Falmouth and Penryn’s community radio station Source FM has received a boost in power from it’s loyal listeners.

The station, which is home to over 96 volunteer presenters, recently conducted a successful crowdfunder campaign to raise £5,000, enabling it to purschase a new transmitter and antenna.

The Source FM technical team was hoping that a more powerful transmitter combined with a specialist ‘lindenblad’ antenna would enable it to reach more households inside of Falmouth and Penryn.

The area suffers from what is known by proffesional broadcasters as "locational absorbtion" or in Cornish terms, lots of granite hills and houses.

Station manager Matthew Rogers said, “We know we’ve got listeners as far away as the hills of Bodmin but we still have a problem reaching some of the homes in the middle of our catchment area.”

The new antenna, which took several months to build, has enabled Source FM to boost it’s power from 25 watts to 50 watts as well as utilising a mixed polarity signal pattern.

Falmouth Packet:

This means that the signal is stronger for people living inside of Falmouth and Penryn and should be able to be heard by more people.

Matthew added: “We are still testing the new equipment and would especially like to hear from people inside Falmouth about whether they are able to pick Source FM up on the 96.1 FM frequency. We know that the infamous transmission black spot by the Prince of Wales Pier is still not very good, but we have had reports from other parts of the town that people are now able to hear us loud and clear where before it was just white noise”.

The station recently also received a clean bill of health from Ofcom and is currently preparing for a busy season of Parklive events in Kimberley Park as well as it’s involvement with a number of other local festivals.

You can watch a short video of the installation of the new equipment here: