Radio Free Palmer takes to the airwaves today

One evening a few years back, New York Times reporter William Yardley was sitting in Vagabond Blues with his laptop open. He approached a Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman reporter, also there with open laptop, and inquired how we were able to get online.

Radio Free Palmer was our reply.

We’ve grown accustomed to using Radio Free Palmer for many things — from Internet access in downtown Palmer to referring to its online archive of audio from Mat-Su Borough Assembly and school board meetings.

And we’ve also partnered with the nonprofit to expand the learning opportunities Valley students have who work on the Frontiersman’s Schools page. Now a student who writes an especially good Student View column for our pages can learn the skills through Radio Free Palmer to record the piece for broadcast there, too.

We’re pleased to say the idea to add radio broadcasting to the palette of skills we help students master came directly from our students.

They asked for this opportunity and when we asked the folks at Radio Free Palmer, they replied with an enthusiastic “yes.”

With any luck, this is the week listeners in the Palmer, Sutton and Chickaloon areas used to visiting Radio Free Palmer on its website will also find the station broadcasting on the FM radio dial at 89.5.

The call letters for the Valley’s newest radio station are KVRF, which stand for Valley Radio Free. Why not use KRFP? Well, those call letters are already in use by Radio Free Moscow in Idaho. And besides, organizers say, these call letters make room for the local radio station to eventually expand its broadcast area to include more of the Mat-Su Valley.

A bit of trivia, did you know that broadcast signs in the U.S. usually begin with “K” west of the Mississippi River and those east of the river usually begin with “W?”

After months and years of work by Radio Free Palmer’s determined volunteers, organizers say they expect MTA to complete the DSL connection to their Sutton transmitter hut sometime Tuesday.

Once that last piece of the technical puzzle is complete, listeners will hear music streaming over their radios at 89.5 FM as well as on the Internet. While we look forward to what will surely be an eclectic play list, we expect information from public meetings archived on the site will be the main reason we visit again and again.

Radio Free Palmer has contracts with the borough and school district to stream their meetings live to the site. Then the audio from the meetings is archived on the website for later use. So when we need to listen to an assembly meeting from last month or last year, it’s there. Just click on the Podcasts tab at radiofreepalmer.org.

This is more than just a great new tool to get local information. It’s an excellent example of what tenacious Valley volunteers can accomplish by working together.