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Microbroadcasting Summer Camp
ScottGant writes "Wired has this
story about Steven Dunifer and his four-day Radio Summer Camps sponsored by Free Radio Berkeley that offers how-tos for building transmitters and antennas, along with advice on handling any FCC agents that might come knocking. Imagine this: A thousand little stations send radio programming across cities and towns from senior centers, dorm rooms and attics. The understaffed FCC would be powerless to shut them down. Audiences would have substantive content choices. No one would tune into Top-40 radio. And the media moguls would slink back into their caves. The FCC and Big Radio are obviously paying attention to the microbroadcasters -- it was
pressure from independent broadcasters that forced the FCC to grant a limited number of low-power, or LPFM, radio licenses to community organizations, a decision that the NAB resisted. Are these Pirates or Patriots?"
"The Underground" was a radio station broadcast from the top of one of the dorms at OSU. They tried without success to get a license to broadcast, including a low power license, for years... Finally, they just started broadcasting at a couple of watts from the dorm with no license.
To put it in perspective, I lived about 300M away from their broadcast site and I couldn't get any reception.
Anyway, the FCC came in and turned their power down to the legal limit. You can't get their station from 4 floors below their antenna anymore.
"there are too many, they can't get us all" is not a valid way to go about changing things, especially when the penalties are harsh like the penalties for FCC violations.
Plus, who wants the local idiot to set up a station and swamp out a station you actually like? I'm not saying that I like anything that is being broadcast, and I wish like hell I could get the underground on my radio, but it just isn't going to happen until we start reforming media ownership laws...
+++ ATH0 +++
Try this if you want to build a free-standing FM transmitter from a kit, or this if you want to drop a PCI card into your PC and be on the air instantly.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
sorry it is 1/distance^2 not sqrt, the number is about right, I just missed typed.
The FCC proposed doing just what you have said is impossible, that is, licensing thousands of low power FM stations. However, the broadcast industry purchased a vote in Congress to override the FCC's technical findings. They cut the number of stations from thousands to a few hundred by requiring overly strict and told the FCC to study it a second time. The FCC study came back recently with the same results as the first one, thousands of stations can be licensed w/o causing interference.
Watch for a new bill from John McCain to allow thousands of low power FM stations to be licensed. Maybe if you become more informed about the issue you will ask your Congress critters to support this legislation since your interference concerns have been allayed. If you want more info take a look at the Free Press LPFM page
I like the idea of "hobbyist" broadcasting. The more voices, the merrier. Power to the people. There's no downside -- in theory.
The idea, though, of turning anyone with a soldering iron and microphone loose on our already crowded broadcast bands sounds like a disaster, though. Homebrew transmitters will be filthy, interefering with services inside and outside the broadcast spectrum.
The FCC has the legitimate purpose of regulating public airwaves for just this reason. Radio anarchy will reduce the usefulness of *all* broadcasting and many other services. Wanna surf wi-fi? Better hope your neighbor ain't running a dirty transmitter in your apartment complex.
I wish the Commission would consider laying aside a MHz or so for hobbyist broadcasters. But they should require type-accepted transmitters and dictate minimum technical standards of operation. None of this would be expensive or an undue burden upon those who would like to air out the First Amendment.
There's also the question of broadcast obscenity and indecency. If such broadcasts are illegal for licensed stations, the same should apply to hobbyists.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Well, one of the rules of microbroadcasting is that you're not supposed to use a channel occupied by, or within .3 MHz of, an existing station.
And it's more than just gentleman's advice...if you try to piggyback your local 50,000W clearchannel station with your 10W community station, you will never be heard, not even in your own house. Your radio will ignore your broadcast as static.
When I do "pirate" broadcasts, I generally use a piece of the spectrum in between our local NPR station and a "dance party" college radio station. Both are low powered, relatively, so I get a good signal. I can broadcast almost all the way down the street! It was a lot more useful in college...where a good, low-powered-but-legal signal could reach the 9000 students or whatever in the dorms.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
No. Well, not usually.
By broadcasting whatever they please over top of the expected/indended brodcasts, they interfere with the regular reception on my radio.
Like many other's posting today, you're stuck in the paradigm that microbroadcasters are going to intentionally broadcast "on top" of some already in-use band... and that if it weren't for the FCC's enforcement of the licensed allocation the FM and AM bands would be utter chaos. I've got some news for you...
Broadcasting in the same band as an established station with a strong signal isn't going to get you any significant coverage or audience (no matter how compelling your program material may be). A low power transmitter's field strength is going to be overwhelmed after only a short distance if there's a powerful transmitter within the same city... especially if it has the tremendous advantage of transmitting from a tower on top of a hill. This is especially true for FM, where the radio will track the higher amplitude frequency and effectively ignore your smaller signal. Even on AM, where you have a chance of superimposing your audio, it doesn't take much signal from the strong source before your voice/music is not intelligable.
Low power radio transmission also doesn't reach enough people to be effecive at selling the scams and questionable products that most spammers push.
What if I prefer 'top-40' drivel?
In the extreemly unlikely case some low power transmitter spewing an unlicensed signal on top of your pop music station... you'll probably only have to move a short distance or just orient your antenna a little differently to pick up the extreemly strong signal these stations transmit.
Even if you're deprived of Top-40 for a little while, take comfort in the likelyhood that it won't last long. Sure, someone may be having a good laugh somewhere... but they're probably going to shut it off soon, partly for fear of getting caught, but also because it won't be long until they realize turning to an unused band or one with a very weak signal is going to buy them a lot more coverage.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Like many other's posting today, you're stuck in the paradigm that microbroadcasters are going to intentionally broadcast "on top" of some already in-use band... and that if it weren't for the FCC's enforcement of the licensed allocation the FM and AM bands would be utter chaos. I've got some news for you...
I've got some news for you too. Transmitters "leak". A homemade transmitter tends to leak a lot. They don't stay confined to one and only one section, they spread across a chunk of spectrum. They have to, in fact, because that's how frequency modulation works. But when it goes a lot further than it's supposed to, it causes interference on neighboring channels.
Few here are concerns about jackasses who try to steal bandspace from some other station. That's a self solving problem. But poorly made transmitters that knock out a whole MHz of the spectrum at a time is not unheard of, or indeed, uncommon in pirate radio.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
What's ironic, and maudlin about the whole affair, is if Mr. Dunifer had not blatantly violated FCC rules, he would have been eligible to submit an application for a Lower Power FM (LPFM) license, which the FCC has begun granting again. Even if Mr. Dunifer is himself ineligible, he could have used this opportunity to encourage and support others in applying for such licenses. However, you won't see Mr. Dunifer or FRB doing this. They would rather play with their own toys by their own rules, and society be damned.