KUAF-FM, 91.3, the NPR affiliate in Fayetteville, will soon be in the market and fundraising for a new FM transmitter.
Station Manager Rick Stockdell said the station’s 26-year-old, 25,000-watt transmitter is on its last legs. Bad weather and lightning strikes have knocked the transmitter out of commission in the past, and replacement parts are either costly or have to be custom-made.
Stockdell said that each time the transmitter’s tube is blown — which happens about every two years — it costs the station $5,500.
He compared the decades-old transmitter to a 1957 Buick.
“It’s totally unsupported by the manufacturer. … We can still get a tube for it, but any other part that comes along, we’re at the point now where there could be something that goes wrong with that transmitter and we’d have to find a machine shop somewhere around here to manufacture the part for us,” Stockdell said.
To make matters worse, the station has to run the transmitter “pedal to the metal” to reach its preferred wattage, he said, which reduces the lifetime of the tubes.
The station recently acquired a backup transmitter, which should ship within the next month, for about $65,000. The original backup was purchased around the same time as the main transmitter and had problems of its own, including not working at its maximum 3,000 wattage and not reaching the entire coverage area.
The new backup will be 10,000 watts and most listeners won’t even know it’s in use. Stockdell said the signal would not be as strong as the main transmitter, but the coverage area should remain about the same.
The station’s coverage area includes 14 counties in west and northwest Arkansas, as well as parts of Oklahoma and Missouri.
The price tag for the main transmitter’s replacement, which will not only be new but also upgraded to 30,000 watts, will be about $150,000.
But Stockdell said he is waiting to hear back from consultants about whether the roughly 3-inch coaxial cable it uses will also need to be replaced.
A 25-foot section of the cable caught fire last year after water got into some cracks in the aging wire. A new cable would cost an additional $50,000-$75,000.
An announcement about the new transmitter will likely be made after the new year, when the station will begin its 30th anniversary events. Stockdell said he was hopeful that the anniversary would drum up enough interest to quickly raise funds and have the new transmitter installed by this time next year.
The station raised more than $1 million in about two years to build its current South School Avenue headquarters. Stockdell said he expects getting the money for the transmitter will prove more difficult.
“It’s nowhere near as sexy as a building that’s out in the middle of Fayetteville across from the library that donors can look at when they drive by and take some pride in. They’ll never see the transmitter,” Stockdell said.
The station doesn’t currently have any plans for on-air fundraisers for the transmitter. Stockdell said those were “pretty sacred” because the station prefers to reserve airtime for programming.
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