Mycal's Micro Power Radio Station

Dirty Boy's Radio

Back in 1986, in a town called Chico in Northern California some of my friends [Which included members of Group 42!] and I ran a low powered FM Radio Station off and on for about 6 months. It was called Dirty Boy Radio and was billed as subsiderary of Dirty Boy Productions (responseble for many major and minor parties over several years.)
We ran mostly on Thursday, Friday and Saturday (the weekend in Chico.) The station was live about 40% of the time and on tape 60% of the time.
The transmitter we used was a FM mono transmitter with about three and a half watts of output power. The transmitter was a homebrew design based on a MC1648 VCO running into a 3 stage amplifier chain. The amplifirers in the 3 stage chain were all running Class-A with low Q tanks for broadband operation. A filter was made from a length of coax.

For an antenna, we used a halfwave horizontal di-pole, a center feed virtical di-pole, and a j-pole at different times depending on where the transmitter was living. We had our best coverage with our 1/2 wave horizontal (or close to horizontal) dipole that we had strung a good 150 feet up a couple of trees. With the other antennas they were no more than 30 feet above the ground. [Show above right is one of the only know pictures of G-Man in existance.]