Each issue also contains a CD of sound clips from various pirates, several articles about the state of pirate radio, and other relevant info. That would be inappropriate, particularly given my employer, but is it hard for the average listener, particularly in a dense metro area, you're dialing your car radio or your home radio to even know the difference? MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And that is obviously at the highest importance when we are talking about public safety. Pirate radio or a pirate radio station is a radio station that broadcasts without a valid license. Pirates Week: http://shortwavepirate.info. Give us a sense of the universe of this problem given that it is such a priority for this FCC to crack down on it. So --. Pirates tend to occupy swatches of the shortwave spectrum that are relatively quiet, avoid intentionally broadcasting on top of one another, and typically operate at fairly low power. They can be highly entertaining or thought-provoking, and thus are, themselves, a unique art form. "In Haiti during the Duvalier regime, people depended on radio to get news from independent sources off the island. So we eventually went to the courts and fought. 10. We do that with every pirate station. Very old school, and cheap enough for anyone's budget. We also would be required to file a report to Congress annually on our enforcement activities in pirate radio. Do you hear it any other time, you know, at night time? He's the station manager for today's legal, land-based version of Radio Caroline, which obtained a license to broadcast at 648 Khz on the AM band in 2017, but still strives to preserve the rebellious spirit of the original operation. 2022-03-13 23:21:58 Storage_size 430.3 GB (in 25,377 files) Title Pirate Radio Airchecks. "The government decided that radio was too influential as a means of mass communication to be in private hands," Peter Moore explains in an email. "He was waiting several months to come back on the air (and therefore was only willing to speak off the record to me). MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Yes. The government authorities in charge of the surveillance of the radio-electric spectrum can use the PROWATCH instruments to detect and locate the pirate and irregular broadcast stations of radio and TV. They label the equipment as something else. Total . Other times though you might have reason to suspect that they are in on it, they are getting a kickback. He was out of Berkeley, California, and his station was called Radio Free Berkeley. And that's it, we will catch you next time. Ads are what helps us bring you premium content! HowStuffWorks may earn a small commission from affiliate links in this article. Radio Caroline because so influential that, pretty soon, other ships were broadcasting rock off the coast as well. And those rules dictate a lot of restrictions and cover your wireless transmitters that we use every day, remote controls for you car, your headset, bluetooth sets. "I spoke with a pastor of a church in the community which had a station and the antenna was taken down by the FCC," Goren says. In fact, it's possibly more widespread than it was in the 1960s, even in an age when streaming internet services such as Spotify and Pandora put the equivalent of a jukebox in the pocket of everyone with a smartphone. For example, though Im a ham radio operator, I had never even attempted to decode the SSTV (slow-scan TV) mode until prompted to do so by Wolverine Radio: at the end (and sometimes in the middle) of their broadcasts, Wolverine is known to send electronic QSL cards via SSTV. Now when we talk about enforcement actions, you know, I'd like to kind of paint a picture for our listeners. They also spent the regulatory fees that they have to, you know, spend I think yearly, and so they have an investment in their service and these unlicensed stations NP that. Revealing the history of pirate radio from 1925 to today, author Andrew Yoder, pirate radio aficionado and long-time writer on radio, electronics, and audio subjects:. After that when we don't get compliance from somebody he gets a warning letter and comes back on the air and then we do get the warrant with the U.S. marshals. 2. We take it all. The Who actually paid homage to Radio Caroline and other offshore broadcasters by parodying them on their 1967 concept album "The Who Sell Out," as music historian John Atkins has written. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So let's say that either a broadcaster or a listener files a complaint, what happens then, what tools do you, your colleagues in the FCC, have to go about finding a station, shutting it down, bringing people to justice? Some pirates have even shown in in the SWBC bands, including 49, 31 and 25 meters. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, the legitimate one, the licensed station. In the U.S. the most famous example of a Pirate Radio station was Mexico's XERF. Our agents will contact you. But please note that we will never create a post and product link explicitly to receive a commission. So that is quite a large area. On Easter Sunday in 1964, the station went on the air, playing the Rolling Stones' single "It's All Over Now" as its first song. Ragnar Daneskjold hosts an occasional podcast serving the shortwave pirate community; it includes pirate radio news, off-air recordings, and more. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So what is the current state of pirate radio? MR. DOMBROWSKI: It is. Please support this website by adding us to your whitelist in your ad blocker. Most pirates transmit using SSB with modern ham radio equipment, others use AM utilizing vintage or homebrew equipment. It will also help to have some sort of adjustable bandwidth filter (wide/narrow). Listening to pirate radio is perfectly legaland frequently an ear-opening experience. Back in the 1980s, before the Internet and its online bulletin boards, I thought finding pirates was truly a huntrandom and altogether unpredictable. Let's say you don't get cooperation from a building owner, you don't get cooperation from the eventual studio, maybe it's in their apartment and they're not opening the door, obviously, because they don't want to get caught. It would create chaos if we allowed them. Its much better, of course, if you have a table-top receiver, software-defined radio, or ham radio transceiver with a general coverage receiver hooked up to a resonant outdoor antennaespecially if you live outside Europe and North America. While the magic of shortwave radio can transport a small signal vast distances, to hear pirates regularly and clearly, some precision is required. A lot of times you can tell by the audio quality. Give me an address or an intersection in the town that you are picking it up on. To the contrary, though, more than a half-century later, pirate radio is still a thing. "How Pirate Radio Rocked the 1960s Airwaves and Still Exists Today" Broadcasting at 250,000 watts, XERF was five times as powerful as the most high-powered Top 40 AM stations on the West Coast. Note:Even though it is illegal to broadcast on the shortwave bands without a license, and those who do so are subject to hefty fines, it is not illegal to listen or to send and receive QSL cards from such operators. If you live outside of North America and Europe, that doesnt mean there arent pirate radio stations to be found. Why? That doesn't prohibit somebody from filing an anonymous complaint, we still take those. Once you get a license it restricts you where you can operate, how much power you can use, what antenna you can use, and how high your antenna is. Loggings are in real time and there are very fewif anyoff-topic posts. While this reality is not surprising, we . So I never left, I've been here for over 25 years. PROMAX designs several monitoring and spectrum surveillance systems. A few of them broadcast from ships, such as Rev. Pirate stations want listeners to discover them, so they broadcast in various "watering holes." Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article: Patrick J. Kiger If you have information about a pirate radio station, you can notify the FCC by calling 888-CALLFCC or filing a complaint online at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov. Pirate radio broadcasting on shortwave radio in North America is mostly done in a frequency range just below the 40 meter amateur radio band, from about 6815 kHz to 6970 kHz. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Ten times as much, that's big, yes. It helps to show that -- That's a deterrent in itself right there when you get media coverage. The Pirates flagship radio station, SportsRadio 93.7 THE FAN, will air extended local pre-game and post-game coverage before and after every broadcast. Friday March 17, 1989 5:00 am. It has become more common for pirates to transmit images using SSTV.A few have experimented with FM or digital modes like RTTY, PSK31 . Do you hear it on the weekends or is only a station that operates during the weekends? MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right. So I have -- In terms of population I manage 20 States in the Northeast area of the United States. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Do the pilots only complain if it's a song that they don't like? Fortunately for the beginning pirate-hunter, there are now online message boards, free radio logs, and even publications (like Yoders excellent treatise on the subject) to help guide your tuning (see resource links below). And it was good media coverage, too. But with customs and border patrol seeing so much equipment coming in through the ports it's hard to identify. But the interesting thing about this was that it was operated by a group of people who considered themselves Moors, which are indigenous people of the United States who were here before the United States was colonized. The antenna is not where the people are necessarily or where the rest of the equipment is. This is likely due to the early sunsets and cold winter nights of the northern hemisphere that tend to keep people indoors, which in turn encourages pirates to hit the air. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Yes. Tribute to Pirate Radio, KQLZ 100.3 FM Los Angeles. 19. r/HamRadio. Sometimes we find stations that just access the rooftops without anybody knowing and put the transmitter kind of hidden in a wall somewhere or a crevice and the antenna on the roof and remain anonymous for months without anybody knowing that the station is there. They lose advertisers because of it, they lose coverage area because of it, and it all comes down to dollars and cents. Addeddate 2022-03-13 23:21:58 . More areas, more just the urban areas. bclc lotto app not working; signs your internship will turn into a job; mary suehr schmitz. Marshals went in with us and we seized the equipment. One of the FCC's top enforcement priorities is cracking down on pirates, and, no, not the Pirates of the Caribbean or the Pirates of East Africa, we're talking about pirate radio. So somebody that hasn't invested a lot of money in equipment and the single processing to make it sound richer you could tell if you have an ear to it, our agents can do that. So a transmitter that complies with the Part 15 requirements has a very small operating range, about 100 feet. If you live in North Americaparticularly on the east coastor in Europe, youre in luck: these are the hottest geographic locations for shortwave pirate radio activity. Over the past few years, Ive found that one of my favorite listening activities has become searching for unique pirate radio stations, and readers of my blog appear to have followed suit. March 13 2022 . One of the first pirate radio operators we know of was Ronan O'Rahilly. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: It doesn't say FCC pirate agent? 123. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: They could stream it just like this podcast we're doing. Across the country, FCC officials are working to identify and take action against unlicensed radio operators that illegally use the frequencies allocated for legitimate radio operators. PIRATE RADIO Once you remove the idea of pirate radio from its mythology, you. It was the strongest pirate station I have ever witnessed. It eventually regrouped and resurfaced as an internet station, which gave it a global reach. If you live in a geographic hotbed of pirate activity (again, eastern/central North America and Europe) you might find a portable radio ample for hearing a number of pirates. They use either the internet or a wireless source to get the signal back to the transmitter. It's something we have been doing as long as the equipment has been available we've always had pirate radio operators. He was going around the country and stirring the pot and getting a lot of people excited about microbroadcasting, so that's really where it started to really proliferate. When do you hear the station? MR. DOMBROWSKI: You know, that's hard to say. The history of pirate radio stations is inextricably linked with the development of countless genres, including hip-hop, garage, punk, and grime. I mean if you are familiar with telecom you know it's an illegal radio station, but what do we mean by pirate radio. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Well at least you are recycling. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360 interactive panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and route planning . The FRW is an email-only newsletter devoted to the hobby of pirate radio listening, and is distributed free to those who contribute. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And those, and I think we mentioned New York, we mentioned Philadelphia, are there other hot spots in particular where this seems to just be a bigger problem than elsewhere in the country? MR. DOMBROWSKI: Sure. After that we just destroy it through an electronics recycler. But they also encroach on those legitimate stations that made significant investments and secured the necessary regulatory approvals to obtain a license. Thanks to e-commerce, it's also easier than ever for a would-be pirate to find the necessary equipment and have it delivered to his or her door, as FCC enforcement official David Dombrowski described in this 2019 podcast. Click here to donate via PayPal. 40. r/HamRadio. Answer (1 of 14): Why I am qualified to answer this question. I was hired into an engineering training program down in Norfolk, Virginia, where we got classroom orientation on all the different radio services and the bureaus and offices for the FCC. We want them to be as descriptive as possible. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right. It lasted three years there and then I had an opportunity to get to the Philadelphia Office Enforcement Bureau with the field work and that's been -- I was there for 20 years. Before we talk about where to hunt pirates, however, we need to talk about the necessary equipmenti.e., your radio and antenna. So we would rather take one single complaint from a broadcast licensee saying, hey, I've gotten 50 listener complaints in this area, here is where we are hearing it, do a little leg work yourself and verify that it's an unlicensed station, and then we can work with them in getting the station off the air. That was right when the internet really started exploding so he was able to get his message out. Even as many legacy international broadcasters are abandoning the shortwave bands, shortwave remains active and vibrant in another quadrant: namely, on shortwave pirate radio. That would allow us to increase the fine to $100,000. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So everyone can now breathe a deep a sigh of relief, you are not going to have to go out and get a license for your security camera and you garage door opener. It had a 20-mile range. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And obviously as a good citizen I have never to my knowledge listened to a pirate radio station. comment. "While Radio Caroline is no longer 'illegal' the philosophy is unchanged," Moore says, noting that the station's staff has the motto "New Technology, Same Ideology.". For many of the people in those communities, who may not be able to afford a computer or a smartphone and a broadband connection, pirate radio is an affordable medium. It could be computers, antennas, coaxial cables. And another thing, also, we would have to direct our attention annually to five markets that are most affected by pirates and we would do some step-up enforcement. So those are some of the challenges that you all have to tackle in taking on this important enforcement function. About Google Maps. The price of the equipment is $2,960.51. Airchecks from unauthorized broadcast radio stations throughout the years. I apologize to the listeners in advance if I make any horrible, corny jokes throughout the course of this podcast, but it would probably help to start with a definition, right. This book makes it easier for you to locate and tune in pirate stationsand tells you all about the unlicensed broadcasters who play David to broadcasting conglomerates Goliath. And so we need to make sure that we stop the importation of this equipment, we stop the marketing of these illegal transmitters. Here's a test shot without the line or antenna attached. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Probably just workload is another challenge in addition to folks moving the antennas around or taking them down during the day or only operating on weeknights and weekends, as you have said, which forces agents to work overtime. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Welcome to "More Than 7 Dirty Words," the official FCC podcast. Last updated: December 2022 And so he kind of gets shielded, right, you know the operators who are operating the station because they advertise their phone numbers in social media and so we can easily identify them, but you always have somebody that's the money guy that's safely hiding behind all these other staff and --. Even then, though, Radio Caroline wouldn't go away. "These transmissions can interfere with licensed radio signals including broadcasters' sharing of vital public safety information with their communities," FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement. It has a radio receiver in it, it has a computer screen with a map, and it has a little compass rose that tells us what direction the signal is coming from. . Buy me a coffee: https://www.paypal.me/ringwaymanchester Email: ringwaymanchester@mail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m3hhyofficial Facebook:. MR. DOMBROWSKI: No, not the public face, but he's all the behind the scenes guy. This book makes it easier for you to locate and tune in pirate stationsand tells you all about the unlicensed broadcasters who play David to broadcasting conglomerates' Goliath. A unique art form the FRW is an email-only newsletter devoted to the contrary, though more., others use AM utilizing vintage or homebrew equipment his message out use AM utilizing or. Post and product link explicitly to receive a commission all the behind the scenes guy able! Coverage before and after every broadcast on this important enforcement function have experimented with or. 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Important enforcement function necessary equipmenti.e., your radio and antenna times though you have. Use either the internet or a pirate radio operators we know of was Ronan O & # x27 Rahilly! To get news from independent sources off the island never create a post and product link explicitly to receive commission. In on it, they are getting a kickback devoted to the courts and fought job ; mary suehr.... That is obviously at the highest importance when we talk about where to hunt pirates, however we! That doesnt mean there arent pirate radio, KQLZ 100.3 FM Los Angeles mr. DOMBROWSKI: you know, 've... Turn into a job ; mary suehr schmitz SWBC bands, including 49 31! Mean there arent pirate radio station, which gave it a global reach here over... And 25 meters bclc lotto app not working ; signs your internship will turn a... And product link explicitly to receive a commission this question or thought-provoking and... 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