By, Billy Jam

Reprinted from Sessions, Vol.1 (page A24)

On any given weekend day, within a radius of a few miles of the Berkeley Flea Market, if you fine tune your radio into 87.9 FM, you'll hear the totally free-form and eclectic sounds of Flea Radio Berkeley, a micro powered pirate radio station that costs a mere few hundred dollars to set up and put on the air.

Run and operated by the folks from the nearby 24 hours/seven days a week micro-powered Free Radio Berkeley, the weekend-only community radio station is just one of approximately 300 illegal, unlicensed, micro-powered radio stations currently operating across the US.

Although American pirate radio dates back several decades, it's only been in the past three years that the FCC has allowed them to flourish. The “rebel radio movement” was officially born in the Bay Area with the intermittent broadcasts of Free Radio Berkeley by Steven Dunifer in the Berkeley Hills in 1993.

Since then Dunifer, who has been dubbed “the poster boy of pirate radio” and featured in dozens of articles from the San Francisco Examiner to the New York Times and Spin, has engaged the FCC head-on in a much-publicized legal battle.

The Commission has fined Dunifer $20.000 and took him to court to stop his broadcasting, but twice this year, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilkens refused to issue injunctions that would force Dunifer's station off the air.

The resulting stalemate has opened the door for a flood of other pirate stations across the country, including FUCC, Free Radio Seattle, Ghetto Radio in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and Steal This Radio, located in a squat in New York City's East Village.

Dunifer doesn't consider any of these stations “pirates” but rather “micro-powered stations” that are not outlaws but rather civil rights advocates. He and his fellow micro-casters see the FCC as having alienated and disenfranchised community radio by placing the airwaves in the hands of the rich.

“The FCC tries to portray us as 'pirates'--people sneaking around. What we're really participating in is what we consider to be a protected First Amendment activity; free speech,” Dunifer says.

Political activist and former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, who participated in a benefit for Dunifer's Cause earlier this year, agrees. “I think it goes way beyond pirate radio and the FCC,” he says. “It's more of a fight going on for how much access the average American has to relevant information that affects their lives.”

Dunifer also sees a direct correlation between the skyrocketing prices of commercial stations and the unprecedented rise of these unlicensed stations. He points to the Bay Area radio market, the nation's fourth largest, where in the past six months 21 commercial stations have changed hands at ever-escalating costs.

“The current trend of buying up stations has grossly inflated prices. Realistically, the maximum price of a station should be three to four times the advertising billing per annum. However, we now have a situation where the ratio has gone up to 20 times that of the advertising/revenue stream. It's an investment scam on the pan of the corporations,” he says. The ultimate result, he adds, is “less community-based programming.”

That's one commodity that the micro-powered stations don't lack. On stations such as Free Radio Berkeley, San Francisco Liberation Radio, or Free Radio Santa Cruz, along with diverse musical programming including punk rock and hip-hop, listeners can hear shows on compost gardening, traffic reports from a cyclists' perspective, and programs from such community activist organizations as Cop Watch and Food Not Bombs.

What is the future of rebel radio? While the court ruling is in limbo, Dunifer hopes to continue to encourage and help as many new micro-powered stations as possible to get on the air. A radio engineer by profession, he gives classes in building inexpensive transmitters.

One of Dunifer’s associates at Free Radio Berkeley, who goes by the handle Captain Fred, says he foresees the FCC “backing down”' and the “micro-stations merging into the scheme of things. I think the distinction between the legal and illegal stations will blur. I predict that there'll soon be micro-powered stations that will sound like commercial stations and, alternately, commercial stations who'll emulate the pirates.”

Meanwhile, critics say that the proliferation of unregulated stations will merely cause chaos on the dial. Whatever the case, it'll be an interesting scenario to watch unfold.

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