HAWTHORNE, Nev. -- TV 13 is on the air, broadcasting from an old, single-wide mobile home to an audience of dozens, even hundreds at times. It's as small as TV stations get, and by far the smallest in Nevada. If every resident in the area and every guest at the El Capitan Hotel tuned in, the audience might reach 3,000. Still, the owners bill it as "Central Nevada's Only Full-Service Commercial Television Station."

Bob Becker, 65, got the TV station in 1994 as a Father's Day present from his son Scott, who owns a low-power station in Kansas. Technically speaking, Scott gave his father a construction permit for a TV station. Eighteen months later, Bob and his wife Ginny, 60, were on the air.

KWI-TV is not just a little TV station, it's an itsy bitsy TV station. Most big-time TV folks would laugh at the equipment -- an "antique" transmitter, 50-foot tower, one old Sharp VHS camcorder, no editing equipment, no lights, a few cheap microphones, a couple of VCRs, and a single satellite dish out back to pick up programs from satellites. Nevertheless, KWI-TV is an officially FCC-licensed TV station, with 10 watts of power -- enough to reach every person in Hawthorne and every fish in Walker Lake.

Bob and Ginny have full-time jobs, he as a maintenance man for the county, she as a nutritionist. They were both well-paid executives in the Chicago/Milwaukee area 15 years ago. Then Ginny quit her job, and Bob unexpectedly lost his after 16 years. They were free.

They had family in Hawthorne, so that's where they headed, living in a 20-foot travel trailer for the next year.

Now, together they earn less than Ginny alone earned back in Chicago. TV 13 covers its own expenses, and that's about it. But Bob and Ginny don't seem to care because they're having fun, even though they admit running a TV station is a grind. Ginny says it's as time-consuming and demanding as a child.

Until they started TV 13, they had never set foot in a TV station. Now, they own one, and when Ginny introduces herself as "the owner of a TV station," people exclaim, "You own a TV station?!!!" like they're meeting Ted Turner. Little do they know that anyone in a big city could climb to a rooftop with a megaphone and reach a larger audience.

Their studio is their old mobile home. Video tapes are strewn everywhere, including on the kitchen sink. A couple of old TVs, bought at a pawn shop, serve as monitors. Using a home-video character generator, they send advertising messages crawling along the bottom of the screen of whatever's playing at the moment, usually at the rate of about 20 to 30 messages an hour. Advertisers pay a whopping nine cents an ad -- $67.50 a month for 720 exposures. On a big-city station, nine cents wouldn't buy a fraction of a second.

Advertisers include Scotty's Gas Station, Maggie's Restaurant, the El Capitan Casino, Mother Goose's Day Care and Woody's Automotive.

Most of the time, the station airs "The Nostalgia Channel," which comes free by satellite. Every so often, however, Bob and Ginny pop in with something local. But there isn't much. And hardly ever any news. "We don't have a news hour, in fact we don't even have a news minute," said Ginny.

But they do respond to a very-occasional breaking story, videotaping the incident and then driving like crazy back to the mobile home where the tape is popped into a VCR for broadcast. Their biggest story was when a potato truck overturned on U.S. 95.

By far the most popular show is the taped-delayed, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Mineral County Commissioners meeting. Bob and Ginny cite this show as an example of how their tiny TV station is able to have a positive impact on the community.

TV 13 covers some local events -- the Loon Festival, the Armed Forces Day Parade, girls basketball, the Miss Mineral County pageant, and even an occasional graduation ceremony, although not always with success. Last graduation, for example, the battery went dead in their photographer's camcorder after only 23 minutes.

Other local shows include "Community Calendar," hosted by Mineral County Sheriff Rocky McKellip from his desk in the sheriff's office. The most ambitious production is a monthly talk show, "Civic Roundtable." The volunteer host sits at a round table at the library and interviews local folks about local issues. The set is hokey and drab, and the sound is awful. But Bob and Ginny know it, and accept it as part of running a Mom and Pop TV station. This is not to say they don't yearn to do better.

For now, though, they keep it simple and dream of the day when, said Bob, "We can have 24 hours a day of Hawthorne."

(E-mail KWI-TV owners Ginny and Bob Becker)

©1999 by Out West Newspaper

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