Hey, this is Zac Smith. I’m the station manager and founder of KUHS LP Hot Springs, Arkansas.
I’m here to talk about our station, Arkansas’s only all volunteer-run, solar-powered community radio station.
Here on mashable.com.
When you scan the dial and you come upon KUHS,
you're going to hear something that you're not going to hear anywhere else.
And that is the stand that we are able to take.
And you know, I certainly think that our financial situation gives us that freedom.
As you drive into Hot Springs, you sort of come around this curve and about four miles away,
you can see the top of the mountain with all the radio towers on it – including KUHS right on the very end.
And, for me, it's always a symbol of my place in the world and my town and the place that I really love
and the community that I really value and that I want to benefit and that I think benefits a lot of people around it.
So it's huge for me.
When we first were drawing up the technical plans for the radio station,
we had access to this site, and it's up on a hill.
It's an old AT&T microwave relay shack,
and they had pulled the power and we did the math on reconnecting the power and putting in a transmitter.
And then we did the math on covering the building with solar panels.
And we realized that in about three years, it'd be cheaper to have solar than paying that bill every month.
There’s no station in town where it’s – everybody’s talking, everybody’s reading dumb stuff off of the internet.
We wanna party, to pump you up for school, every day!
People really saw that we were in it for the long-term and that we were in it for emergencies.
That we're in it for the environment, we're in it for our community,
and it really helped them rally behind the mast, so to speak, and come to our aid.
and it really made people realize the scope of our power. That we're we're literally
a conversion process from sunlight into music.
It's great.
Hi, I'm Bob Nagy, I'm a radio frequency communications engineer.
And my passion is building small community stations that are run on solar power.
The ‘brain’ is talking, program debugged,
remote telemetry functional with a Spikenzie board there from Canada.
Oh, yeah.
I built KUHS along with Zac Smith and other people – with hammers and everything else.
To do that in our community of about 50,000.
Setting up broadcast facilities like this on solar power are extremely simple.
It's an extremely simple project to do and it's not expensive whatsoever.
I probably have the equipment to build five of them in my garage and room here.
There's just not a lot of components to them.
So, there's only two constants, two numbers you have to remember.
Whatever the total power usage is for the month, multiply by seven –
that's the total amount of wattage and solar panels you need.
Whatever the current output of the solar panels is, multiply that by 20
for the amount of amp hours and batteries you need.
There's the whole thing. And it's just panels, charge controller, batteries.
And, bingo, you're on the air.
So our installation on the mountain here, on West Mountain,
has been going for roughly six years with absolutely no electricity connected to the building.
I can tell you right offhand that four solar panels
would run a 10-watt radio transmitter 24/7 and for 40 years.
And the cost of solar panels, PV, even 16-17% efficiency solar panels,
it's now the cheapest energy form. It beats coal, it's a no-brainer.
But because solar is so profitable, I retired at 47, because I built a solar house.
And because I cashed in and sold it in Austin in 90 minutes for over asking [price], and came to Hot Springs.
And you know, I've been retired for 18 years.
So solar is extremely profitable and pays off and bought my freedom.
And it will buy everyone else's freedom, too.
It's a huge symbol of what I've been able to do in this town.
When I moved here with my wife, we were traveling musicians.
And we spent many years playing music and traveling around the region.
And that was very fulfilling, especially when we had young kids
and we could throw everybody in the station wagon and drive around America and call it a tour.
But, of course, then the kids get more expensive.
We weren't writing new songs anymore and we needed to do something else.
And so, getting this radio station started, it being the foundation for what we did with this piece of real estate –
it has helped me drive the stake into this place.
We had a kid, and I mean, a literal minor.
I've known this kid his entire life, all of a sudden, here he is. He's 17.
He wants to put on a comedy show.
We take this kid, we put him in the studio, and we're like, "Have at it!"
"Nothing obscene, but you can cuss now." And just that freedom for him to come in and his buddies to come in,
and play songs that they find are funny, play snippets of stand-up, to make jokes.
And, you know, they can say "Fuck" on air, if they want to.
It gives them a place to take a stand and say,
"Hey, no one's really harmed by someone saying 'shit' on the air. We can support this."