Here Comes the Sun

What this episode covers

Running the board for a station that runs on sun. [Image Courtesy of Sun Radio] This is Passport to Texas We all know that plants, wildlife and humans depend on energy from the sun to survive. TPWD even installed 25 solar photovoltaic systems at 17 of its own facilities. But have you ever known a radio station run by the sun? From the time the voice leaves the microphone until it gets to your listening device, it’s solar powered. Sure, sure…this is off topic for our show, but—c’mon—to partner with nature to make radio is super cool. Daryl O’Neal is the executive director of Sun Radio, the first and largest non-commercial radio network powered by the sun. We started looking around the landscape and noticed that all these small little non-commercial radio stations were off the air. We started trying to figure out okay well what if we could put them back on the air. Would it be a mission in doing that, bringing community radio back and what if we could also do it and be solar powered. They are doing it: sending their signal to eleven different stations in Central Texas… but it’s not easy. The real challenge we had is making sure that the solar power is consistent, because our equipment is very delicate. So, we had to put a lot of electric conditioning equipment in to make sure that DC feed that’s coming in is consistent. If you add up all of the kilowatts, it’s probably close to 75 to 80 thousand watts. Enough power on the ground to power the equipment in the air to send a signal out. A signal that spreads like sunshine across Central Texas. For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.