A Republic Of The Airwaves Do-It-Yourselfers Give Town A Radio Station

People here have a reason now to order a radio when they buy a new pickup. It’s a do-it-yourself station called Republic Community Radio.

Local radio broadcasts came to this isolated mountain community for the first time in June 1995 when volunteers fired up an unlicensed transmitter in a battered 16-foot travel trailer on the hill overlooking town.

“To get in your car and hear the radio was a first for Republic,” said Nancy Giddings, principal of the public schools. “I think it’s the coolest thing that has happened for Republic.”

Take a stroll through town and you’ll probably meet one of the station’s numerous volunteer disc jockeys. You’ll definitely meet a supporter.

“You mean our little illegal radio station?” said Ron Tatlow, co-owner of the Hitch-in Post Restaurant and Lounge. “We love it because it’s illegal.”

Actually, some supporters say the “micro” station is legal under a January 1995 federal court decision, but that claim considerably overstates the facts.

A U.S. District Court judge in Oakland, Calif., has ruled only that the Federal Communications Commission can’t shut down an alleged “pirate” radio station before proving its case in court.

Republic Community Radio was established by Ferry County Assessor John Sweetman and computer store owner Dave Kebler with a transmitter that’s not much more powerful than a cellular car phone.

“I think it’s about 5 watts, which we figure is about equivalent to a couple of fair to middling flashlight batteries,” Sweetman said.

It’s enough, though, to send a charge through this community of 1,036.

When the Republic High School boys basketball team won the state B championship March 8, Republic Community Radio brought the team home, even if it couldn’t carry the game.

The radio station charted the progress of the team bus on its triumphant return. Listeners were told where and when to meet the bus for a horn-honking, light-flashing victory parade into town.

“Who else is going to do that for you?” asked Richard Eich, owner of a sandwich shop and game arcade called Eich’s Mercantile.

Not KOMW, the Omak commercial radio station that began beaming its signal into Republic last August with a repeater.

“Until we started our own radio station here, they didn’t even know we existed,” said Linda Tatlow, co-owner of the Hitch-in Post.

But KOMW has broadcast the B tournament for years and used its influence to keep the Republic station from getting a broadcast feed. David Iverson, president of the Seattle company that controls tournament broadcasts, said he “felt an obligation to support stations that go through the hoops” of expensive federal licensing.

Giddings said many Republic residents “were really upset” because they feared, incorrectly, that KOMW might not go ahead and broadcast Republic’s championship game.

“This was the biggest event of our lives,” she said. “I had people come to me in tears.”

Even though KOMW brought the game to a broader area than Republic Community Radio could have, some people were still disappointed that “their” station couldn’t carry the game. Especially so because the local station had distinguished itself by broadcasting most of Republic High’s other games.

“I really can’t emphasize how epoch-making it was when we broadcast the first one of our games,” Sweetman said. “Everybody was talking about it for weeks afterward.”

Any thought of broadcasting just a couple of games was quickly forgotten. “People would have killed us,” he said.

Delivering the games hasn’t been without risk, either. A gale was blowing when announcer Ron Starkey called the Oct. 4 football game at Liberty High in Spokane County from the top of a wobbly 20-foot-high scaffold.

“All of a sudden, some kid decided he needed to climb up there,” Starkey recalled. “I was looking for a parachute.”

Starkey and other game announcers - including high school sophomores Chad Dinkins and Rob Smith - sometimes use a cellular telephone to send their live reports to the transmitter. One month the result was an $800 phone bill, which was paid by passing the hat in the business community.

Much of the station’s equipment also is donated: everything from the transmission tower to the emergency generator. The board of directors sells memberships to raise cash.

Sweetman said he and Kebler each put up about $3,000 to launch Republic Community Radio. They’ve long since given up hope of recovering the money.

“We just keep putting more in it,” he said. “If our wives knew how much we’ve put into it, they’d kill us.”

The station is a marvel of ingenuity. When volunteer disc jockeys aren’t at the microphone, a computer program written by Kebler and Sweetman automatically mixes advertisements and community service messages with music programming received by satellite from a Seattle company. The announcements are digitally recorded on the computer.

At least one unsuspecting listener mistakenly blamed inept disc jockeys for interrupting songs with advertisements. Not that there aren’t some inept disc jockeys.

“Programs range from the really good to, well, what you would get if you invited your friends and neighbors to talk on the radio,” Sweetman said.

The station has almost as much variety as there are musical tastes in the community, from country to classical, gospel to grunge.

“If you haven’t heard some music on this station that you absolutely hate, you probably haven’t been listening long enough,” Sweetman said.

While most commercial stations stick to one kind of music, Republic Community Radio “mixes it all up and that’s cool,” high school sophomore Andy Stauch said. “My parents can sit down and listen to it, too.”

Other Republic High students expressed similar sentiments, but more than a few confessed they don’t hear enough of their kind of music.

Freshman Brandi Cromwell said she wants “alternative” music, but the station has too much country, jazz and classical. On the other hand, senior Sarah Ramsey said her craving for country isn’t satisfied.

She listens to her father’s blues and alternative music show “just because he’s my dad.”

Kathy Konz, owner of the local Grange Insurance agency, switches back and forth between Republic Community Radio and KOMW to weed out everything but country music.

Konz said she’s a fan of the Republic station even though she’s a member of the Ferry County Action League, a conservative political organization that spent about $3,000 to license the KOMW repeater.

Some Action League members have been critical of Sweetman, a Democrat, and others who support Republic Community Radio. But Action League Chairman Gary Olson said the organization has been unfairly accused of trying to undermine the local station.

“Two radio stations are better than one,” he said.

Richard Eich, who is “about as Republican as you can get,” said he thinks the Republic station “has done a pretty good job of staying neutral” in the area’s often-contentious politics.

Like Linda Tatlow at the Hitch-in Post, Eich uses the station to promote lunch specials at his shop.

He also offers ice cream to kids who get their homework done early while listening to bluegrass music on Thursday evenings - when it’s his turn to play disc jockey.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo