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Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

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Re: Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

#21

Post by at_a_remove »

The Great Translator Invasion of 2003 created a situation where the portions of the band where community radio, run by and for residents (local information, for local people), was instead occupied by "translators," replicating signals from religious broadcast networks like Moody.

Between that and NPR behaving as if they were about to be blasted off the air by third adjacent-channel interference from tiny station with pitiful transmitters, it is very difficult to come up with situations where the band is being used as promised.

I am not surprised that pirate radio is still a thing, given this kind of outcome.

Re: Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

#22

Post by leggomylibro »

sh-run wrote: post #5

I'm completely unfamiliar with this, but could they not get HAM licenses and operate on amateur radio frequencies? Or simply turn what they are doing into a podcast? Or is the issue that their target audience only has access to AM/FM radios?

One of the funnier HAM licensing questions in the US is when you're allowed to transmit music. The answer?

"When incidental to an authorized retransmission of manned spacecraft communications"

So...not very often.

Re: Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

#24

Post by jhallenworld »

There is an interesting story about the high power side of broadcasting. There was a station in the US, WLW that was 500 kW. This one station reached almost the entire country. The FCC finally limited the maximum power to 50 kW. Mexico had no such restriction, so "border blasters" appeared- high power stations on the boarder transmitting into the US. They ran ads, made money and had huge audiences. Most famous is Wolfman Jack on XERF.

http://www.ominous-valve.com/xerf.html

http://www.theradiohistorian.org/xer/xer.html

http://www.ominous-valve.com/wlw.html

Anyway for low power community radio, the situation is ridiculous. Some part of the FM dial should just be reserved for low power self-regulated radio. The rules are the way they are to protect incumbents and the same thing is happening on the internet. A recent example is when the David Pakman youtube show got dinged by CNN and NBC because he was rebroadcasting CSPAN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z43JMffa1x0

Re: Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

#25

Post by jeffdavis »

I recently got into HAM radio a little bit. I like to believe that radio (aside from wifi and cell service) is still useful, but the use cases are getting pretty thin.

There are lots of ways to deliver news. I get the feeling that a lot of the appeal of using pirate radio is because it's illegal.

I know there are a few benefits, like tuning a car radio to the right frequency, and not requiring someone to know how to set up a streaming audio service. But it seems to be a declining use case.

Re: Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

#27

Post by kragen »

It would be interesting to see an ISM neighborhood mesh network for broadcasting this kind of thing. With modern openly-licensed codecs you should be able to get decent music quality in 16kbps or less, so a half-duplex channel at 512kbps could carry 32 concurrent transmissions. With mesh nodes every 500 meters, you can use four nodes per square kilometer and spare the mobile nodes from spending battery on forwarding packets when they're not plugged in, or even transmitting signals. If you build the network on a for-profit basis, you can subsidize distribution of $20 radios from broadcasting fees. Is there an equivalent of RTL-SDR for pocket-sized projects yet?

Related: Cory Doctorow’s 2003 short story, “Liberation Spectrum”: https://craphound.com/stories/2003/01/10/liberation-spectrum... https://www.salon.com/2003/01/16/liberation_spectrum/

Re: Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

#28

Post by tjohns »

mindslight wrote: post #13
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was getting in compliance too burdensome for them? For every well-behaved pirate, there’d be many ill-mannered pirates if you didn’t seize their operations.

"Ill-mannered" ? I can't think of anything more ill-mannered than a handful of companies abusing the letter of the law by "owning" all of the licensed spectrum in a given area, and then filling it with lowest common denominator chum in a race to the bottom. In this day and age where main societal attention has moved past radio, most of the FM band should be put under a regime similar to 2.4GHz. Preserve the few remai…

The problem with that plan is that broadcast radio does not let two stations (in the same general area) share the same frequency, period. So you need to have frequency coordination.

Compare with the ISM bands, like 2.4 GHz, where you can use complex digital signaling (e.g. CDMA/TDMA combined with robust error correction and detection) to effectively timeshare the frequency. The only reason this works well is because the frequencies are two-way and severely power limited - and even then the WiFi channels are congested.

Your home WiFi network has a range of a few hundred feet. A broadcast radio station can easily reach hundreds of miles. The reason those broadcast licenses cost so much is because there's just not enough broadcast spectrum to go around.

A better option for most users is to just stream over the Internet.

(That said, I would certainly love to see a chunk of spectrum set aside for low-power ad-hoc/community stations. But I don't think it would work reliably if it ever got popular.)

Re: Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations

#30

Post by jfengel »

jhallenworld wrote: post #24

There is an interesting story about the high power side of broadcasting. There was a station in the US, WLW that was 500 kW. This one station reached almost the entire country. The FCC finally limited the maximum power to 50 kW. Mexico had no such restriction, so "border blasters" appeared- high power stations on the boarder transmitting into the US. They ran ads, made money and had huge audiences. Most famous is Wol…

I would expect that radio stations in general were suffering from people switching to other forms of media. If that's the case, would it perhaps drive the licensing price down?

And if the licenses could be affordable, perhaps it would be possible to raise funds for people to do low power radio in that space? I don't know if it would be legal to do it that way, but if somebody presented the FCC with a plan (including details of how they'd self-regulate), perhaps they'd accept it?

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