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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

#71

Post by OrgNet »

gleapsite wrote: post #33
kragen wrote: post #27

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…

A long time ago I used an rtlsdr hooked up via usb-otg in order to track aircraft [1]. I'd be really interested in a minified version that didnt need the otg dongle. Or even a stand alone battery operated sdr that could be controlled with bluetooth? I dunno how big that market is, especially absent a network like you propose. [1] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ads-b-decoder-rtl-sdr-now-available-...

I did that for a bit too and quickly noticed that not all aircrafts broadcast that signal...

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

#73

Post by serf »

magduf wrote: post #46
Chlorus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's gotten really unreliable in many places these days because the infrastructure is decaying and companies are spending the absolute minimum to keep it going, but they're milking it for profit from all the dinosaurs who refuse to give it up. Citation? I haven't heard anything about this and I work closely with telecom. > and is getting older and easier to manipulate into buying stuff. You know, Slashdot was never…

>Citation? I haven't heard anything about this and I work closely with telecom. It's what I've seen with some of my family that lives in smaller towns or rural areas. Some crappy company like CenturyLink buys up the infrastructure and then just lets it rot, but charges huge prices for phone service, higher than cellular service. Then service quality is poor and outages are common. >You know, Slashdot was never quite…

>Older people are generally easier to manipulate, which is why there's laws against "elder abuse".

That's absolutely not the reason laws like that exist, unless you consider the neglected elderly who are ignored in places like hospice care facilities as having been 'manipulated'.

I think that's a grossly overbroad definition of the phrase.

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

#74

Post by segfaultbuserr »

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…

And it's also sad to hear that NPR is a big opponent against micropower radio.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-power_broadcasting#Legisla...

NPR argues that the proposed changes would unreasonably burden its member stations by requiring them to resolve LPFM interference problems. Adoption of the new FCC rules also would jeopardize the extensive network of translators that pubradio stations have built with federal assistance and would upend the commission’s longstanding spectrum policies favoring full-power broadcasters, according to NPR.

> “It may be one thing to ‘squeeze in’ secondary low-power facilities into a mature broadcast service,” NPR said, referring to the commission’s original plan for LPFM, “[but] it is quite another to reverse decades of commission policy and rules favoring higher-powered broadcast facilities by elevating LPFM stations to co-equal status with full power stations.”

> “The laws of physics have not changed, and a system of full-power broadcast stations serves many more listeners with less interference compared to low-power broadcasting,” NPR wrote.

> “We know there are not a lot of low-power stations out there in relation to how many could be if third-adjacency protections were lifted,” Riksen said. “We are really concerned about how many would come into creation when third-power adjacencies are eliminated entirely.”

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

#75

Post by Cougher »

squarefoot wrote: post #31
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.

1: being in compliance requires lots of money -> lots of money requires advertising -> advertising to be effective requires finding as many listeners as possible -> finding most listeners requires broadcasting trash -> bye bye small local station broadcasting interesting stuff. If there was a way to be in compliance without shelling out loads of money that would be awesome and we'd see pretty much every station becom…

Years ago, I would have loved a good prog station. It would have been similar to a good pirate station "back in the day", or even like a lot of FM stations were back in the late 60s/early 70s. But I've long developed my own interests and moods over decades and I find it hard to want to listen to someone else making selections for me. Especially as I prefer listening to older music and I'm much less prog-exclusive than I used to be.

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

#76

Post by kube-system »

OrgNet wrote: post #72
sojmq wrote: post #26

In the days of streaming over the Internet I don't see the need for pirate radio stations.

It is harder to track who's listening to which FM station and might be useful if your internet is being blocked or censored

On the other hand, internet radio is useful if your FM station is being blocked or censored.

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

#77

Post by magduf »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #65
vinay427 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think radio is a lot like landline telephones: it's "dying", but it's taking a long time because there's a bunch of dinosaurs who still use it and won't quit until they're dead. I would consider actively switching if there were an alternative that was strictly better. Something with the quality of at least HD radio and the reliability and accessibility of FM radio, for instance.

SiriusXM?

Sorry, no, that doesn't qualify. The sound quality on SiriusXM is abysmal; it's something like a 32kbps bitrate. FM radio has far better fidelity.

I tried out SiriusXM when I got my new car, because they had a free 6-month trial. It was truly awful (even in a car, which doesn't exactly have a great environment for listening to music), so I quickly gave up on it.

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

#78

Post by colejohnson66 »

magduf wrote: post #77
colejohnson66 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SiriusXM?

Sorry, no, that doesn't qualify. The sound quality on SiriusXM is abysmal; it's something like a 32kbps bitrate. FM radio has far better fidelity. I tried out SiriusXM when I got my new car, because they had a free 6-month trial. It was truly awful (even in a car, which doesn't exactly have a great environment for listening to music), so I quickly gave up on it.

It always sounds better than FM to me. Probably because of a lack of static; It either worked or it didn’t.

I thought you were kidding though, so I looked it up, and Wikipedia[0] confirms it:

> Each two-carrier group broadcast 100 8-kilobit-per-second streams in approximately 4 MHz of radio spectrum. These streams were combined using a patented process to form a variable number of channels using a variety of bitrates. Bandwidth is separated into segments of 4-kilobit-per-second virtual "streams" which are combined to form audio and data "channels" of varying bitrates from 4 to 64 kilobits-per-second.

Wow. I thought they just used satellite internet and streamed from their servers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_Satellite_Radio#Technology

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

#79

Post by squarefoot »

Cougher wrote: post #75
squarefoot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1: being in compliance requires lots of money -> lots of money requires advertising -> advertising to be effective requires finding as many listeners as possible -> finding most listeners requires broadcasting trash -> bye bye small local station broadcasting interesting stuff. If there was a way to be in compliance without shelling out loads of money that would be awesome and we'd see pretty much every station becom…

Years ago, I would have loved a good prog station. It would have been similar to a good pirate station "back in the day", or even like a lot of FM stations were back in the late 60s/early 70s. But I've long developed my own interests and moods over decades and I find it hard to want to listen to someone else making selections for me. Especially as I prefer listening to older music and I'm much less prog-exclusive tha…

I also listen to different genres (70s pop rock, some punk and light jazz, old style metal, 80s disco and more modern stuff etc.) though I found prog to be more interesting as a wannabe musician; much easier to grasp than the hardest jazz and closer to my origins (Rock&Roll, 70s-80s Hard Rock etc). I also have a thing about swing and big band sound; one of my dreams is hopefully being able one day to take many well known tunes and play them swing-style using rock and big band instruments together. I often hum "normal" songs swing-style while driving my bike and I found that the number of them that could be rearranged as such is surprisingly high.

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

#80

Post by magduf »

blotter_paper wrote: post #53
magduf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We get the leftover bits for arbitrary consumer transmission, the good parts are spoken for by corporations with deep pockets. Actually, no. Check out a chart of the usage of the radio spectrum in the US, and you'll find a shockingly huge amount of it is reserved for the military.

Fair enough. The deep pocketed corporations do still get preference over little people though, even if Big Daddy Government gets his slice first.

If you look at the spectrum, however, the deep-pocketed corporations are only getting preference of a very tiny sliver of the spectrum. They should be getting preference, because they can do a lot more with that spectrum than the rest of us can. I hate to argue for deep-pocketed corporations, but it's true: we simply wouldn't have things like cellphones and 4G without them controlling the spectrum this way. You can't have things like that with massive amounts of interference from amateurs broadcasting whatever they want with low spectral efficiency (the spectral efficiency of old analog stuff is terrible compared to modern protocols). You can't legislate the laws of physics; there's only so much spectrum available.

The solution, to me, is simple: if the little people want to be able to do more with the radio waves, they need to get the government to release some bands to them for amateur or low-power use, instead of expecting everyone to cram anything and everything into the 2.4GHz band. There's a huge amount of spectrum out there, but we're not allowed to use it because it's reserved for military radios. The military doesn't need to control the vast majority of the spectrum; it's not like they're exchanging vast quantities of data with it, the way we civilians do with our phones.

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