Gimme Radio (for online listeners) Gimme Radio is one of the more modern American rock radio stations available today. We have had cases where we have gone in on in rem seizures and found drug paraphernalia inside the building and so that becomes now a law enforcement issue and they take care of that, they handle that situation. Total Views 29,203 (Older Stats) ITEMS. That would allow us to increase the fine to $100,000. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right. As this 2009 article from the Independent, a British newspaper, details, O'Rahilly obtained a 63-ton (57-metric ton), Danish passenger ferry, the MV Frederica, and renamed it Caroline, after the daughter of the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy. 2. They spent the fees to get the license. 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. That would be not a good practice. All you need is a location to host the antenna and access to electricity unless you've got batteries, then just the location.". Pirate radio guru Andrew Yoder started his own pirate blog last year, and has already began populating it with regular updates, QSLs, and recordings. It would identify what are the legitimate stations and also identify what stations we sanctioned so they could better get an understanding, you know, is this a legitimate station I am hearing or not. MR. DOMBROWSKI: No, not the public face, but he's all the behind the scenes guy. Select a station from the list and it will play on the tuner. Director Richard Curtis' 2009 comedy-drama stars the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, a disc jockey for an unlicensed rock radio station that broadcast from a rusty, decrepit ship off the British coast in the mid-1960s, defying government authorities to spin the rock records that weren't allowed on the BBC at the time. It was the strongest pirate station I have ever witnessed. Multiply the answer from #1 by the fraction of wavelength of your antenna's design (most antennas are 1/2 (.5) or 1/4 (.25) wave; the popular Comet is a 5/8 (.625) wave antenna). And while pirate radio stations can be found across the radio spectrum, especially on AM and FM in urban areas, in this primer Ill be focusing on those that inhabit the shortwaves. And it was good media coverage, too. It's not. They label the equipment as something else. Though Channel Z was broadcasting in AM, as many do, its best to hunt pirates with an SSB-capable portable. Set up your Raspberry Pi You'll need to get Raspbian, the Linux-based operating system for the Raspberry Pi. And so when a station operates say on 95.5 megahertz they now have potential to cause interference to other stations on 95.5 that may be a little distance away. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, well, you know, they operate in the AM band so it sounds really distorted when you are trying to listen to FM radio on an AM radio. MR. DOMBROWSKI: So this equipment helps us track us down. Listening to Other Stations: Click on the tuning arrows ( TUNE >) to listen to stations up and down the dial. Hover over one of the three pirate radio neighborhood zones (the center zone has the most stations) and click for a list of stations that broadcast to those areas. Marshals went in with us and we seized the equipment. The frequency spectrum is a natural resource and so all of our decisions that we make when we allocate spectrum is for the public interest. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Well they had their antenna up really high. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Well let that be a lesson to the youngsters listening. In the quieter winter months, stations seem to pop out of the ether. Last updated: December 2022 . Please support this website by adding us to your whitelist in your ad blocker. We do that with every pirate station. The FCC argued that we were here to regulate the airwaves. In the U.S. the most famous example of a Pirate Radio station was Mexico's XERF. I mean you got to give it to Congress for the bill naming that they do. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So, David, you are uniquely qualified to talk about this topic and to help listeners to understand just how qualified you are how did you get to this current position at the FCC. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: There is not a sign on the box that says illegal pirate radio transmitters. So we eventually went to the courts and fought. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right. We do a field strength measurement to see if their power exceeds that threshold and if they meet the Part 15 requirements or not. Our agency was delegated by Congress to allocate frequencies and allocate it in the public interest and it's a resource. 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 we are out there just gathering evidence for the first time our agents will go to the door, they will identify themselves with their badge. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Raise it all the way up 100 feet and our director at the time rode up there and got the antenna down. Note: This podcast was recorded on June 21st. Goren, who's been monitoring the airwaves since the law was passed, notes that on a typical day, he picks up about 26 pirate stations in Brooklyn alone. We have had meetings with broadcast associations where we went a room with other broadcasters and that's a very big concern of them, the financial end of it. Alan Roes Music Programmes on Shortwave, List of QRP General Coverage Amateur Radio Transceivers, List of VHF/UHF Multimode Amateur Radio Transceivers, How To Tune In Pirate Radio Broadcasts on Shortwave, https://swling.com/blog/category/pirate-radio/, LRA 36 (Arcangel San Gabriel, Antarctica) Test Broadcasts on March 1st and 4th, 2023, Radio Waves: AM Buzzkill, AM FEMA Push, AM Devitalization, and RFI-Blocking Chips, Bob Zanottis presentation to the Fairlawn Amateur Radio Club (Part 2), Radio Waves: The DLARC, NASA Citizen Science, PopShopRadio DRM to Europe, Hackers Disrupt Russian Radio, and Afghan Radio Closures, LRA 36 (Arcangel San Gabriel, Antarctica) Test Broadcast Today at 20:00 UTC. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Do the pilots only complain if it's a song that they don't like? The station is capable of running off of 13.8/28 volts DC battery, which can even be charged with solar power. But sometimes it is very difficult with those stations that have put more investment into the equipment. Pirate cards are among the most unusual of QSL cards, that often incorporate obscure or vintage imageryhumor, horror, or other graphic oddityor cast the pirate in a unique character representation. Pirate radio operators usually have day jobslike most of usthus only transmit while home from work. I mean if you are familiar with telecom you know it's an illegal radio station, but what do we mean by pirate radio. Pirate radio stations are unlicensed broadcasters. Revealing the. I mean they have a significant financial investment in their stations, they have gone through proper FCC process, and now they are competing for listeners with stations that did not go through that process, did not necessarily bear the same financial burden to get up and running, and they are not maybe just competing with listeners, as we have mentioned we've been competing with, they are competing with advertisers as well. And they come -- I've worked with them when they have bulletproof vests on and automatic weapons. But what hast made the problem really expand is the equipment is readily available with the internet now. There were helicopters flying over and taking videos, so we got on a little TV, and that helps to go a long way when we get a little media coverage. Here's a test shot without the line or antenna attached. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: -- and you always try to go with the least destructive one. He was out of Berkeley, California, and his station was called Radio Free Berkeley. Total . Radio plays such an important role when you talk about hurricanes striking or other natural disasters, people turn to their local broadcast, including radio for information, and to have that be interfered with is a public safety concern let alone the FAA issues which are very serious. Back in the 1980s, before the Internet and its online bulletin boards, I thought finding pirates was truly a huntrandom and altogether unpredictable. Buy me a coffee: https://www.paypal.me/ringwaymanchester Email: ringwaymanchester@mail.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m3hhyofficial Facebook:. Some pirates simply key down their mike and begin talking, sharing their political or social views; others offer near-professional music productions, complete with listener feedback, and often acknowledge listener reports with QSLs (radio postcards). They can call their State Broadcast Association to get our contact information. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: My guest has been David Dombrowski, Regional Director for Region One in the FCC Enforcement Bureau. So how do you escalate the situation, you know, what tools do you have to say, okay, we're not getting cooperation let's take this up a notch? ( Disclaimer) Transcript: MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Welcome to "More Than 7 Dirty Words," the official FCC podcast. Is it when you are driving in, you know, to and from work? So we have had the most success in getting stations off the air when the district attorney is involved, because the U.S. Attorney's Office when we do the in rem seizures, they have a lot of case work and very high profile cases so there is a little reluctance sometimes because of the case precedence for the U.S. attorneys to take on our cases. 3. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: We're not using an FM spectrum for this podcast. We hope you understand, and are grateful for your support. I used a pneumatic spud gun to launch an arborist's bag to deploy my 50' end fed antenna 40' up into a tree. We also recommend that the complainant contact the station that they are getting interference to --. Total . Airchecks from unauthorized broadcast radio stations throughout the years. As soon as there were laws on the books, there were pirate radio stations on the air. I asked him why he would still take the risk to go back on air and he said he wanted to reach the homeless, the shut-ins, the elderly who couldn't access the internet.". And he had some good backing, financial backing, by the ACLU who were fighting for him, and he was a microbroadcaster and he tried to encourage others to follow in his footsteps and protect our First Amendment rights, so he was --. Pirate stations want listeners to discover them, so they broadcast in various "watering holes." We do let stations operate with low power transmitters but they have to comply with the technical requirements of Part 15 of our rules. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Thank you. Since FM radio is broadcast as a mono signal, with a left-minus-right signal sent alongside, they can make a two-channel stereo station by recreating the stereo pilot carrier and then adding in. I know out on the West Coast in California we have more significant numbers than other areas, so that probably would be one of the five markets identified, maybe the L.A. area would probably be another market that we would look at. The U.S. 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. 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? They are not considered an operator by investing in that. They don't know how to reach us? And audiences can get the station on inexpensive radio receivers there's no need to have a computer or a smartphone with 5G, or to pay a monthly subscription fee or worry about blowing through their data limits. So for that period of time they lose communications and they have to try to find another available channel to keep that communication line open. That was right when the internet really started exploding so he was able to get his message out. These guys aren't blowing off their listeners like the other radio stations. 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. MR. DOMBROWSKI: We do make them aware that they are contributing to this illegal activity. So what is pirate radio? MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes. "Caroline now has two stations, one playing album music and one playing the original pop music for which the station is remembered," Moore explains. Now that maybe gets us down to the building, you know, where it might be operating. Radio GDay came on from Australia occasionally, but no one else. Do we have a right under the first amendment to speak via a radio station even if it is unlicensed by the FCC and is there potentially a case that can kind of exemplify why pirate radio is not protected under the First Amendment? After the reorganization and modernization of the field I then became the Regional Director and manage several offices now. Ive also been encouraged by pirates to hone my weak-signal DXing using exalted carrier reception (ECR)zero-beating an AM signal in SSBin an attempt to hear weak AM pirate stations. Well joining me to discuss this topic is David Dombrowski, Regional Director for Region One in the FCC Enforcement Bureau. 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