Nathan Iramwenya: I created my own radio station

Just out of high school last year, Nathan Iramwenya has his own radio station located inside his parents home at Tabuga village, Nakuru county.

The 20-year-old however, happened upon this quite by chance and it all started four months ago when he was repairing a radio at home.

“There was another radio not far from where I was working and I was surprised when it started picking static from the one I was repairing,” he says.

Without any formal training in electronics and relying purely on curiosity, Nathan decided to try and ‘diagnose’ where the static was coming from and place a microphone on the other radio’s speaker. The static was immediately amplified.

“I then realised that the radio I was repairing was acting like a signal sending station. This further heightened my curiosity,” he says.

Nathan then bought a cordless microphone, disassembled it and connected its motherboard to that of the faulty radio. He then put what he refers to as ceramics inside the microphone, connected it to a transmitter and modified the station’s power system.

This system works using single nine volt AA re-chargeable batteries, the kind used in cordless microphones.

He then tuned the other radio but it still picked up static and Nathan decided to tune into an un-allocated frequency modulation bandwidth. It worked. Excited, he hooked the microphone to the ‘station’ and spoke a few words - they came out clear as day from any broadcasting station.

“I then hooked my cell phone to the ‘station’ using an extension cable connected to the audio port and was amazed when audio and video files stored in my phone were picked by radios within a radius of 100 metres tuned onto my frequency,” says the innovator.

Other discoveries were to follow. When Nathan hooked a TV aerial to the station, the range of signal reception would increase to a radius of 2.5 kilometres.

And today, this young innovator’s dream is to own his own radio station where he can spread content of his liking.