The Raspberry Pi powered Pocket FM was born out of work by MiCT, with support from the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt), for the Syrian Radio Network (Syrnet)

Pocket FM is a portable Band II FM broadcast transmitter the size of a shoebox that starts working as soon as it’s connected to a small antenna, a power source, and an audio signal. A single device can air radio programs over a radius of about six kilometers. At its core is Raspberry Pi, an affordable computer board that can easily be further developed and modified with different features for different scenarios.

“The challenge in Syria is that it can be scary, in some areas, to set up big FM transmitters, because they are easy to detect, easy to destroy, and expensive to run,” said Klaas Glenewinkel, MiCT’s co-founder and director. “We had the idea of bringing in many small ones and creating a mesh of radio transmitters so people can access local information where TV and other means have failed.”

Big radio transmitters, Glenewinkel said, were sometimes stolen by people who then demanded money for their return, or could be co-opted to broadcast certain messages. But a decentralized network of hard-to-spot transmitters circumvents those obstacles and is simpler to set up in remote areas. Pocket can also find new frequencies to broadcast on if one is jammed, and can even send out quick text messages to listeners using the RDS protocol.

The team that participated in the initial creation of Pocket involved not only staff from MiCT and IXDS but also software developers, people from NGOs, radio engineers, and logistical experts who helped coordinate transport (both legal and illegal) of various pieces of Pocket FM equipment to difficult-to-reach areas. “This is not just an app that you can download from the store. It’s still a physical device. If you want to bring equipment from Germany to Syria, into Aleppo, you need a lot of coordination,” Glenewinkel said.

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