UC Irvine Radio Station Powers Up to Reach a Countywide Audience : Broadcasting: KUCI’s signal is boosted from 25 watts to 200. Its eclectic programming can now be heard from San Juan Capistrano to Diamond Bar and south Long Beach.

IRVINE —  Those tuning in to UC Irvine radio station KUCI around 11:30 a.m. Monday were greeted by some 25 minutes of clock-ticking sounds, more minutes of angry static and then the portentous tolling of a dozen bells followed by a wild cheer.

Anyone accustomed to listening to the station probably took it in stride, as it was scarcely the oddest array of sounds to have emerged from the unpredictable mix of techno, industrial, grunge, hip-hop, world beat and other non-mainstream musical styles championed by KUCI DJs.

The difference Monday was that from the bells onward, KUCI’s potential audience grew by a couple of million. The eight minutes of static marked time when the station was off the air as a new, $95,000 transmitter and antenna were brought on-line, boosting power from 25 watts to 200. While that’s not much power compared to 50,000-watt commercial stations--or even to other college stations such as Cal State Long Beach’s 8,000-watt KLON--it is sufficient to take 23-year-old UCI out of the closet.

The joke used to be that DJs at KUCI would have a bigger broadcast range if they just stood at a window and shouted. Indeed, listeners more than a couple of miles from the campus generally had difficulty pulling in the weak monaural signal on 88.9 FM. But Monday, at the flick of a switch, the station was reaching most of Orange County.

The transmitter transition was celebrated by nearly 50 current and former station staffers, so many of them crowded into KUCI’s tiny Studio A that it resembled a ‘50s campus phone booth.

“This is a great day for us,” declared Kevin Stockdale, who has been working to get the new transmitter for much of the decade he has been with the station. “Our cramped broadcast range has been a discouraging problem. This is quite a turnaround.”

Stockdale, KUCI’s media coordinator, was accorded the honor of being the first voice heard on the newly boosted signal. The second was that of the cartoon group the Archies, intoning their 1969 hit “Sugar Sugar,” which had been the first song played, doubtlessly tongue in cheek, when “underground radio” KUCI first went on the air 23 years ago. Monday, it was followed by the somewhat more typical offerings of REM and a South African a cappella group.

KUCI gained Federal Communications Commission approval for the upgrade in 1991. The process was complicated by Los Angeles college station KXLU, which had a pre-existing claim on the 88.9 bandwidth. So it wouldn’t interfere with the KXLU signal, KUCI had to configure a directional antenna. Stockdale says the projected broadcast pattern resembles a lima bean, with the concave edge facing Los Angeles.

The biggest hurdles were funding and red tape. Station representatives had hoped to make the wattage jump early in 1992; the slow grind of paperwork also dashed plans to go on-line last November.

Now that it finally has the new equipment, the station has to find ways to afford it (the equipment has been leased for purchase by the university, which in turn leases it to the station). For the next several years, the station must use a sizable chunk of its annual $100,000-plus budget to pay off the equipment, with some help from the university.

By 1996, however, the university will cease subsidizing the station, which then is supposed to be self-sufficient.

KUCI General Manager Ghizal Hasan said he is confident that the station will find the audience it needs to support itself.

“We had some dedicated listeners out there as it was,” he said. “And now you don’t have to have tinfoil on your antenna or lean to one side of your room to pull the signal in. We had a fund drive in 1991 and, even with a 25-watt range, we raised over $8,000. I think by reaching more people, and giving them the different programming we have, we’ll get the support we need.”

Minutes after it went back on the air, the station began getting calls from friends in the field, reporting that it could be heard as far away as San Juan Capistrano, south Long Beach and Diamond Bar. The station’s broadcasts of Senegalese, Bulgarian, Israeli, Pakistani-Sufi and other styles Monday afternoon even came in clearly on a balky car radio in Fullerton and Brea, though the signal broke up north of Imperial Highway.

Disc jockey John Lewis, who is host of three programs on KUCI, doesn’t expect the larger audience to change many things in the small broadcast studio.

“This is the result of a long struggle, but in a way I think for everybody here it doesn’t really matter much,” he said. “We could only be broadcasting for one block and everyone would still put as much care into it. We knew it was 25 watts but we’ve always acted like it’s 5,000. Knowing we’re reaching more people can only add to that spirit.”

Program director Eric Jaquay said he doesn’t expect the station to change its free-form format to match the expectations of a general audience.

“There’s a division between (commercialism) and professionalism,” he noted. “We try to be professional but not slick. Instead of softening the broadcasts to make them more accessible, I think we need to go in other directions, especially with some of the other stations in the area that are now playing Nirvana and other bands that only we were playing a while ago. I personally feel we have more of a responsibility to remain underground, to provide something that you couldn’t get anywhere else.”