fee of $200-$250 sliding scale is charged. At the end of the radio camp session you may purchase the 40 watt transmitter for $350 - the cost of the kit, power supply and enclosure.
All Radio Camp sessions will be held at Free Radio Berkeley's shop in Oakland, CA. FRB's Micropower Broadcasting Primer, available on the web site www.freeradio. org, will be used as one of the primary documents for the sessions. Anyone interested in attending should download this document which is in pdf format.
Click here for the Summer Radio Camp informational packet in PDF format. Pre-registration is required.
Sessions are from 10AM to 6PM
Workshop fee, sliding scale $200-$250
Summer Radio Camp Dates:
May 23-28, 2008
July 4-July 7, 2008
August 1-4, 2008
August 29--September 1, 2008
Donate A Transmitter
If you would like to have the experience of building a 40 watt transmitter but do not wish to engage in broadcasting, please consider assembling a transmitter at one of our camps and donating it to a community in Latin America or somewhere else in the world where people need a voice.
Have Transmitter Will Travel
Radio Camps on the Road
Free Radio Berkeley will be holding Radio Camp workshops in a number of locations both inside and outside the US during 2007 and beyond. If you are interested in sponsoring a Radio Camp in your area, please get in touch.
Click here to download the Radio Camp Flyer, (PDF document)
Click here to download Micropower Broadcasting - A Technical Primer, (a 25-page, 629K, PDF document).
En Espanol - click.
The primer is used as one of the primary documents for the Radio Camp sessions.
The Revolution Will Be Televised
From Free Radio to Free TV Broadcasting
It is now time to “Turn on, tune in and take over”. Finally, guerilla media activists will be able to say: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure.” (Outer Limits intro circa 1963)
Free Radio Berkeley’s engineering staff have designed and developed low power VHF and UHF transmitters by the creative use of off-the-shelf technology. So far, design engineering efforts have yielded TV transmitters capable of reaching a distance of 4-5 miles. Amplifers capable of covering an even greater distance will be available in the first quarter of 2006. Estimated cost for a VHF transmitter and antenna system with an effective radiated power of 75 watts is about $500 (cost of kits & modulator), $700 to $800 for a system with an effective radiated power of 400 watts. For a UHF system, add about $300 to the above amounts. Coverage pattern is 220 degrees, not fully omni-directional. Further work is continuing on the development of antenna systems.
TV Broadcasting kits are now available, check the store catalog for kits. Any composite video source with an audio out signal can be used by the TV transmitters. Click here for a typical TV broadcast configuration diagam. Typically, most folks will most likely use a multiple disk DVD player or a computer with video files on a large capacity hard drive. Live broadcasts are certainly a possibility. This would require several video cameras and a video switcher/mixer.
A 200-disk DVD juke box style player would be able contain almost two weeks worth of material, assuming two hours per DVD. Considering the quantity of video material available, most of which will never be seen on either broadcast TV or cable/satellite feeds, there should not be any problem providing audiences with an exciting and compelling selection of material.
No doubt, the FCC, the National Association of Broadcasters and other entrenched interests will most strenuously object to Micropower or Free TV Broadcasting. What better way to respond to the total propaganda environment that has been created with television media.
Click here for more information About Free Radio Berkeley
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“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” — Thomas Jefferson
“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.” — Thomas Jefferson
“In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.” — Mark Twain
“The best society, the best human existence, arrives when humans most closely determine the truth, and act on the truth, and separate it from superstition, falsity, or misinformation. And there is no better system for determining the truth than free speech: Testing the validity of an idea in the waters of public discussion and debate.” — Dave Rodgers
“Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully.” — Lucy Parsons
“With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions." — Abraham Lincoln
“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.” — Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell
“As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.” — Dick Cavett
“To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.”
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
“The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free...”
— Utah Phillips
“The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
— Stephen Biko
“You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.”
— Sean O'Casey
“If large numbers of people believe in Free Speech, there will be freedom of speech”
— George Orwell
“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
— Howard Zinn
“The FCC can kiss my Bill of Rights.”
— Stephen Dunifer
“..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority to set brush fires in people's minds.”
— Samuel Adams
``When in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.''
— Emma Goldman
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the
freeness of speech.”
— Ben Franklin
“[T]he right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon ... has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.”
— James Madison
“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
— Patrick Henry
“A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to. And any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong and foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has the vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well, sustain life.”
— Emma Goldman
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