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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?"
I know this will not be popular, but there is a reason for the FCC to be around and to control the spectrum. Think about it, if the FCC did not exist I could drive around with a 2kilowatt spread spectrum transmitter on 2.4Ghz, good by WiFi, or I could jam all cell phones anywhere. The FCC may not be perfect but we need it. Also with these vandals (yes I use the word vandals) it would be nice if they were low power and such, but they get their kicks from broadcasting over another station. That is one reason for the FCC to protect peoples right to their freq. If one wants something on the air there is always the public access stations. Or you could do a net stream, there are many other options, the FCC is not there just to hurt the little guy, they are there to protect the bands, they are not always good at it, and they make mistakes
"...offer how-tos for building transmitters and antennas..."
I also like what it can do for neighborhoods where it might enhance a sense of community which is sorely lacking these days. Either way, I think everyone wins and that doesn't happen very often (well, the NAB doesn't think that they win but anything that promotes radio eventually helps the NAB).
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
No one would tune into Top-40 radio.
.. yeah. Never underestimate the banality of the common man. Even in areas where there is substantial choice, Top-40 pulls 'em in. Like it or not, it's there because it makes money.
Aaahhh
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.... Are these Pirates or Patriots?
Try "idiots". There's only so much radio band out there. If there were 1000 little stations then result would not be 1000 choices of content, it would be ZERO choices of content, because there'd be so much mishmash and overlap that nobody'd be able to tune in shit without interference.
If you want to kill off FM Radio, this'd be a good way to do it. But it wouldn't be a good way to help out the people who just want to hear tunes. Want to broadcast your selection of tunes? Go get a license like everybody else.
Everyone is free to do what they want, including broadcasting over someone on a popular frequency if you don't agree with their message. Should your local little broadcast station become too popular, one of your competitors mearly has to jam your signal out of existance. nothing you can do, no reprecussions, you just have to sit and take it.
Or Neither?
So, Congress is supposedly still investigating whether a low power, 100 watt station, will interfere with a 10,000 watt big boy broadcaster. This is why the FCC pulled out about 75% of the possible frequencies and number of low-power stations per district.
Anyone want to place money on the outcome of that congressional research? I lay odds at 1 to 1 that the report will state that little broadcasters are ruining the signals of the big guys.
Congress is such a wonderful scientifically responsible and honest body.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
Most 'pirate' radio has tended to broadcast either 'college' rock/alternative or political speech from one of the two classical extreems (socialist left or faschist right). Substantive content choices will have to mean more than "Not Brittany". It will need to include educqtional programming, targeted at the specific neighborhood, or musical programming preserving vanishing jazz or blues artists, or op-ed that's more substantive (there's that pesky wood again) than the soundbite of the moment approack.
Who is John Cabal?
These people are definitely ordinary radio pirates. The FM band has licensing for a reason -- because there is not enough space for everyone. I cannot find an empty spot on the FM band even in a college town with less than 20,000 people. The band is crowded, and there is not enough room for everyone and their dog.
Besides, has anybody else noticed that the reason most "microbroadcasters" are "micro" is because nobody wants to listen to them? After all, if everyone is dissatisfied with clearchannel and likes some random local broadcaster, they can always persuade the FCC to give the small station a license instead. After all, that works for college stations, NPR stations, and many local stations. So, the pirate stations have to resort to tactics like interfering with a legitimate broadcaster in order to promote their crappy and unpopular format.
This isn't better. I'd rather listen to a commercial rock station and hear mediocre songs all the way through and put up with ~25% advertising than institute a model where I can't hear any song to the end in my car, because I lose reception too fast.
Even if - maybe especially if - it's a song I love.
The FCC, for all its flaws, serves a useful purpose. It regulates the use of a freely-accessible (technically, at least) resource which is extremely limited in supply.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
The FCC is a sham and should be dismantled.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
No one would tune into Top-40 radio
How many of the unfeasible thousands of tiny radio stations do you figure would be playing Top-40 anyway? There really isn't enough diversity in music to support even a modest number of unique radio stations. Most of them would be playing dead-air or else experiencing wide overlaps in content.
Beyond that, what are the chances that this technology could be used for evil instead of good? Does anyone remember the hooligans who usurped a Burger King drive through system and berated customers for being fat? Unfortunately, a tool like radio would probably inspire the worst in poorly mannered people rather than the best in mild mannered ones.
The technical aspect is very interesting and well worth teaching. The social aspect needs a disclaimer.
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
"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. "
Is that like the RIACC is powerless to stop the millions of downloaders and file traders from sharing music, etc... because there's just too many people doing it? All they have to do is get the interested parties (commercial radio for instance) to call their lawyers who will call their lobbyists who will pay a few judges/polititians who will write a law that includes a fine so large (you know, like up to $150,000.00 per song) that no one will take the risk of getting caught. Then they just have to arrest a few people to set an example and all the sheep run back to the barn...
Welcome to America man, land of the Lawyer... Someday this may again be a free country but not today.
If this happened right now, I think the FCC would be more worried about shutting down Stern than all these little transmitters. More money and votes to be won in censorship than in regulation.
FCC fines Stern for his typical less than politically correct show but won't address Oprah's show where "tossing salad" was graphically described. They're not likely to be any more consistent with very small rogue transmissions.
We the people OWN the radio waves. They belong NOT to the Federal Government, but to us.
We had the FCC created to regulate radio waves and frequencies, so that Emergency Services and "public" stations would not receive interferance from "private" broadcasts.
However, now the FCC is "renting" out the airwaves, and restricting content.
How did this all happen?
The Government (FCC) has overstepped its boundries with this one.
Let's remember that Sir Francis Drake was a pirate, as well as the proto-feminists Mary Read and Anne Bonny. In Drake's case, the Spanish were plundering their American conquests for gold to use to arm themselves for invasion of England. Drake not only was instrumental in defeating the Armada directly, but in cutting off the funding for the Spanish terror as a licensed privateer, chartered by the Crown to seize Spanish shipping. The Crown eventually revoked the licenses to Drake and his peers, but the pirates were enabled to continue their careers awhile especially by the free trade policies of New Amsterdam, whose Dutch citizens could still remember the evils of the former Spanish dominion over Holland.
/Inquisition with New World gold, or Clear Channel/Bush with the "public" airwaves) is opposed by independent, free-thinking owners of their own rigs, preserving liberty against the dark designs for ultimate consolidation of power.
The essential outlines of respectable piracy are these: A group seizing wealth to which it has no real moral claim, and using that wealth to further increase the scope of its power towards absolute monopoly, controlled through a close collusion of centralized wealth, power and religion (e.g. Spain
Pirates can be good, those opposed to them as evil as the conquistadors. Without pirates, Spain could have taken control of most all of Europe and the Americas, the Inquisition would still be ongoing, and the level of economic development and social justice would be that of a typical South American country at best. The public should find ways to directly charter pirates, in doing so aligning them with the public good as Drake was allied with the good of England. Then the FCC will be as unlikely to act decisively against them as it is to take on Opra.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Imagine this: A thousand little stations interfering with police, fire and ambulance radio dispatching and communications, and, even better, aircraft communications. The understaffed FCC can't shut them down, but the FAA comes in and (deservedly) kicks your ass.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's low power FM and everyone will make sure to be nice. Right. That's how things always work out, right? None of these homebrew transmitters will have a bad harmonic or other out of band spur, right? And as the FM band becomes fuzzed out no one will flee to other bands, right?
This is the ONE legitimate purpose of the FCC- bandwidth management. You're so ideological stubborn you'd eliminate that as well and deliver the spectrum into chaos?
--- Ban humanity.
"""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.""
1. actually it kind of is. it's one of the reasons civil disobedience can work.
Civil disobedience rarely works - and when it does it's because a big section of the power structure wants it to.
Re "too many microbroadcasters": Back in the '60s people thought that if enough people smoked dope and took other drugs it would saturate the justice system and lead to legalization of recreational pharmaceuticals. (Just as it was perceived had happened with liquor prohibition.) Four decades later we find that instead the government retooled for a self-funding "Drug War" on the model of the Spanish Inquisition and used it to debug legal tools that can be used for other forms of oppression.
If civil disobedience by the bulk of the largest generation in US history can't prevail, what chance do the relative handfull of small-broadcast operators have?
The poster children for Civil Disobedience are Ghandi and King.
Ghandi gets kudos because of the perceived success of his work in India. But a major fraction of the British Parlement already wanted to dismantle the empire, and especially to unload India as a colony that cost more than it paid. Ghandi gave them good PR for portraying their opposition as monsters and thus getting their way.
Very few people remember that, before he succeeded in India he tried the same approach in South Africa - with no success whatsoever. They also forget his prescription for what the Jews should do about the NAZIs: Commit mass suicide in protest.
As for the good Doctor Martin: Blacks got the vote at the end of the Civil War, but had it taken away by the Jim Crow laws. The freedom rides and the other passive resistance enabled LBJ to put one over on the generally pro-segregation Democratic party by passing the Civil Rights laws - but implementation of those were mandated by the courts to occur at "All Deliberate Speed" - which meant "never". What finally did the trick was the cities burning in '68. Immediately afterward the civil rights laws acquired some teeth and the blacks got the vote for real. WHAT a coincidence!
Then the media raised King to hero status - in order to eclipse the likes of H. Rap Brown, Malcom X, and Charlie Thomas. And the blacks have since been "helped" back into underclass status by "programs" that destroyed their family structure and educational opportunities - to the point that they actually peition the government to be futher disempowered.
Just like veterans got the vote after Shay's and the Whiskey rebellion, women after the temperance movement started smashing bars, and 18-20 year olds after the anti-Vietnam-War riots and bombings. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun - and at the end of a club, and in a firebomb.
Passive resistance techniques such as civil disobedience are often a useful, and sometimes necessary, early step. They let you acquire the moral high ground. But passive resistance by itself doesn't prevail.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way