Pirate Act: what the law says and how it threatens pirate radio stations | Hacker News Reader

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

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84 pointsTomte80 comments

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

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?

>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?

Actually, I kinda doubt it. 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. (Disclaimer: I listen to radio in my car sometimes, but only NPR, not anything commercial.)

So basically there's a captive audience here that won't go away any time soon, and is getting older and easier to manipulate into buying stuff. It's not a growth sector for sure, but it is something a company can put minimal investment into and milk for profit. This is seen now with landline phone service: 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.

> 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 quite this toxic back in the day.

>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 this toxic back in the day.

How on earth is it "toxic" to state a fact? Older people are generally easier to manipulate, which is why there's laws against "elder abuse". Are you going to try to claim now that dementia doesn't exist, because that's "ageist"?

> How on earth is it "toxic" to state a fact? Older people are generally easier to manipulate...

That's not true.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3525123/Generation-...

> That's ... true.

Partial citations can be very misleading...

>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.

> Disclaimer: I listen to radio in my car sometimes, but only NPR, not anything commercial.

He doesn't even listen to radio! It's beneath him!

> 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.

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

Yeah, you're not going to get FM quality from 4kbps, so it's exactly like I said.

It might sound better to you because you're only listening to the channels they allocate the maximum bitrate to (i.e., the most popular ones). I don't listen to pop, so the stuff I tried listening to (hard rock and metal) sounded like total shit.

Here's a test for you: rip your favorite CD into FLAC, then encode this into a bunch of different MP3 or AAC streams of different bitrates. See what they sound like at 32kbps or worse. If that bitrate actually sounds fine to you, you might want to visit an audiologist and get your hearing checked. 64kbps will probably sound OK, depending on the codec (Ogg Vorbis and probably AAC will sound noticeably better than MP3), but nothing is going to sound good at 32 or less.

In short, XM does not have enough spectrum available to stream all those channels at a high-quality bitrate, so they devised this wacky scheme to allow them to broadcast some things at higher bitrates than others. While you don't need a high bitrate for talk radio of course, they also relegate many other music channels to lower bitrates, resulting in poor audio quality. Why would I pay $12/month or whatever for this? These days, if you insist on streaming music, you're better off just using your phone with a high or unlimited data plan and listening to Spotify or similar.

But why do that “wacky scheme” and not just stream over satellite internet?

They do stream from satellites; that's why it's called "satellite radio". That doesn't mean they can use as much spectrum as they want; they only get so much spectrum to broadcast in, so they can either have fewer higher-quality channels, or more lower-quality channels, or (what they did) a scheme where different channels can have different quality levels. But of course, they assume that most listeners can't tell the difference between good quality compression and poor quality (too-low bitrate) compression, and aim for more channels to satisfy more diverse tastes.

As an aside, SiriusXM isn't just broadcast from satellites; they also broadcast in cities from terrestrial towers, because in cities the reception from the satellites frequently isn't good (too many tall buildings and tunnels, too much multipath distortion, etc.). This doesn't change the spectrum allocation they're granted though.

> I think radio is a lot like landline telephones: it's "dying", but it's taking a long time because... there's a small number of corporate owners owning the majority of stations. FTFY

When the same corporate owner controls multiple radio stations in the same market, the listening experience sucks. I've recently started spending time with someone that listens to the local hip-hop stations (there are 2). They play the same 5 songs all day long. They go to commercial at the same time. They have the exact same format where each station has the same concept show at the same time. Just pick the on-air personalities you like better. I would be totally expect to find the same style station from the same owners in other cities would follow the exact same formula.

The Reply All episode where they get into some of the history of XERA and John Brinkley is pretty great. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/dvhexl

There is a documentary about the "doctor":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkMXDVBnrv4

Goat glands, oh boy..

Imagine, if you will, that this law was applied to Facebook, Twitter, etc. That you could only see content produced within some number of miles. Without Having so much reach, I wonder if we could devise a system that returns to amplifying local voices and creating community as opposed to louder, problematic voices from afar.

Ideas would spread the exact same way. Most people follow their friends and relatives. Most of those people usually live near you. It wouldn't take much for ideas to spread on a sort of mesh network of these interconnected groups.

Yeah. I mean this more as a thought experiment as it's not even really feasible technically (how would you ensure someone is where they said they were).

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.”

Back in the day I listened to a pirate station that broadcast out of Arizona. Similar to what the article mentioned, that station was run by people who were passionate about music, camping, and what was going on with respect to the National Forest service and the BLM with respect to public lands.

Objectively, they met all the mission requirements that the FCC at the time said they stood for, use of the common air waves for the public good. Their 'crime' was that while they operated a great station the lack of regulatory control meant they were 'at risk' of doing something "bad." They eventually got shut down, the world was not a 'better place' for it.

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 remaining high power commercial broadcasters to maintain the capability for emergency communication, and let a vibrant ecosystem (without the revenue to pay hefty license fees) regrow on the rest.

(edit: Well, the exact 2.4GHz regime might not be the most appropriate, because the obvious play is to broadcast on every frequency for more exposure. But the spirit of my argument remains - "pirate" operations remain vibrant because they can't be bought up and consolidated the way legalized stations do, and so their operation should be encouraged)

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.)

"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".

Very true. The problem here isn't regulation per se, which I concur is necessary, but the absurd amount of money it costs.

I was aware of that when I wrote my comment. Also the 2.4GHz has a lower inherent range due to higher frequency and water absorption.

I just don't foresee a huge interest in amateur stations being a problem that couldn't be sorted out informally. So Timmy decides to stomp on the broadcast of Tommy a few doors down - they'll figure it out. It certainly can't be worse than the current situation where Tommy isn't broadcasting at all.

Perhaps I'm discounting the effects of "100W SWR-tolerant FM Transmitter" on eBay for $60 direct from China. But shrug with the current state of radio consolidation, why not cross that bridge when we come to it?

FWIW I would say there is clearly more than enough broadcast spectrum to go around at the current prices, given how much dead space there is.

In this situation 1+1=0. If Timmy and Tommy go to war the frequency is effectively useless. Neither will be heard without severe interference.

Several thousand in licensing fees might have been too much for 2_3 volunteers or people doing it as a hobby.

http://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-approves-lower-annual-fe...

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 becoming legit without being forced to ditch Zappa in favor of Bieber and the like. The way it works is the reason why, save for a few rare gems, you turn the knob only to hear the same rubbish pretty much everywhere.

And by the way, if anyone likes the genre, my favorite radio station is TMB (The Musical Box) which streams progressive rock from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thanks to the Internet for making it possible. Easy to search for. Direct link to the stream for the impatient: vlc http://142.4.217.133:9740

2: That is actually the other way around. Yes, there are bad apples, and they should be prevented from operating, but there also are loads of people behind pirate radio stations who are sensitive about interference problems and other issues; lots of them are well trained and equipped engineers who fulfill their dream of getting on air with the best intentions. Many also are licensed HAM operators, though for obvious reasons they can't reveal their callsign. Radio Frequency is what hackers did when there weren't computers available; the practice is old.

Interesting forum on the subject: http://darkliferadio.proboards.com/

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.

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.

If anything, I think there's a lot of value for having people broadcasting on a community level.

In the era of the internet and hyper-connectivity, we've lost that sense of community and having local broadcasters that don't work for companies and don't have corporate agendas is a step towards restoring it.

The available local broadcast frequencies just need to be shared by people in the community and there has to be a strong sense of accountability for mess ups

I like pirate radio but it's illegal by definition.

They completely fail to mention that spectrum is limited and that you are probably causing interface for someone else.

The right thing to do would be to give them free or subsided licenses.

If the spectrum is otherwise used for cancers like advertising then I wouldn't consider interfering with it to be a bad thing.

In addition, I don't think these "pirate" operators have any nefarious intentions and wouldn't wish to actually interfere with any station (as it would be counter-productive to their own listeners, since the existing station would scramble their own broadcasts too) so I am not sure this has ever been a real problem.

How much space is going unused? I vaguely remember something back in 2013 about nonprofit groups having a small window to apply for community FM radio stations. But I assume there hasn't been a window since then.

Is that because there's no availability left anymore? Because radio stations don't want competition? Because it'd take an act of Congress and Congress isn't doing anything anytime soon? I genuinely have no idea.

I'd be more or less sympathetic to pirate radio based on the fairness of the legal avenues available. (And clearly I don't know much about those processes.)

Illegal behaviour is often what causes improvements of society.

Is there a real problem to be solved by this proposed legislation?

Of course, in theory, it's necessary that radio stations not transmit on the same frequency too close to each other, or there's interference. If this is happening in practice, then increased enforcement might well be called for.

If, on the other hand, interference isn't happening in practice, then increased enforcement seems like both a waste of resources and... is there a name for social benefit coming out of things being in a legal grey area?

If demand for spectrum is low in a certain area and there is plenty available for these pirate stations, then just have an easier process to become legit. There obviously needs to be some sort of process to make sure everyone is playing fair, you can't have total anarchy on the spectrum but there could be less burdensome application process for lower power stations that can prove they are operating for the common good. If you are just playing music and running used car dealer ads, you can go through the normal registration process.

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.

What happened in 2003 and where can I learn more about the translator situation?

It doesn't seem to be limited to religious programming. For example, KUSC, a non-profit classical station, has 4 translators. I don't understand why. NPR affiliate KCRW has 5 translators.

"A 2003 FCC licensing window for new translator applications resulted in over 13,000 applications, most from religious broadcasters. Due to the number of license applications, LPFM advocates called it the Great Translator Invasion."

It isn't limited to religious programming but it the major component.

Translators are really just re-broadcast mechanisms, and because of the various oversights in the regulations, the original signal does not have to be over the air or local, so networks can spawn off in parts of the band that were, in the spirit of things, intended for programming created by the same people the LPFM signal could reach: those in the nearby area.

There's a long, long history of lower power stations and tons of inside baseball on the topic. Unfortunately, removing market caps in the nineties caused a wave of consolidation in the radio industry that swallowed up many local stations with higher power. The Great Translator Invasion similarly purged the local stations with lower power.

Despite that consolidation and what you would think would be efficiencies of scale at the cost of programming from locals, many of the media companies that "borged up" the little guys have gone bankrupt. I won't pretend to know too much about all of this, I can only say that due to my contacts in the radio industry I have had multiple points of input giving me an overall negative opinion of how this has worked out over the years.

If we could get cognitive radio going over SDRs, mesh networks using automatic frequency hops to the nearest radio whitespace would become drop-dead easy.

From there, the FCC could issue regulations to the tune of 'use any non-military band for up to X seconds, provided you confirm you are not interfering with any other traffic every Y milliseconds' and the entire licensing scheme of "radio bandwidth is a finite good" could be virtually eliminated. It would be like going from IPv4 to IPv6 in terms of total amounts of available IP addresses.

The lack of technologies like cognitive radio aren't preventing mesh networks. If you're talking the useful bands for data transmission (ie, VHF and up but mostly very up) then the only thing that matters is height above terrain. Unfortunately except for exceptional situations (coastal mountains or megacity roofs) that height and getting power up there costs a lot of money. That's why neighborhood and city mesh networks don't work. And it's why cell networks do.

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/

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-...

If a broadcasting area can be 10 square kilometers with 100,000 people in them, and you need 40 base stations for $5000 to cover that, I feel like the infrastructure investment is insignificant compared to the engineering effort. Apparently the market exists.

In the US you could even transmit FM radio at the legal power levels from the base stations too, reaching like one apartment building from each base station.

A bigger legal problem is the copyright question. You could start with music from Jamendo and the Internet Archive but sooner or later your broadcaster DJs are going to want to broadcast Lindsey Stirling or One Direction, and then you'll have to prove in court that it's legal!

> A bigger legal problem is the copyright question.

_Unfortunately_, statutory licensing means that you can license most commercial music for your station for a couple hundred per year ( https://www.prometheusradio.org/music-licensing-noncommercia... ). Considering the investment of time that goes into scheduling, promoting, etc. a successful station the licensing costs aren't that big a deal.

I say unfortunately because the existence of blanket rates and in particular compulsory licensing has undermined the free market, and as a result new/independent performers have a much harder time getting aired because they essentially can't compete in terms of price (e.g. you can play our stuff free!) because almost every station/venue is already paying blanket rates and doesn't have much marginal cost in playing the commercial stuff.

Right, but those rates don't apply to internet streaming. This proposed new service isn't exactly internet-based, but it isn't an FCC-licensed commercial radio station either, and it's digital and packet switched; you can bet your left ovary that sooner or later it would face music industry mafiosi arguing in court that it should have to pay the internet streaming radio rates, not the ones KVIL pays.

Follow the link and look midway through it, statutory licensing also applies to non-interactive internet streaming too-- though the rules are somewhat different.

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

FCC interview: https://www.fcc.gov/news-events/podcast/pirate-radio They minimize the regulatory burden and emphasize the dangers of interfering with air traffic control, and suggest internet streaming as an alternative, among other interesting tidbits.

Broadcast radio is dying to the point that it's difficult to purchase a high end FM tuner now-- pretty much anything that exists is old models. Heck, used XDR-F1HD regularly sell for twice their original price. In many places big chunks of the dial are vacant, and where it isn't a few companies own most of the stations.

The public and the industry needs more pirate radio -- if the political will to undo the regulatory capture that's killed LPFM can't be fixed quickly.

Instead of enhancing penalties, they should instead be limited to actual damages for signal interruption to licensed stations plus no more than 2x whatever licensing would have cost had the FCC been willing to issue a license, which they're usually not.

I loved listening to the pirate stations in NY in the late 70s and early 80s. WFAT, WFSR, WLAU, etc.

But there are more options today for "broadcasting" over the Internet than there were then.

While I wouldn't want to see any "pirate" face jail time or huge fines for a first or second offence, it still can be disruptive to the legally licensed radio stations that were granted use of those frequencies. Like it or not, the airwaves are a limited resource, and need to be managed and provisioned.

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.

I feel the need to mention the movie "The Boat that Rocked", despite being 99% fiction (based on fact), there's a "spirit of the hacker" to it that provides a level of comfort to my soul.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_That_Rocked

A surprising number of radio stations in major cities in the UK started out as pirates. Why aren’t lawmakers in the US instead trying to make it easier for pirate radio stations to operate legally?

And without pirate radio we wouldn't have the "People Just Do Nothing" mockumentary series!

The U.S. is in the waiting room for a serious house cleaning. As it is, literally everything revolves around some big companies profit margins. If it doesn't benefit that, it's not important.

God I hope we fuck em up soon. They subverted the justice system, and now there's no pressure release for when bad things happen.

Maybe the FCC should set aside a few portions of spectrum that are completely unregulated.

Probably a lot of bad actors would show up. But who knows? Maybe most of them would get bored and leave.

This is basically what wifi, bluetooth, and garage door openers use. The sad thing is that they carved out chunks of the spectrum that don't reach as far as the already-in-use TV and radio spectrums. We get the leftover bits for arbitrary consumer transmission, the good parts are spoken for by corporations with deep pockets. I'd like to see the whole thing opened up, it would make meshnets easier to get going.

>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.

I'm curious... if you're mostly doing talk, then wouldn't something around a 32k stream be potentially sufficient these days? I haven't run the numbers, but if anyone has calculated on what it takes to run a web/online stream I'd be interested.

Of course, that precludes music licenses for the most part.

From a technical standpoint it costs basically nothing, you can get a dedicated server with 100Mbps speed quota on a 1000 Mbps upstream, for under a hundred bucks a month.

Sufficient to support a very large number of Icecast stream listeners.

All of the software needed to do it is zero dollars and some combination of GPL/BSD/Apache licensed.

I really don't think pirate radio would be interesting if it was legal in itself.

Add to that they then might get mainstream advertisers and follow the FCC and syndicate to wide non-localised areas if legal, destroying everything unique about them.

Whatever happened to "Community Radio" low-power licensing? Or is a 3 mile radius just too small?

They aren't currently issuing LPFM licenses.

Commercial operators and, in particular, NPR have fought incredibly hard against LPFM even with the anemic power/radius limitation.

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.

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?

That, plus Ham radio basically doesn't allow broadcasting. Ham radio communication is (more or less) intended to be between parties that communicate with each other. There are some exceptions, like telemetry, but Ham isn't intended to replace commercial broadcast stations.

Playing music on HAM frequencies is against the terms of pretty much every license, and commercial radio receivers that everyone has in their house and car won’t pick up transmissions on HAM frequencies. Assuming a disproportionate amount of pirate radio stations operate in low-income areas, access to equipment is a high barrier to entry for listeners. Internet radio is one solution, but who wants to listen to the radio from their phone when their apartment already has an FM receiver?

You are restricted from "broadcasting" most things over Ham frequencies.

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.

The FCC's purpose from its inception was to centralize power in the hands of a few powerful capitalists. In a free country, why would the national government have complete control over a radio station that broadcasts solely within a single state or city?

https://reason.com/2017/04/05/roosevelts-war-against-the-pre...

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