FCC liability for radio pirates operating on your property
jdsupra.com
jdsupra.com
More seriously, I’d be mighty concerned if I were a landlord and saw someone putting up a ham antenna, regardless of whatever licensing they claimed to have. It’s a bad day for public radio.
We are required, in our society, to keep ourselves informed. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking laws in the US.
(And then we have the countless unintentional radiators to contend with.)
But I do believe the author was jokingly referencing landlords adding generic catch-all clauses without understanding the issue, and understood it went to such lengths, and found that funny. (I did)
Obviously letting everyone broadcast radio-station strength FM signals willy-nilly is a bad idea, but going after someone in a neighborhood occupying an unused swath of spectrum is not, in my opinion, the best use of anyone's resources.
How would you know? If your equipment was operating improperly or out of specification, how would anyone contact you to let you know?
> these pirate stations became a great source of up to date crowd sourced information
This is a fantastic claim that should come with solid evidence. I know licensed HAM and other operators do practice and work to provide these services, but I've never seen them legitimately attributed to pirate stations anywhere.
> but going after someone in a neighborhood occupying an unused swath of spectrum
It's complaints based. The FCC does not "scout around" looking for pirates. If you step on my signal, I will record it, and I will report it to the FCC. If your station has been found and is being shut down then your actions rose to this level of notice.
> the best use of anyone's resources.
I agree. The airwaves are _everyones_ resources though. It's those who abuse the system that create the waste.
> How would you know? If your equipment was operating improperly or out of specification, how would anyone contact you to let you know?
The stations I broadcast on had websites and Facebook pages. Anyone was free to lodge a complaint, but no one ever did.
> This is a fantastic claim that should come with solid evidence. I know licensed HAM and other operators do practice and work to provide these services, but I've never seen them legitimately attributed to pirate stations anywhere.
It's a fair ask, but sorry I'm not going to dox myself to provide you with evidence. Either believe me, or don't.
That said I don’t think the claim is that “fantastic”. What’s hard to believe about people tuning into a hyper local station to get up to date information during an emergency? The fact some of those folks were volunteer fire fighters or search and rescue makes it too hard to swallow?
> It's complaints based. The FCC does not "scout around" looking for pirates. If you step on my signal, I will record it, and I will report it to the FCC. If your station has been found and is being shut down then your actions rose to this level of notice.
Again, we were operating on unused bands of frequency with low power transmitters. I promise you there was no one else's signal being "stepped on".
> I agree. The airwaves are _everyones_ resources though. It's those who abuse the system that create the waste.
If you consider a small, fun, independent, neighborhood radio station to be "abuse", then sure, we're the bad guys. I would counter argue that you shouldn't need to provide the FCC with tens of thousand of dollars to use resources that are going unused, and that no one is going to "miss" anyway. It's not like the spectrum is some finite thing that can never be recouped once used. If someone else started using that part of the spectrum at a commercial level, we can just turn our low powered gear off.
87.9 is great because it is the default freq of a lot of small plug in transmitters, so tiny signals are ubiquitous and it's the low edge of the band. Never sell anything or rebroadcast Internet sources that sell things (exception is Old Time Radio shows with ancient commercials). Find a playlist of older things that aren't 'hits'. Don't let any broadcast FM salesman conclude, "they're taking listeners from our market." Stay away on the band from Public Radio Stations, they are likely complainers and if there's one at 88.1 then bump to a few slots above it. No 'fake' IDs with letters of course, and I'd suggest no jingles or station cute names. Psychologically this gives some busybody an entity in their mind to oppose. Be nothing but a signal.
I did week long marathons of CBS Radio Theater, old Prairie Home Companions from the time before Keilor was savagely MeToo'd, and long form rock like ELP and reggae and classics and whatnot shuffled from a big eclectic list of older everything (but not 'hits'). Once I did a solid week of one long ~40 minute seamless loop of wave after wave of crowd laughter. Nothing but laughter, crowds and individuals with distinctive laughs. As the week progressed I felt the average quality of the FM Band increasing.
In markets that have historically had the largest number of pirate complaints. The article is clear about this nuance.
We'll see if anybody directionfinds me =D —73
What does it mean to not accept interference?
If you're an unlicensed user, you just have to live with it.
Anyway, frequency selection was a manual process, and while the best sound quality was found on frequencies where no radio stations transmitted, it was fully possible to dial in an already occupied frequency. Power output was low, but strong enough to overpower anything in a 10-15 m radius, forcing nearby cars in a traffic jam to listen to my music.
So, like, post a sign "no pirate radio broadcasting plz"? Or show how it's in the lease agreement that it's against the rules?
Sounds like it. I’ve never broadcast over radio so I’m not sure how easy it would be to hide but that seems to be an important factor. It might come down to surprise inspections but those still usually have minimum 24 hours’ notice, at least where I live.
Your only hope is to set up an unattended transmitter, connect to it through the internet, and spend your effort obscuring that connection. Creating an untraceable connection through the internet is a lot simpler.
Aside: you could actually obscure the location of your transmitter by building multiple of them and doing some tricks with phase and frequency. Ultimately you're still trying to hide a guy in a crowd screaming into a megaphone. They'll find you eventually, you can only make it harder for them.
A reasonable analogy is to think of the antenna as a lightbulb that either changes color quickly or changes brightness quickly to send a signal.
If you find yourself bathed in, say, green light, it's pretty easy to look around until you see the green lightbulb.
It's very nearly the same here except that radio waves are at a much lower frequency than visible light. If you see a signal at 14.313 MHz, you can swing an antenna around and walk in the strongest direction until you get to the source, modulo reflections and whatnot.
If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
Spread spectrum and/or frequency hopping.
> If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
The reason you can't hide it is because it's an FM modulated signal on an actual carrier frequency. It's designed to be received by cheap consumer radios in the clear.
...Can you elaborate on this? I'm quite curious.
From wikipedia:
"After the FCC complied with the provisions of the Radio Broadcasting Act of 2000 by commissioning the MITRE Report to test if there was significant interference from LPFM stations on the full-power stations, the study showed that the interference of LPFM is minimal and would not have a significant effect on other stations."
This is all about the FCC acting as guard dog for 99% spam spewing stations.
The power limits and operating conditions for low power FM should be relaxed, to allow the radio spectrum to be utilized by the citizenry.
I wonder how well the FCC will stand up after Chevron. The AM bits I glanced at look really solid, this is a band, this is a channel this is the maximum rate of amplitude change, tidy technical details spelled out by congress.
But like, the PIRATE act is pretty explicit, 100,000 per day 2 mil max. Perhaps there's some other law that allows the FCC to adjust for inflation. but the bill, as I the non-lawyer reads it, doesn't say anything about inflation.
Seems like they could lower the fine a bit, at least.