MilleniumClock

I'm really interested in running my own pirate radio station and am wondering if anybody has an information on what i would (i.e. hardware/software) to be able to run one.

Any help and info is appreciated!


kthnx<3

orange monkeyee

www.totse.com surf around there. unbelievable amounts of information.

Randerolf

www.thejoyofgodzilla.tripod.com

I used to have a show on a pirate station. the WRAD site has some good links. Check it out and good luck.

*salutes*

PS We did only manual stuff. Not any computer stuff. Finding mothballed equipment from radio stations helps too.

MilleniumClock

Thanks alot :-P

sleepingbeauty

...eexcellaant. (in a low Burnsish voice)

alt0220bergeek

so I take it you mean broadcast pirate radio and not some streaming audio web radio?

good luck, and just don't play music that sucks. just f*ck corporate radio in the ear!

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basmoq

good luck to ya man, I've never heard a pirate radio station before. Heard of them, but never seen one. I do remember a movie about one though, does anyone know the name of the movie??? I think it was from the 80's.

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Cycler

Pump Up the Volume, I think. In college we had a guy splice into the old intercom system in our dorms and play all sorts of crazy stuff it was a riot.

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shakran

there's a college in MN that used to use a wire radio. Basically it transmitted through the electrical wires. They acted as the transmitter, so that only radios VERY close to the wires could pick it up. If you went even 15 feet off campus, you'd lose the signal. That let them get a much less expensive radio license since their effective range was something like 6.5 feet. Only trouble is that the grounds crew decided they needed to install these big tall metal lamps all over campus for safety reasons. Lamps acted as a big antenna. Suddenly their range was much higher, and they wound up being forced to upgrade their license, at which point they upgraded their transmitter to a real one.

Nothing to do with pirate radio, but I always thought it was kind of a neat story.



Oh, and if you wanna run pirate radio my best advice is to get two CD players with backtime (counts down to 0 instead of counting up for it's time display) and cue capability (this will let you play songs without big pauses in the middle of it.)

Wouldn't hurt you to get a minidisc player or two as well. With these, you can preproduce bits such as sweepers, or even hour long radio shows so you can run a show without having to be there.

Disassemble one of those old swing-arm desk lamps (the ones with the springs). Take the lamp itself off, and use gaffers tape to tape a mic holder onto the end. Then clip your mic onto that. You now have a very cheap movable microphone. To get better sound, avoiding big thunks when you make "p" sounds, get a small embroidery hoop and stretch a pair of pantyhose over the hoop. Clip that in front of the microphone. Instant pop filter.

You will also need some sort of mixer. I'd recommend a live mixer rather than a production mixer. This will be set up to make it easy to turn audio sources on and off. It'll also auto-mute your monitor speaker when you turn the mic on.

Then you'll need a transmitter. Good luck finding one. Make sure you find out what its rated wattage is and do not even think of exceeding it or you'll wreck things.

Make sure your transmitter antenna can't ice up, either by wrapping deicing coils around it or by living in Florida. If it ices up it increases the SWR (signal-to-wave-ratio). In layman's terms it starts feeding a lot the transmitter's power back into the transmitter. This is a good way to wreck a transmitter. And since it's a pirate radio, find somewhere to effectively hide the antenna, because broadcast antennas are pretty easy to spot, and you don't need to be giving your location away that easilly.



If you're not gonna apply for a noncom FCC license, do NOT run the station too often or at regular times, because I guarantee you will get people (legit radio stations) complaining to the FCC. I've even heard of some cases where station engineers get pissed off enough at the pirate who's screwing up their systems that they went out and triangulated his position themselves, then showed up at his door for a beat-down party.

Keep the range to a low roar. If it gets outside your neighborhood, you only increase the likelihood that it will be noticed by someone you would prefer not to have noticed.

never identify yourself by your real name (hey, it's happened. Duh).

It would not hurt to read up on the FCC requirements for on-air performance. If you break the requirements and you're caught running the station, you can not only be nailed for running it, but you can be nailed for all the stuff you did wrong while you ran it.

BTW, yes, it's true, you can say "fuck" on the air now, provided it's not a noun or a verb. i.e. "fuck you" is illegal, as is "he's a fuckhead." "Nice fuckin' car" is OK however. (yes, the FCC is royally fu . . . well you get the picture

btw, don't do what the pump up the volume guy did - if you give out a phone number, then the fcc knows where to look for you

tarheelz

BTW, yes, it's true, you can say "fuck" on the air now, provided it's not a noun or a verb. i.e. "fuck you" is illegal, as is "he's a fuckhead." "Nice fuckin' car" is OK however. (yes, the FCC is royally fu . . . well you get the picture


News to me. Might want to doublecheck that.

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Fire

he's right- was covered on the local news here- but it is in a very limited context- so not so great anyway.

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DrJekyll

A pal of mine and I had a pirate radio station for a while. We calibrated it to 91.1 (in order to avoid bleeding into other local stations). I'd recommend that you do something similar...you're much less likely to get complaints as long as you're not using someone else's "turf". We set the antenna up on top of a guy's house and just ran it to his laptop/mp3 collection. The guy eventually bought the transmitter from us...and apparently took it to Atlanta. At that point, he was treading on territory, got tracked down, and nearly caught.

cchris

I used to hear a lot of pirate broadcasts via my shortwave radio but alas,it had to make way for this puter thingy.
It truely is amazing what can be heard on the airwaves.

A wealth of information can be found here.

http://www.blackcatsystems.com/radio/pirate.html

http://www.radio4all.org/

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Cynthetiq

i ran a pirate ham radio station in the 80's... lots of fun... much better than broadcast because you can get them to contact you via another station and not give you up your location or phone number

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Anomaly_

Pirate radio can be a lot of fun. It all depends on what you want to do though. If you'd like to broadcast to your immediate community you'll want to look into an FM broadcast band transmitter. There are a variety of kits and pre-fab models from companies like:

Ramsey
Veronica
Progressive Concepts

Probably the most overlooked and most important part of the transmitting system is the antenna. The benefit of the FM broadcast band is that it is a spectrum of relatively high frequencies which equates to shorter antennas (much shorter than AM broadcast band antennas, for example). You also typically want a vertically polarized signal which means an upright antenna rather than one stretched parallel to the ground length-wise. Two common types are the 1/2 wave dipole and the 5/8 wave antenna. Doing a Google search will bring up many links on how to construct your own for a specific frequency. There are pre-built ones like the Comet 5/8 wave as well.

If you have a more esoteric inkling you might want to consider shortwave pirate radio. It's what I'm mostly interested in but it may be more work and/or money then you're interested in expending. The nature of shortwave frequencies, depending on the time of day and solar activity, is that they can reach the ionosphere and be refracted back down to earth one or many times. This means you can potentially be heard across the world. However, you do lose a certain amount of audio quality compared to the FM broadcast band, especially if you're transmitting in Single Sideband Mode as opposed to AM.

As you would expect, the antennas are also considerably larger. The good thing is that a 1/2 wave dipole is pretty easy to make, you just need to accomodate for its size. The most popular shortwave frequency for US pirates is 6955 KHz which falls in the 41 meter band. Dipoles in this range are about 67 ft. long, so if you have any restrictions on antennas where you live you're going to have to do remote transmissions.

Another tricky thing to consider is a transmitter. You'll probably want to use a solid state HF amateur radio transceiver. Ebay or local "Ham fests" are a good place to look for used rigs. When you finally have one, you also need to make an interconnect between your audio source and the mic jack on the transmitter.

I've left out tons of information for the sake of brevity but you can PM if you want more details. The Free Radio Network is my favorite source for information because of the message boards that have many veteran pirates posting. There are also logs of shortwave pirate activity to give you an idea of where to tune to if you're interested in hearing others (some of which have amazing production value and original content).

MacGnG

ramsey has good kits you can build or buy. there's so much info on the net you just need to find what u want or have money for and get it set up. its not tooo difficult with the right equiptment

pkripper001

Captain Midnight was the movie about pirate radio that was shown on the USA network on there Night Fligt movies.This was long ago, and the movie was made by Beverly and Furd Sebastian from Sebastian International.I wish someone could find where to buy this movie at. I think it may have been Sebastian Intermnational that help make Pump UP The Volume, since the credits is given to SC International and New Line Cinema. I want to bring this thread back, because 911 in north Forida just don't refer to New York. It is a local thing, if you don't understand. I want the interest in pirate radio to stay alive.

MSD

This was posted 6 years ago and nobody made fun of him for linking TOTSE?

roachboy

Prometheus Radio Project

especially this:

Prometheus Radio Project

mediageek file: pirate/free/micropower/low-power radio

Rogue Radio Research

it's a bit late in the game i suppose, but why not?

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Xerxys

I only just checked Totse and I just realized it's shut down. I found totse before I found TFP!