Dublin hobby station KFM

Dublin hobby station KFM

KFM was a part-time hobby station broadcasting from Sandyford in south Dublin in 1986. It was run by well-known anorak Gerard Roe who had previously hosted a popular Free Radio Show (FRC) on Radio Annabel and Radio Dublin Channel 2. This recording is from 13th April 1986 from 1420-1505 and features Gerard on air. There is an advert for Anoraks UK and KFM jingles. Frequencies announced are 106 FM and there’s a reference to a test transmission on shortwave on 6240 kHz in the 48 metre band. Gerard shares his memories of KFM:

I had a studio set up in my house that I used for recording and some production – mainly for my own amusement. At one stage I connected it up to a 25 watt FM TX, just for a bit of experimentation at weekends.  A friend living nearby had build an experimental shortwave transmitter and we linked to it for a few weekends (Shamrock Radio International).  This was at the time when I had been off air after Radio Annabel closed and also around the time when I did a few programmes for David Baker at Kiss FM in Foley Street.

The signal from KFM was very local (just around Sandyford/Dundrum), but because of the location height, it also fell down into Bayside where Brian and Dónal Greene were probably the only other two listeners to the station [Brian is co-founder of Pirate.ie]. It didn’t last long, as even I got fed up of having a radio station in the family home. I remember one Sunday morning, after a very late Saturday night before, being woken up to be told that there was a phone call for me, from Brian and Dónal, asking if KFM was coming on air that day. I probably decided then that operating a station from the house wasn’t going to work out in the long run.

That studio was also used in 1988 to record the first programmes for test transmissions from Dublin South Community Radio.  I was involved in the early days of the first management committee and I trained up some of the presenters to go on air for a short pirate run, just before the closure deadline of December 31st.  I did some early weekend mornings programmes on the station for the first very low powered live tests, from a temporary studio assembled in a courtyard off Dundrum Main Street (opposite the original Dundrum shopping center). The station eventually was licensed in 1995 as Dublin’s first community station (now known as Dublin South FM).  By that time, I had started the Anorak  Hour with Simon Maher at Coast FM and was back on air with an FRC format, for the first time in about 11 years (since the closure of Annabel).

That’s about all that can be said for KFM …. and a lesson learnt that there was always someone out there, tuned in with a tape recorder, back in the olden days!

This recording is from the Skywave Tapes Collection. Skywave Radio International broadcast a shortwave station in the 1980s from Baldoyle in northeast Dublin.