WKFH LP 95.5 is a radio station based around providing the rural community of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, with educational resources and a diverse range of media. It’s a new station, both to Pacifica and overall, still in the phases of starting up, building community connections, and growing programming.
WKFH was started by Tom Mondell and Ricky Venzie to try and bring a broader range of educational programming to their communities and help build discussions based in less conservative political opinions than the listeners might normally hear day-to-day.
WKFH is a project connecting Tom and Rick’s community priorities with an extensive background working with both public and commercial stations. Tom Mondell, who was kind enough to give time for an interview, has worked with education programs for a local county jail and on teaching herbalism. Before getting involved with WKFH, Ricky Venezie created and hosted the Ricky V show on WXED 107.3 FM for seven years.
Currently the station runs local programming, some Pacifica shows, and is also available on internet streaming, while they wait on the antenna set-up for their station. WKFH is looking for routine volunteers to build programming, as it is still run by Tom and Rick who handle all the logistics of building the station. The website is in the process of being updated but will stay at the address of WKFH.org.
Below is an interview with Tom Mondell. Responses and order have been edited for length and clarity
Grey Cooper
WKFH is a pretty recent radio station. What initiated starting that?
Tom Mondell
Politics, enlightening the audience to new and different forms of music and information. Because you know the landscape – people know about their favorite basketball team, or favorite team. I’m an athlete, or I was, so I think I have the license to talk like this, but when your favorite team is more important than what’s going on with your democracy, you need a little education. You need to hear something different, if you’re open enough to listen, to look further out of your typical scope of influence. That’s a big reason [we started]. Even though we’re a low power FM, and we’re trying to get our stream looking proper, [if] we can affect hundreds of or a few 1000s of people, then that’s a bit better than nothing,
Grey Cooper
Are there specific educational programs you try to run?
Tom Mondell
There’s your typical events in and around the community, like a tractor pull. I’m talking to my partner Rick about doing more political events, that’s what we’re really here for. We’re not just here to let everybody know that the class play is going to happen next week. We’re here for a more important reason. What drives the radio for me is not so much the politics, but to maybe turn something on in somebody’s head, that there’s more than what they’re experiencing right now. That’s going to move us forward as a civilization.
Grey Cooper
For the equipment, what was the process for getting that up and running? It can sometimes be labor intensive starting off. What was the process for, like, getting the radio initially up and running?
Tom Mondell
We’re still doing that.
It’s very frustrating, waiting on people, getting help with technical work, customer service, those sorts of things. We’ve been waiting six months for the company that owns the tower we want for our antenna to get back to us on a lease price. Occasionally, you’ll get a token text message. I’ve got my consulting engineer, and he has better luck getting a hold of the representative of the company than I do. We thought maybe we’d take a year to get the radio going. We’re at over a year since we got our license.
It’s all patience, because there’s so many little details. The software we use for scheduling and broadcasting is internet based, and that’s a whole other practice. Unless you’re an IT expert from San Francisco or somewhere like that, the learning curve is crazy, even though I’ve dealt with Broadcast Software before. Back in 2000, I started an internet radio station that lasted six years, and the software was much easier than this current one. It’s just a whole different ball game. Things advance, but along with the evolution comes a lot of other variables that you need to know as a user.
The fun part is the programming. For me, I love music, it’s fun to schedule and seek programs, and put together the music library. That’s the fun part, but it’s currently pushed to the side because we’re trying to get the major building blocks together first.
Grey Cooper
What are the major building blocks you are still working on?
Tom Mondell
The antenna, the transmission, that’s a big one. We’re also getting a more professional looking website put together. We’re trying to find people to volunteer who feel the same way as we do about the project, and find the monetary support to keep us going. It’s hard to get support when you’re not broadcasting yet, when there’s no product to listen to. I’m empathetic so I’m always putting myself in their place, like why give money to this project if you didn’t have anything to see.
Grey Cooper
You said you like the music part? Do you generally record local shows? Do you DJ music you already know?
Tom Mondell
We’re streaming local material right now, but it’s like a mix of national and local artists. It’s limited, because we’re still building the station. We have to build the car so we can drive it. But we know what we want to do, we have lots of program ideas. We don’t want to do what everybody else does. We’re not a 100,000 watt commercial FM radio station, where the priorities are making money, and it’s all homogenized programming. We have the ability to be creative, be experimental. For example, we want to run overnight, cater to the insomniacs, program music and information targeted towards them. They’re having a hard time sleeping, working at a nighttime job, we help them fall asleep, or pass the time when they’re stocking the shelves at three o’clock in the morning.
We believe that difference is good, and we want to educate with our programming. When you’re giving people something different that they don’t hear anywhere else, music or shows, you’re educating them. That’s a neutral word, educate, but we want to educate people in a constructive way with what we put out there.
Grey Cooper
What’s the community feedback been like so far?
Tom Mondell
That’s still in progress. We have the streaming going. It’s not ready to advertise, and there’s nobody to promote. All the connections we make, it’s just one on one word of mouth, holding meetings for interested parties. We’re getting close though, and the website [is] perfected enough where I can see us streaming, and promoting that stream, within the next couple of months. Hopefully by that time we’ll have a lease price for our tower space, so we can be looking at buying equipment and hiring the rigging crew to hang the antenna, [and have] engineers hooking it all up.
I wish there were two or three Toms besides me. It’s just two people, and I hear this a lot when it’s low power projects, that it’s usually one or two people that are doing everything, especially in the beginning.
Grey Cooper
It is just the two of you starting and running this, right?
Tom Mondell
Yeah, everyone else comes and goes. They’re curious, they want to know what’s going on. But you don’t want to ask too much of volunteers, unless they’re really committed to the project, and we haven’t found anyone else at this point who is coming from that place. People are just tied up, they have other problems, especially now, when a lot of them are thinking, ‘Well, should I still even live in the United States?’-
I feel like we’re in danger of losing something that I never took for granted, but I always felt fortunate [that] we lived in a country that played by certain rules. I thought something like the current situation could never happen here, and now [that] it’s starting to happen, it’s up to us to do something about it. In our own way, we want to do something by being a sounding board to people in our region, or people out there picking us up on the internet.
We have this feeling of responsibility to educate people about what’s going on, and the way you want to do that is through broadcasting or streaming. But every day that goes by where we’re not ready to put the product out is another day we’re losing.
We’re like everybody else in the United States. We want it out now, like how we want instant coffee. That’s how we were brought up, but you can’t, there’s just certain things you can’t hurry along. You don’t have that control.
Grey Cooper
It does sound like you have done a lot already, though.
Tom Mondell
Not as much as we’d like to be done. It’s creeping along. I have to learn to be more patient. In two years, you’ll talk to me again, and we’ll be up and running, but that that’s not where it is right now.
The website is in the process of being updated, looking better than the temporary Weebly site that that came with the broadcasting software. It‘s just a lot of work. I like it, I’ve always been a radio guy, but this is the biggest challenge I’ve ever had in my radio experience through my life. I’ve worked for commercial stations, public radio, community radio, but this one’s been the most challenging. I thought I knew everything about radio, but, before when I worked at a station) as manager or staff, everything was already set up. The departments would have been going since the radio station was built, the programming there, the towers, everything. I didn’t have to worry about setting up. This is a whole different ball game, even though it’s small. I’m really looking forward to that stage where everything’s running smoothly, and we can focus on the education.
WKFH Is currently streaming at www.wkfh.org