In Internet Age, Pirate Radio Arises As Surprising Challenge (ap.org) 157
K7DAN writes: Just as the demise of terrestrial radio has been greatly exaggerated, so has the assumed parallel death of pirate radio. Due to the failure of licensed stations to meet the needs of many niche communities, pirate radio continues to increase in popularity. Helping facilitate this growth is the weakening power of the FCC to stop it, reports the Associated Press. Rogue stations can cover up to several square miles thanks largely in part to cheaper technology. The appeal? "The DJs sound like you and they talk about things that you're interested in," said Jay Blessed, an online DJ who has listened to various unlicensed stations since she moved from Trinidad to Brooklyn more than a decade ago. "You call them up and say, 'I want to hear this song,' and they play it for you," Blessed said. "It's interactive. It's engaging. It's communal." It's upsetting many congressional members who are urging the FCC to do more about the "unprecedented growth of pirate radio operations." They're accusing said pirates of undermining licensed minority stations while ignoring consumer protection laws that guard against indecency and false advertising.
Sounds like a good time to get in on the game (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always wanted to start a pirate radio station just for shits and giggles, and doubly so after watching 'The Boat That Rocked" (watch this one, the UK release, not the US version "Pirate Radio", imo.) The fact that it is apparently infuriating to certain members of congress would just be icing on the the cake...
Service Regulation (Score:1)
Protecting licenses that costs hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions. Now where does that sound familiar from....
Oh, I know! A million dollar medallion for taxi drivers in large cities like New York!
I think what Uber does there is say: "Screw that, we're just going to drive anyway"
I guess that's what pirate radio stations will be saying. "Screw that, we're going to provide service to people anyway."
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False advertising? That's the FTC.
We're in an election year, the airwaves are filled with false advertising. Unfortunately it is POLITICAL speech and legal to spew lies under the guise of electioneering.
So in essence, you're not correct ;)
Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game (Score:3, Insightful)
London has more pirate radio now than it did when "Radio London" was being broadcast from a ship moored in the north sea.
Current radio pirates are putting transmitters on random rooftops getting power spliced from street lighting, and sending the audio over prepay 3g dongles. Whenever they get found, they're replaced almost immediately on a different roof.
They seem to be funded by paid promotion of night clubs and minicab companies.
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I've always wanted to start a pirate radio station just for shits and giggles, and doubly so after watching 'The Boat That Rocked" (watch this one, the UK release, not the US version "Pirate Radio", imo.)
Or, you could watch Pump Up the Volume for an even better movie about pirate radio...
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It's significant enough that I found the US version watchable, while I found the UK version enjoyable. (I may be biased in this in that I saw the UK version first, and then the US version.) The disjointedness is absolutely due to scenes that were included in the UK version and not the US version. I honestly don't know why they cut it, because the stuff the cut wasn't exceptionally vulgar or anything of the sort.
Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game (Score:4, Interesting)
...we would have developed tech to have radio broadcast in non interfering ways
If you know of some technology that achieves that and still allows the utility we currently enjoy, do share.
... folks would have slid into non overlapping slots in the meantime
What does finite resource mean to you? There is already a far, far greater demand for slots than there are available slots. Without regulation every slot becomes unusable.
Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game (Score:5, Interesting)
What does finite resource mean to you? There is already a far, far greater demand for slots than there are available slots. Without regulation every slot becomes unusable.
Maybe where YOU live but where I live there's only 3 stations and they all suck. There's LOTS of unused spectrum here but micropower pirate radio wouldn't give you more than 3 listeners since your coverage area would be mostly trees.
Generally pirates do their best to NOT interfere with licensed stations and EAS systems. Stomping on licensed broadcasts is how you get unwanted attention. It's in their best interest to not be a dick. In places like NYC this can be tough though as the spectrum is crowded there. Using a 100W transmitter to cover a small town in the middle of nowhere however, it's pretty easy to play nice with others. The only way you'll get busted that way is if you violate decency laws or manage to steal listeners (or even worse, advertisers) from legit stations.
This isn't about protecting the spectrum, this is about protecting advertising dollars for ClearChannel. Local community radio is DEAD. Pirate radio is about the only way to avoid listening to canned satellite-fed syndicated bullshit. Large broadcasters fought against LPFM so hard that they effectively killed it.
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Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game (Score:4, Informative)
Rich? No.
Think about community public radio stations. Consider those that make investments into for-profit ones, too.
Like other confined resources, there is only so much spectrum. It's juvenile to believe that a 100w station doesn't interfere with others.
Yes, some stations trade for major bucks. It's called: business. Still others are community supported.
Want the facts? Grow up and understand how we got here, and that the radio waves aren't a private little party. Wanna be a DJ? You can be. Wanna serve your sense of community? You can. There are lots of legal indy radio stations out there. They play by a set of rules designed to allow sharing of the airwaves, through the same set of rules that all people to have FM receivers and HD receivers with great audio fidelity.
People that live within the constraints of civility understand the need for rules-- because there are lots of people that desire to do whatever the fuck they want for any reason they want, e.g. uncivil behavior. I don't believe in mandated conformance but I do believe in civil rules regarding finite resources.
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Community radio usually has some sort of political agenda to push in order to get the funding needed. The rest are clearchannel garbage.
Oh I understand completely how 'we' got here.. (you mean 'they', don't you? most people sure as hell can't afford an FM license) It's called lobbying.
The criticism most have here isn't over good management of finite bandwidth, it's that it's used as a convenient excuse to shut down competition to the existing market structure. The problem is the state needs to quit selli
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It's more complicated than lobbying. In the late '40s and early '50s, FM was just born. The FCC gave a few stations incredible turf-- unknowingly setting them up for high future asset value.
Tall antennas and a lot of power gave them reach. Reach gave them advertising power. Spectrum was set aside for public use, educational use at first, then non-commercial use. Political agenda aside, community radio can be marvelous. So are LPFM stations. The lifeless crap we listen to is driving ClearChannel, Emmis, and
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If that is true, then the licensed station takes it up with the FCC who goes and finds said pirate radio station.
It's how it's always worked. Most licensed stations use hundreds of kW to
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It's true that many stations have enormous strength and tall antennas, a historical domination process. But there are many low-power stations, struggling to be heard, especially in the high school, college, community, public media, and specialty areas.
Your assessment of what pirates covers only ones that think about what they're doing. Many do not. You can make an FM station from an Arduino, put a cheap 100w amp on it, a crappy antenna, and interfere with licensed stations for quite a radius.
I disagree with
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In my area, the local school district has a full height antenna for their broadcasts. They're not at the same power as the big stations, but they're sure not struggling to be heard unless you're up in the mountains. The college stations are all high power with rebroadcast towers for a hundred miles or so.
Nobody is struggling to be heard, because the bandwidth is managed by the FCC, and schools have an easy time getting licenses.
If you put a big amp on a software radio and interfere with something... the FCC
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You need community radio. Such stations really do respond to local tastes and needs. IMHO, NPR is corporate media, although not as awful as ClearChannel, Emmis, etc.
Starting a community station takes vision, but they do well because as you cite, they fit the local needs, not the automated crap today. Get one of these, rather than the pirate version. Eventually, it's more sustainable for the community.
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well, hey if clearchannel and the fcc didn't make it so expensive to license, we'd have more.. the problem is that once the community station starts playing ads to pay bills, the game is up. It becomes subsumed until it's no different than the others.
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Underwriting and sponsorship are the briefest of ads. It's because people won't open their wallets, and electricity, facility, and meager salaries add up to money.
The FCC also has to ensure that there is staff to review and enforce licensing, the engineering that goes behind it, and the ongoing management of spectrum, as well as common carrier infrastructure, telephony, etc. None of this stuff comes free.
It's not ClearChannel that's made licensing expensive; an act of Congress allowed networks to own more t
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You mean other than that if you are stepping on someone else's signal, they are stepping on yours as well.
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...we would have developed tech to have radio broadcast in non interfering ways
If you know of some technology that achieves that and still allows the utility we currently enjoy, do share.
Government.
Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game (Score:4, Informative)
>we would have developed tech to have radio broadcast in non interfering ways
And when we were done with that, we'd have developed anti-gravity devices and eternal motion machines to generate power with.
You can't get around the laws of physics. We live in a quantum universe and there is a finite number of frequencies that can exist and absolutely zero way for two things broadcasting on the same frequency not to interfere.
Maybe we may have developed wifi likes ways of telling sources appart - but that was only possible AFTER we developed networking protocols and digital electronics, both of which depended hugely on tech for early radio to get their start - there is no reasonable way to claim the opposite would have been possible. Digital broadcasting does allow you to put more signals in a smaller band, but we couldn't get there until digital devices got small - which took a long time. Radio was already prominent in homes in the 1940s - when computers took up entire basements.
Not all public resources can be privatized effectively. And many never should. So how do you then avoid the tragedy of the commons ? The only solution is to regulate access so that nobody can abuse it.
By the way - you know what would happen if you build an early Marconi/Tesla style morse-transmitter and operated it right now ? You would fill every TV and radio in 3-block radius with static - on *every* channel. It took time to develop tuners.
Are you seriously suggesting we would have been better off if nobody could operate commercial radio devices until AFTER we developed fine-tuning abilities ? Or if the airwaves, all of them on all channels, simply belonged to whoever bought the strongest transmitter and antenna ? Why would anybody have bothered at all ? You go invest thousands in the equipment to get a station online, and somebody else decides he would rather have your listeners and spends a little more and your entire investment is down the drain - unless you invest even more and build bigger, but then they can too. Every market would either have had no broadcasts at all, or only the broadcasts from whichever broadcaster had the richest investor.
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There is no way I'm going to give my whole neighborhood, and indeed the whole world, my information about how I use what frequencies for what, and just hope that everybody in the world is some sort of John Galt libertarian God of Benevolence.
"no regulation" means you don't have all that regulation stuff, it doesn't mean that it just self-organizes in perfect form from the ooze.
More like, gangs and cliques create their private digital distribution networks and run them enough power to stomp out every other s
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Re: Sounds like a good time to get in on the game (Score:2)
You are by no means describing an absense of regulation. Just a different form of regulation. It nay or may not be better but it is decidedly not what you advertised it as.
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unmitigated nonsense. we would have developed tech to have radio broadcast in non interfering ways
Hey Anonymous Coward, do you even know how the physics of Amplitude Modulation (AM) and Frequency Modulation (FM) radio transmission works?
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We'd be back to this shit [wikipedia.org]... never-ending internal wars between different factions vying to try and take over and become the government, except it would be much worse since we have weapons which are far more effective at killing massive numbers of people than we had back then.
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Well if your pirate radio station is interfering with other stations and an emergency happened, you would have blocked important emergency information.
Also such bandwidth could be reserved for a new station.
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Where oh where would we be without the government to protect us?
In my community they're about 50 miles away, and if a less sarcastic person calls them up and makes a complaint, they drive their truck out and confiscate lots of equipment.
I don't think anybody has ever complained about pirate radio, though, because there is enough available bandwidth that they're not stepping on the toes of the licensed stations. But they certainly come out here frequently to deal with CD radio enthusiasts running 1000W amps and bleeding over onto people's telephones and home stereos.
If i
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The regional FCC office in my State doesn't do that. If you're a first offender and it is private, non-commercial use, and you didn't interfere with the airport, they simply confiscate everything with a plug, but don't fine you. You can get back things with a plug that are not radio-related... if you cooperated and made an effort to learn the rule you broke.
A lot of CBers get all their electronics confiscated, and learn not to use 1000W amplifiers. 100W-250W, usually turned down to 10 or 15W, is more than s
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After this post... (Score:1)
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This adds a new dimension to the slashdot effect [wikipedia.org], after all...
Slashdot has a far smaller readership than it did a decade ago. I don't think the "Slashdot effect" is a real thing anymore.
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Slashdot has a far smaller readership than it did a decade ago. I don't think the "Slashdot effect" is a real thing anymore.
This probably has more to do with the fact that most web servers these days are no longer behind 128k ISDN lines...
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Indeed. I'm waiting for Metamucil to buy Slashdot. It will, at least, change WHAT is being Slashvertised. . . . (grin)
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This probably has more to do with the fact that most web servers these days are no longer behind 128k ISDN lines...
Being behind a tiny pipe like ISDN would help prevent the web server from being overwhelmed. The pipe would be saturated, and temporary slowness and timeouts would happen, but in most cases the servers would be just fine.
With backbone-connected colos, on the other hand, we started to see servers going down, and returning error messages at best, or be out for the day.
As web servers and their hardware improved, unfortunately, content shifted too and were no longer on the actual web server. High traffic st
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Desperate need (Score:2, Insightful)
" ignoring consumer protection laws that guard against indecency"
The 1950s are over. The airwaves are in desperate need of shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.
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Howard stern brought those.... and the FCC targeted him only. So he moved to Sirius/XM and now has more subscribers than COMCAST has because it is outside the regulatory world of the FCC.
This is where the future lies, things that are outside of the FCC's rules from the 1940's -1960's that were put in place by republicans wanting to save the children from talk about nipples. It's why internet radio is growing rapidly as is satellite.
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outside of the FCC's rules from the 1940's -1960's that were put in place by republicans wanting to save the children from talk about nipples.
Hold up, everybody. Someone is wrong on the internet! [xkcd.com]
The FCC was created by the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This law was updated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Signed into law by William J. Clinton.
The commission is designed to have a 3-2 party split - although there have been "independents" from time to time to get around this. For the first 2 decades it was controlled by Democrats. Since then it has switched back and forth, with a roughly even split o
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That, and nobody seems to remember Tipper Gore's crusade. People love to make fun of the R,
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For those of old enough to have been there and young enough to remember, it wasn't a "crusade" it was a batch of failed proposals by a politician's wife. Everybody agreed she had a right to ask for whatever she wanted to ask for, but there was no support for the proposals, no crusade.
The only reason people even remember the name of the person who proposed music content ratings is because musicians at the time added her name to their songs, because "politicians wife" was still more broadly known than "niche
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I'm old enough and I remember. There were congressional hearings. There was huge pressure to pass new laws to regulate speech in the music industry. Rap was becoming popular and crossing over and suburban moms were agitated. Two Live Crew were so horny. They became the sort of lightning rod for the whole thing.
Then Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister and Frank Zappa made impassioned pleas on behalf of artistic freedom before the committees that helped to turn the tide. But the beast still wanted a skin. So
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Congress holds hearings on everything. That doesn't have meaning. Look it up.
There is no "cautionary tale" because nothing almost happened. If you're looking back to history for cautionary tales... look to all the many things that did happen. The one you're pointing at? A few people tried to do a thing, and predictably failed. The lesson you're claiming that teaches is simply not a lesson taught by that history. Find real examples, and then teach the lesson when those subjects come up.
All you really teach i
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All you really teach is that you knew better; you had all the information to see that there was nothing to the claim; people only remember it because songs were written making fun of it and calling out Tipper Gore by name.
I remember Tipper Gore because if you put Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and the authors of the Illuminatus! books in a room together they couldn't come up with a name more odd-catchy-seemingly-meaningful-but-probably-pulled-from-a-dictionary than Tipper Gore.
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Howard stern brought those.... and the FCC targeted him only. So he moved to Sirius/XM and now has more subscribers than COMCAST has because it is outside the regulatory world of the FCC.
SiriusXM would be very surprised to hear they were outside of the regulatory world of the FCC, given that it's the FCC that assigned them the spectrum which they use to operate, and without exclusive rights to that spectrum, the service simply wouldn't work.
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According to the internet, a lot of people need all 7 of those at the same time.
Talk HARD (Score:1)
Wearing only a ____ ring.
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One of my favorite movies when younger. Always angried up the blood, in a good way.
Whatever happened to that conclusion? They wrapped up the movie making it sound like everyone and their cat could have a private radio station. Was that fake? Or have times changed on me?
This is a problem, why? (Score:1)
We wanted better spectrum use, didn't we? Lots of small stations means more spectrum use. And if they're illegal... work with them to make them legal.
Instead of repressing the messenger in the form of DJs meeting the needs of the local community, how about reviewing the licensing and all the other petty laws restricting the community?
Re:This is a problem, why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget, all those rules are only there to protect the incumbents from newcomers... regulatory capture to impose costs on them...
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He's likely serious. This is the problem or issue when people support deregulation. Outside of a few hardcore idiots, the deregulation cry is about breaking down barriers to entry and participation and not the wild west free for all that it gets portrayed as.
It is also the battle cry against big government. Just enough to be effective without being a burden to freedom or prosperity.
The debate on which is better is often more of an emotional one. Often it is derived from a feeling of being powerless
Re:This is a problem, why? (Score:5, Insightful)
> It is also the battle cry against big government. Just enough to be effective without being a burden to freedom or prosperity.
Except that this is an absolutely impossible goal. You can't make government smaller. It is a guaranteed disaster. Whenever you try - you just create a power-vaccuum which is readily filled by somebody else. Initially, this is mostly corporations. As you reduce government size towards your mythic level (which is always described but never defined because those who say it will NEVER reach a level they consider "right") the power of those stepping into the resulting vaccuum grows and corporate executives get replaced by warlords (often the same person).
Now you either end up with a bunch of competing warlords in an endless civil war and your "official government" too small and helpless to actually do anything about it (ala Somalia), or one warlord actually manages to amass enough to quell all the others and you end up with a dictatorship.
The power you fear in big government is GOING to be wielded, there is NOTHING that ANYBODY could do to stop that. The only choice you DO have, is whether it will be wielded by a representative government accountable to you as a voter, or any of the everything else's which are all MUCH worse.
This is one reason I am an anarchist. As such I support the biggest government of them all. A government so large that EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN is an equal member of that government. 100% of the population large. And therefore, much less able to oppress anybody - while having both the will and the power to quell oppression from others.
Anarchy (Score:2)
A government so large that EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN is an equal member of that government.
This sounds more like the definition of democracy. Perhaps you can clarify?
Re: Anarchy (Score:3)
Direct democracy is a synonym for anarchism
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This is one reason I am an anarchist.
Nevermind. I get it now. Jeez, this generation's basement dwellers wake up early.
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Yeah, there's no hyperbole in anything you said /sarcasm
Meanwhile, Bernie measures success in the formation of bread lines, because without lines, only the Rich can buy bread. (yes, he actually said that).
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You have it backwards.
If the government has lots and lots of power - either through regulation or spending - what happens next? What do you do if you are running a company and you have competition and there is a big, powerful government with guns and stuff just sitting right there? What do the wealthy and powerful do when the government has lots of money and power? Just sit there and take it?
No, they didn't get to be the rich and powerful by being stupid. They proceed to use their wealth and power to b
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It is beyond its Maximum, which is why we are in a constant deficit spending situation. The moment a surplus appears, it disappears just as quickly. Budgets that are growing are called "Drastically cut" when they go up by 1% instead of the requested 9%, and programs and departments in government that have long since served their purpose are still around.
Governments are bureaucracies and will grow until resource constrained.
Nope, they grow. Period. And people get into a tizzy fit if they don't grow. Democrats cry "Republicans want grandma to eat dog food" and Republicans cry "D
Re: Gov't is more powerful than corps (Score:2)
In other words: exactly what you should not shrink. And if you think corporations are less powerful than governments you are seriously naive. Governments cant avoid every law that constrains them by doing whatever they want to do in another country
and corporations do not need to worry about reelection.
When corps poison the drinking water - they get a slap on the wrist. But I promise you the governor of michigan will not get elected again. We have power over government. Corps have power over us. Gove
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I'm aware of that, and have read some other pieces on the topic. At least 70% of all chocolate is picked by child slaves for example. That's exactly what I meant by "corporations continue it to this day". The last government to sanction it stopped doing so more than a century-and-a-half ago, and fought a civil war to achieve that. It's not legal anywhere in the world.
But it still happens... wherever they have "small government". Because it turns out one of the things that "small government" is too small to
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I actually agree with you. The size of the government is utterly unimportant. Even the taxrate is mostly unimportant.
What does matter is whether the government does a good job, wheher you get decent value for your taxes. As long as whatever your taxes buy would have cost you more in the private sector, or be worse quality, or both (as in the case of healthcare), it's better to buy it with more taxes because even though your taxrate is higher - you spend less money - it also has the advantage that you can pr
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Beyond necessary regulation to prevent interference, etc he's largely correct. Regulatory capture is a huge problem among regulatory agencies in the US.
Generally the larger, more powerful, and broad the regulatory agency's power is, the bigger the problem tends to be or become.
The FCC is no exception.
Government powerful enough to give you everything you want and need is power
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Beyond necessary regulation to prevent interference, etc he's largely correct. Regulatory capture is a huge problem among regulatory agencies in the US.
Generally the larger, more powerful, and broad the regulatory agency's power is, the bigger the problem tends to be or become.
The FCC is no exception.
Government powerful enough to give you everything you want and need is powerful enough to take it all away...and/or sell it.
Modded "Troll"?
Really?
"I disagree" =/= "Troll"
Aren't you intelligent enough to form a cogent argument, Mr. AnonyMod?
Must be a Trump or Sanders/Hildebeast supporter. "The government is horrible & corrupt! Give it broad new powers and more of those other peoples' money!"
Strat
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I really like that approach. I was a little conflicted because, on the one hand I do want responsible use of radio spectrum, but on the other:
Who? (Score:5, Funny)
Who are these lucky constituents that won't have to worry about false advertising anymore?
You have to admire those Members of Congress, they go after the most hard-to-find targets first. It doesn't matter if those "pirate" radio stations only reach 0.0005% of their own constituency or operate just a couple of hours a month with little or no advertising of any kind. You have to admire the kind of motivation those Members of Congress have at wanting to stamp out those tiny little cockroaches.
If I were the shopping channel network, or ABC, or an internet advertising agency, I would be shaking in my boots right now. After all, if those Members of Congress spend so much of their time and energy going after those little guys, it's only a matter of time before they start noticing all the false advertising going on the biggest licensed television and radio networks, with diamond dealers, phone carriers, cable providers, weight loss products, Duracell batteries, and the list goes on...
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You have to admire those Members of Congress, they go after the most hard-to-find targets first.
How do you expect this to work?
If you have an issue you should be able to contact your local congressperson and if legitimate, have them represent your views at a higher level. This is precisely how democracy is supposed to work and you are complaining about it?
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How do you expect this to work?
If you have an issue you should be able to contact your local congressperson and if legitimate, have them represent your views at a higher level.
Since mainstream broadcasters play such a critical role in which candidate gets airtime and which candidate doesn't, I believe Members of Congress are beholden to their interests.
I don't think the complaints about pirate radio stations are legitimate, but then I pick the battles I can win.
This is precisely how democracy is supposed to work and you are complaining about it?
I vote. I write letters. And I also complain.
That being said, not every issue I care about has critical mass enough to have forward momentum.
Last Year's News (Score:1)
obZZ (Score:4, Informative)
Do you remember
back in nineteen sixty-six?
Country Jesus, hillbilly blues,
that's where I learned my licks.
Oh, from coast to coast and line to line
in every county there,
I'm talkin' 'bout that outlaw X
is cuttin' through the air.
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...Town to town, up and down the dial.
Maybe you and me were never meant to be,
Just maybe think of me once in a while.
Ministry concern about deviation from party line (Score:2)
Wow, TFS makes it really hard to feel that what they're really afraid of is the public gaining access to information diverging from the establishment talking points and entertainment not supporting the current corporate entertainment products.
Maybe that was the intended conclusion I'm supposed to draw, but I can't say I wouldn't have drawn that conclusion anyway.
The funniest thing is "false advertising"? WTF? Do "officials" think current marking practices are a bastion of transparent and unvarnished truth
They have another side of the issue (Score:2)
Congress is 100% at fault for this. (Score:3)
Those fuckers killed the low power FM license because they catered to Clear channel and their other benefactors.
All of the pirate radio "problem" is 100% the fault of Congress. Those are the scumbags that need to be fined and put in jail first.
Give us an affordable low power FM license ability and 95% of those pirate stations would go legit.
Tips for a pirate radio operator... (Score:3)
First you need to build your radio station into a box that you can place at the top of a taller building. get one of the 10-20 watt china transmitters and build a nice 5/8's wave antenna like a J pole out of copper pipe. putall of it inside a sealed plastic box and use a raspberry PI for the audio source.
Now use a USB stick to hold your radio station audio files plug it all in and splice into power you can find up there. if you paint it all to look like it belongs it will not get dismantled for years.
Bonus points, give it a WIFI accesspoint so you can simply drive there and point a gain antenna at the location to upload new content.
Now when the FCC raids the station you will not get arrested as it's not your property and if you are smart you have no evidence behind that it's yours. Yes you are out your $400 of gear (if you buy good stuff with filters) but that is a lot cheaper than the $40,000 fine and possible jail time.
Social engineer your way in to set it up. you are here from dish network, etc....
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I think tops of buildings are somewhat hard to get into, and the power you might find up there is probably not tap-friendly 115v but some kind of high voltage 3 phase used with air handlers or other mechanical systems.
It'd be great if just being near a window was good enough, there are probably plenty of offices where you could stash the box near a window and get easy wall power.
I wonder if a better idea wouldn't be finding a tall tree and placing the box in it as if it was some kind of bird's nest, either
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Trivial to convert a rooftop HVAC power to 120V. and it's also trivial to gain access to the roof if you are carrying a big box and some tools and are dressed as a service person.
"Hi I'm dave from XYZ inspections. I need access to the roof really quick so I can check the HVAC units for leaks. I'll be only a few minutes." 99% of the time a random custodian will let you up there without question.
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The oth
Stranger Danger (Score:3)
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The lawyer/engineer ratio at the FCC — as at every other Federal agency — has shifted and the number of field agents actually capable of investigating is now very small. The FCC has been shutting down field offices [thehill.com] for years and focusing the money on Washington staff.
I ran a pirate radio once... (Score:3)
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The problem with pirate radio... (Score:2)
... at least here in London is that a lot of them now are run by not very bright egotistical and/or criminal (other than just illegal broadcasting) individuals who don't give a stuff about anyone else on the band. They'll cause interference to or even stomp over legit and other pirate stations alike. A minority of them are also a front for other far worse criminal activities.
where is the proof? (Score:2)
sadly, the politician-class is not held to be accountable for making up complete bullshit when urging new laws to protect against the population using our first amendment rights.
Pirates some kind of regulatory body (Score:2)
Perhaps there is an unwritten code among pirate stations but reading in Gordon West's GROL book has an interesting mention. In the early days of radio (1920s or 30s) the Supreme Court ruled Commerce Dept does not have enforcement powers over radio stations (those pre-FCC laws had a lot of holes I guess). Radio stations had a field day, they used whatever power they wanted, operated whenever they wanted, changed frequencies on the whim. Result was chaos and interference that caused many listeners to put away
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I hear that many Catholic Priests DO spend all day, thinking about the children. . .
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I am not sure how that would work here in the US where the nearest ocean is over 1000 miles away.
Border Blasters [wikipedia.org]. 1000 miles isn't a big problem if your regulatory agency is corrupt and you can pump out a megawatt of rf power.
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Border blasters were an interesting phenomenon, but they are dependent on running on AM in order to get the kind of distance you describe. FM won't travel that far, no matter how much power you throw into it. It simply won't travel over the horizon except under rare propagation conditions.
And, to be clear, it's not the AM-ness or the FM-ness that makes it so, but the fact that AM broadcasting is done on some pretty low frequencies, around 1 MHz, and these will both diffract and reflect to reach places tha
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Higher frequencies (VHF and UHF) are also conducive to tropospheric ducting.
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Yes they are, and it's a really cool phenomenon when it happens. Unfortunately, it happens too rarely to be useful in this context. Skywave propagation, on the other hand, will work pretty reliably on the AM band as soon as the sun sets, and groundwave will work day and night, every day and every night.