I know it's not a popular opinion, but the AM/FM radio bands have become such (corporate) crap that I laud people like this radio pirate. I wish a kind of public-access could open up on half the frequencies on the dial.
The FCC helps ensure that specific radio bands are allocated for emergency purposes. There are regulations based on numerous performance characteristics of radios that must be met before a radio transmitter can be sold and operated. The problem with pirates is that they either aren't aware of these considerations or don't care. Either way could lead to interference with firefighters, police, or ambulance dispatch in life-critical situations. (The P25 digital radio communications standard was written specifically to address interoperability between different manufacturers, as a direct result of the inability for first responders to coordinate efforts during 9/11, which led to more lives lost than would have happened otherwise.)
Beyond the FCC, counties need to stay within their allocated spectrum band, lest they interfere with neighbouring transceivers.
Yes, corporate radio is trash. In Canada, we have CBC Radio, which is free of advertisements. Allowing radio pirates to jam airwaves is neither a good idea nor a good solution to corporate crap.
What emergency services are operating under its Steeple in this case?
EAS is expanding to provide visual alerts as well, which the 90.5 pirate fully blocked.
It's hard to draw an exact parallel between public access on cable and public access on FM/AM.
Public access on cable is using infrastructure that cable TV companies were required to provide, as a cost for the privilege of using public right-of-ways to run their cables. All costs paid by the cable company.
None of that is in place in the US for radio. Each station has it's own transmitter and must obtain it's own tower space. There's no one to pay for the transmitter, tower and related infrastructure for a public access radio station.
The closest is the currently existing Low Power FM service, and the Non Commercial FM Service, but it's not free, like public access cable is/was.
Pirate stations generally don't fork out the extra cash to get a certified or verified transmitter. And uncertified/unverified transmitter manufacturers generally don't test for compliance regarding interference to public safety bands.
Radio is available for use for everyone with proper licensing and certification; there's even a block of frequencies reserved for amateur use (read: ham radio).
The US is a country based on rule of law, your anarchist arguments aren't providing useful discussion.
Conversely, if we're not worried, are illegal broadcasts such a danger?
yeah, but it is not legal to encrypt the ham radio traffic, kinda defeats the whole point of having a frequency for DIY usage.
My comment was questioning the efficacy of FCC regulations against protecting from a "real" threat, i.e. same kind of argument as "gun free zones only stop good guys with a gun while not stopping bad guys with a gun."
If anything, I was asking if there should be more regulations to protect against threats that attempt to obfuscate their presence.
Any incidents that go beyond just interference will likely involve other regulatory and law enforcement agencies anyway, so it's unlikely the FCC itself needs more powers for now.
Though it's not like Russia hasn't already tried anyway[0].
I'm pretty sure most people here are going to at least know what ham radio is. That's not the reason why people here are sympathetic to pirate AM/FM radio broadcasters. It's moreso because the AM and FM radio bands are basically a cultural dead zone: ClearChannel and friends bought them all up in decades past and turned them into garbage. This is the sort of misallocation of resources that economists tend to have a blind spot for. According to them, efficient markets[1] are perfect allocators and anyone not having their tastes satisfied are just harbingers of failure[2] angry that their Crystal Pepsi got discontinued. The reality is that there's literally no reason to have eight stations all playing the same mainstream format in one market, and the FCC has dropped the ball on maximizing public utility of the spectrum.
'Cause here's the thing: yes, radio is "available for use" with proper licensing and certification, but that's basically an elaborated no. It's sort of like saying "copyrighted material is available with proper licensing". Nobody is going to be able to afford the licenses, if they're even offered, because the FCC runs on an auction system. And it turns out that that the mainstream station formats are really, really profitable to the point where you can outbid everything else. Is this an actually worthwhile use of the AM/FM bands to have what are effectively duplicates of the same station on every band in every market?
[0] Ok, it was a radar system, not a jamming system, but that's just a difference of intent. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbi6eoh63ZQ
[1] Fun fact: did you know the Efficient Markets Hypothesis implies P = NP? It's true - if markets are perfectly efficient then they can solve boolean satisfiability problems, which are NP-complete, and thus you can break all crypto.
On the other hand, inefficient markets also imply all those finance soothsayers with their technical analysis can actually beat the market.
[2] "Harbingers of failure" are people who are unusually good at buying doomed products. See https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...
More recently, a construction permit on 107.9 was cancelled after it was determined that it could not co-exist with an airport. (If I find the link, I'll edit this reply and post it)
In isolation it’s a dice roll. Normalise it and the game becomes power: since nobody is coördinating spectrum, the loudest transmitter (noisily) wins. Waiting until that predictable point doesn’t make sense, particularly given the FCC seems to have warned this guy in the past without handing out a fine.
Jamming EAS(https://www.fcc.gov/emergency-alert-system). In the rural midwest, it's critical for distributing tornado warnings further from town than you can hear the sirens. Periodic tests are required, and there's a readiness report.
>Can you point at one case of this ever happening, ever in real life where modern emergency communications were interrupted by a FM transmitter?
EAS failures due to interference causing poor signal does happen. From the August 11, 2021 Nationwide EAS Test: "There were 78 test participants on receipt and 32 on retransmission that reported failure to receive the test message due to poor signal. Test participants attributed the poor signal to interference, a weak signal from their monitoring source, or a weather-related complication."
Also from https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRPT-115hrpt843/html/CRP... ,
"Illegal pirate radio stations interfere with the Emergency Alert System (EAS). EAS is critically important to protect the public and national security. During national, regional, and local emergencies, the broadcast EAS system is essential to saving lives. Stations participating in the EAS system must be able to transmit and receive interference-free signals. Pirate stations do not participate in the EAS system and do not comply with FCC's EAS rules monitoring and broadcasting EAS alerts. Further, unlicensed illegal stations interfere with licensed radio stations. Such interference affects EAS alerts that are broadcast by licensed radio stations. Thus, consumers located near a pirate radio transmitter will not hear the legitimate station's EAS alert."
Not just the midwest. Anywhere there is not cell service where there might be some kind of an alert that needs to be generated. AM, FM, and the weather bands are often the only reliable signals that can be received in some areas.
Flooding, tsunamis, avalanches, nuclear power plant warnings, civil defense warnings, etc all have SAME codes.
See page A-13 for all the codes that SAME provides. https://www.nws.noaa.gov/directives/sym/pd01017012curr.pdf
Out of how many test recipients? If I'm reading the report correctly, it was at least 19,302, which means interference caused failure for < 0.6% -- and the overall failure rate was slightly higher than 10%.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-378861A1.txt
I understand that any interference could potentially cause loss of life, but I wonder how much illegal "pirate" broadcasts are really a factor.
This may have some amount of survivorship bias in that remediated interference won't count toward those failures.
Do it on SW, around 6MHz, and you'll cover a 300-mile radius with 50 watts.
So the inherently local nature of VHF complements the inherently local weather alerts. Floods and tornadoes are not an issue at a distance of 300 miles.
A long time ago, we were acquiring the shadiest RF devices possible to test against our WiFi routers, which should avoid auto-selecting interfering frequencies. One device we got was an analog wireless security camera thingie bought right from Amazon. "2.4GHz" it declared, so it was the perfect test case. We turned it on and there was no WiFi interference whatsoever. We got out the test equipment and... its carrier frequency was right on the edge of the L1 GPS frequency. You turn the thing on, there goes GPS for the neighborhood. It was impressively disastrous and we did not test it any further!
That's a company trying to build a radio product, for sale to consumers in the US market. I don't have a lot more faith in random people trying to build FM radios. Sure, you'll know if it doesn't work, because you tune your car radio to it and you can't hear anything. But unless you're careful, you can radiate a lot of power in the sidebands and the harmonics. That will trash licensed spectrum users, which is Not Nice Of You. (As for "amateur radio" operators, how to build and test radios is part of the exam, so there are a lot of great homebuilt radios floating around out there. Also part of the test is knowing when you can use non-amateur frequencies, and what the punishment for doing so is. Needless to say, not a lot of trained hams are building pirate radio stations. So that brings the likelihood of doing a bad job even higher; by definition, only the unlicensed and untrained are even trying this.)
This comment is already too long but I want to relay another fun fact. Building a receiver can interfere with other users of the spectrum; a common design mixes the incoming radio signal by a higher frequency, filters it, and then mixes it down to audio frequencies. If you don't shield this well, then your receiver is actually a transmitter on some random other band. Be careful and test your design with a spectrum analyzer. It's not rocket science but it's not trivial either.
The fifth harmonic will land squarely in the chunk of band between about 435MHz and 500MHz, and being roughly 200kHz wide even assuming they're not overdeviating like hell it'll obliterate a huge chunk of the band. Given how poorly constructed many "pirate TXes are it's almost a given that they'll have ridiculous amounts of out-of-band radiation.
There's one very popular design available on the Internet which I won't link to but will leave as an exercise for the reader, which has a rather nasty sproggie that's only about 10dB down at around 156MHz when it's tuned for about 104MHz. Now, that chunk of the FM broadcast band is quiet around here, but the sproggie passes through the transmitter's largely untuned (at least, broad as a barn door) PA and out the antenna.
The whole thing is not terribly efficient at radiating something 200kHz wide all over the bottom end of the Marine VHF band, but it sure is noticeable.
Source: literally my day job.
I still contend that public-access radio ought to be a thing. It can be a certified station in the same way that cable-access in the 1980's was not "pirate cable".
Limited to a 1w transmitter, so it can only cover a small area. And only a few subranges within the FM band.
But no registration is required, you just need to use pre-approved equipment and anounce your contact details once an hour.
I think NZ started on FM later than many countries, so they saw the wisdom in reserving some frequencies specifically for that use. Unfortunately that wisdom was gained after the US (and most other countries) already allocated everything.
When users of of those bands were moved elsewhere (to mobile phones) they expanded to the standard 88.0mhz to 108mhz range in 2000. Looks like they reserved the 1mhz "guardband" of the expanded range for these unlicensed, low power stations.
Although at this point I think it's on a one way path to being more bandwidth for the Internet (in one form or another).
https://www.prometheusradio.org/startup_costs
So it kinda seems like it was a thing?
it is shameful people buy into, and believe the FCC method of "allocation" is either good, or designed to "save lives" when clearly that is NOT the primary purpose of the allocation plan
If you replace "preferred corporate buyer" with "highest bidder", that would be more accurate in my experience.
Otherwise, I agree-- "highest bidder" is not a great way to determine what is best for the public.
Seems the argument should be more that it is a merit good, but even then some determination must be made as to how to allocate each frequency resource. Auctions are a decent way to do that; supply and demand. So long as they are public and truly go to the highest bidder, I'm not sure there is much to be dissatisfied about.
Thankfully the internet exists to allow people to transmit whatever they want; granted it's still limited to the internet so not the same.
If we allocated broadcast bands today, would we have a hundred narrow channels, or would we have a smaller number of channels and use a TDMA or CDMA style system to expand the number of available slots? I could even imagine packetized broadcasts-- rather than "KXYZ-FM" being on 98.6, your receiver would just scan the entire band for packets tagged KXYZ, and they could dynamically reallocate based on local noise levels or atmospheric conditions.
Says who?
>> Auctions are a decent way to do that;
Clearly they are not, nor it is how that is done, as entire segments are portioned off for a use, then auctioned off for that use.
>So long as they are public and truly go to the highest bidder, I'm not sure there is much to be dissatisfied about.
Lots. for one the fact that companies can buy up huge parts of the spectrum for "future use" and sit on it for decades denying access for innovation.
Is there a "turnkey" solution for someone who wants a broadcast radius bigger than the "talking real estate sign" with a 100-metre radius, but smaller than the smallest commercial/non-profit products? I know there was a lot of talk about low-power FM a few years back, but I think that was still at a level of cost, complexity and licensing far above a lot of the potential audience.
If we had a few nationally allocated free-for-all spots on the FM and TV bands, I'd expect to see such products appear very quickly. Since they'd be made by legitimate manufacturers with the desire to stay in business, they'd generally be well-behaved and have controls limited to stay within bounds, but that would probably be enough to satisfy the niche of "I want to control what's on the radio." Yeah, the channels would be a complete noise mess, but we already did that with CB and the various bands we allocated for Wi-Fi.
Bluetooth Auracast still has a chance at becoming a thing, and is a one-to-many terrestrial broadcast solution that, if implemented by manufacturers, will be available on almost any mobile device. It allows for 4 watts EIRP and it's one-way (no pairing). I could imagine success in a pedestrian-heavy environment.
Re: "...a few nationally allocated free-for-all spots on the FM and TV bands"
The bandwidth unfortunately does not exist for a nation-wide channel in the USA.
I'd expect that a lot of broadcasters left VHF after the ATSC transition, because it seems like most modern TV antennas are UHF-centric designs, and channel 6 is already known for reaching into the bottom of the FM band, so it kills two birds with one stone.
The problem with anything new is that it's like the current appeal of ham radio products in general: the only community it reaches is people who already went out of their way to buy a compatible receiver. You can be relatively sure a "general" audience has standard FM and TV capabilities already.
I can't think of one major US market off hand that does not have a channel 5 or 6 station.
https://www.rabbitears.info/searchmap.php?request=result&stu...
Prescott (Ch 6), Yuma (Ch. 2) and Tucson (Ch 4) have the lower-VHF stations in that region.
The way to "curb" it would be to just give part of the band as "free for all".
Then they can chase people running shittily designed transmitters separately
But 9/11 likely put in much more work into it and multi-band radios that can more easily interoperate.
[1]: https://majorcitieschiefs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/MCC...
Radio belongs to the people, it is the definition of a public good. It is incontrovertible that the ownership rules will be tweaked in the direction of corporate interests at every opportunity.
People (you and I, and our elected representatives, and pirates) need to do everything possible to yank it back, as far and as hard as we can.
The fact that LPFM hasn't even _pretended_ to offer the _opportunity_ for a license in _ten years_ is everything you need to know about that farce.
An LPFM window can not overlap with: (1) Full Power Non-Commercial FM Stations, (2) Full Power Commercial FM Stations, (3) FM Translators (or, repeaters), (4) Full Power TV Stations, and (5) Low Power TV Stations. These windows can not overlap because each of the above services must consider each other in their applications.
The FCC is still wrapping up decisions from the recent 2021 Non-Commercial FM filing window, and has said that they expect LPFM to be next. But they can't do that until the public has the opportunity to object to the final permit granted.
Public goods are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable. While you cannot exclude anyone from listening to your transmission, the very act of you transmitting prevents others from doing so on the same frequency, within the same locale. It is not a public good by definition.
Im very against government interference, but this is one situation in which government regulation makes sense, so long as the portions of the spectrum allocated to the public are fairly auctioned. Admittedly, I have no idea how the private allocation works.
Protecting “scarce” bandwidth is about managing private goods.
I think the broadcasting of the music without a license[1] might have broken some laws.
[1] Unless you only broadcast music/content that was in the public domain, or free for broadcast, or similar license.
If it's line-of-sight on a frequency with no interference and stays at the legal limit of 250 microvolts per meter measured at 3 meters, and there's a good receiver with a good antenna, it's possible.
In some towns (like mine) I’m fortunate that there are a couple stations that are either listener supported, or run by a local university as a vocational program to teach broadcasting and DJ disciplines.
Good radio is (for me) the best way to discover music. I love my local stations WITR college radio run by RIT and WBER which is listener supported.
I totally get pirate radio as a cultural necessity to fill that gap for cities where the radio is all commercial shit.
Back when I was really active in HF, this thing was nuts.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201101121303/https://preoradio...
You may think the radio stations are still awful, but it's an entirely different company.
This way this band and its ubiquitous receivers would still be very useful.
You can always run a net on ham.