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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
Are these Pirates or Patriots?
Can they be both?
"...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.
Bullshit. That's like saying if you broadcast pirate TV shows, noone would watch Survivor or American Idol.
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.
This sort of underground culture is such a good thing that, if the repressive laws causing it didn't already exist, we should enact them.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
adding the internet to this mix...streaming a station to 100 people who then broadcast it to a combined millions...someone could broadcast to a substantial audience from their basement
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?
"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
Are these Pirates or Patriots?
Both: They are Piratriots.
Johnkoerner.com
Young Skywalker, do not underestimate the power of the FCC:
When the Federal Communications Commission came calling to shut down two local pirate radio stations late last year, the pirates say they got hit with a heavy dose of law enforcement muscle - choppers, submachine guns, flak jackets and other equipment and tactics usually seen in the takedown of killers or major drug desperados. (emphasis added)
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...
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.
I turn on the radio and get cross talk and garbled words because of all the damn idiots broadcasting in my area.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Yet the FCC is shirking it's duties by accepting the upcoming wideband interference of broadband over power lines in the frequency range of 3 to 80 mhz.
"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.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
As for subversive news, the article mentioned Democracy Now, I've never heard that one, but I often catch Free Speach Radio News on Pacifica Radio's streaming audio, or if I miss it, download it from FSRN
"And the media moguls would slink back into their caves." Never before have I laughed so hard @ work that the Sation manager came down to the shop and asked me to pipe down, until I read this line. Stop it, *please*, yer killin' me. Cheap Engineer Somewhere in Corporate TV land
Like it's not hard enough commuting and having the radio occasionally cut out to the Brittany Spears song .2 MHz off, now I have to be interrupted every fifteen feet by hundreds of 13 year olds with transmitters and their own call-in show listened to only by their next door neighbor playing their "All-Rancid-and-Green Day Morning, OMG WTF LOL!!!" on my way to work.
Set up a thousand little 802.11 hotspots with point-to-point links to send all sorts of data across cities and towns from senior centers, dorm rooms and attics! Its already legal! The hardware is already cheap!
Now you've not only got local content streaming radio, you've got VoIP services, freely distributable media sharing, local news blogs, etc etc.
This is the dream of many wireless community networking groups, including The Personal Telco Project in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Maybe the poster might be to young to remember the Citizen's Band phenomenon in the 1970's. And while the underlying thought might be that the FCC is powerless or understaffed, try broadcasting in Clear Channel's AM/FM bandwidth and see how fast you get slapped with a cease-and-desist order.
Have you Meta Moderated t
The airwaves don't belong to any government, they don't belong to any private organization, they don't belong to any person.
The FCC is a sham and should be dismantled.
And the ozone does not belong to any government or private organization, but does that mean we should dismantle the EPA?
While I am not a fan of the FCC, it does exist to regulate the usage of the airwaves. I think its power should be limited to protecting the airwaves from being overpopulated, however, they should not regulate the content being provided.
Johnkoerner.com
Most "pirates" broadcast in shortwave, well away from any major AM and FM broadcasters.
www.frn.net has a sightings forum if you want to listen to this stuff.
Is being a patriot really a good thing? From a dictionary via Google
Of course, there are many other definitions, but I like thie one above.
Why is someone who fights others because "My country is better than your country" held in such high regard? After all, we despise those who fight and kill because their race "is better than yours".
Sorry for being a little off-topic, but maybe someone will know the answer.
How about, instead of the FCC having total control of the airwaves for the enitre country, they give control to the states, or the metropolitan areas to control locally? Or some split deal (broadcast power below a certian level is run by the state/city, higher has both state and federal, or only federal).
It seems that if I have a low power station, and I registered with a city or state authority for the frequency in that city, I should be covered, since if the power shouldn't be enough to get to antoher city, and they won't have to worry about me there. The FM spectrum is small, but you can have broadcasters on the smae frequency, as long as the boradcasters aren't near enough to each other to intefere with one another. and that sort of management would be easier by a more local authourity.
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.
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
Italy deregulated broadcasting (on free speach grounds), and the result was vibrant: it replaced the state-run "cathedral" with a privately run "bazaar".
The FCC is a tool to stiffle free speach. National Public Radio was one of the forces that pushed the FCC to crack down on microbroadcasters. It wasn't for fear of chaos. It was to stiffle NPR's competitors. Someone from Radio Free Berkley (true community radio, as opposed to "public" radio) once called NPR the "agent orange of grassroots radio". If NPR is agent orange, then the FCC is mustard gas.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
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.
Adding thousands of mini FM stations to me sounds like the same thing that's happened with the web. Ya, there are a few decent sites out there, but on the whole, the internet if full of crap.
The parallels are pretty interesting, though. If a market were to be saturated with thousands of mini-stations, one would naturally assume that a station or two might decide to take on the roll of 'directory' or 'portal', helping you find a frequency you're interested in tuning into.
I'm definetly for this kind of initiative, and I want to say that the FCC has done a good job at allowing creativity and innovation, particularly in support of hobbiests. However, it seems that big money has more influence and forces the FCC's hand most of the time. That's the real shame of it all.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
Hello. I had a LPFM station, and was visited by the FCC. A few notes...
With the modern equipment and some caution, it is easy to avoid harmonics, and I never experienced adjacent channel interference. Supposidly down in Flordia (Miami?) there are lots of problems with intereference as immigrants run poorly constructed equipment. However, in most cases (like my visit) the FCC could cite ZERO interference. Either the FCC heard about it on the internet (they look), or a commercial station turned you in because they don't like the thought of competition in the market. I don't think LPFM stations would show up in the ratings.
The FCC responded to the LPFM (Low Power FM (Pirate radio)) craze with the LPFM rulings that appeared to setup a legal chance for people to have 10 and 100 watt stations. The thing is, most of the tickets went to churches. ***YAWWWWNNN*** Congrats, the radio band is now filled and there is no room for evil pirates playing non-top 40 format. Church groups are already allowed to have translators, so it was kind of a disappointment. I think Kennard was big on the church tip, so this might explain it.
If you WERE to drop your station over a commercial station, multipath signal antics would cause neither to sound good a short distance from your arial.
The NAB is really out to protect it's members. Monopolistic. No one wants competition. So that is just the way it is....
An *INTERESTING* thing is the new Icom D-Star ham radio equipment. It does 128kbps TCP/IP data via repeaters for Ham radio. I'm not 100% positive, but maybe if someone designed a cheap 1.2ghz digital receiver that could decode mp3 data from the DCOM ham radio system it would be possible to run a metro radio service using streaming mp3 data, along with the callsign of the station owner. There are projects to interface to various car decks, but widespread audience wouldn't be obtainable with the hardware requirements and some HAM people might get pissed if tons of the transmitters started showing up spewing 24x7 data.
I gotta admit, it was run running a station. But the requirements for operating legal are a bore, and it seems to take the fun out of it. LDBrewer was the big source for the equipment, and FCC owned him in a major way. The lack of gear has slowed the spread of LPFM. It is pretty much died AFAIK.
And yet another thing, does anyone know if something like a HP 22ghz spectrum analyzer can be set to watch the broadcast FM spectrum (88mhz to 108mhz)... then if anything new shows up, throw an alert via RS232? I've always wanted to monitor for FM pirates in my area...
You never know what might show up on the dial...
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
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 really isn't enough diversity in music to support even a modest number of unique radio stations.
Out of a thousand stations: 10 AOR, 10 Hip Hop, 50 College Town Indie, 929 JEEEEEZUSSS Saves Send Money, and 1 guy broadcasting an audio tape of his girlfriend and him going at it on the kitchen table.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Currently, the FCC is the legislative branch of the media conglomerates.
The FCC exists primarily to cater to ClearChannel / Kiss FM. It's not about serving the public, it's about serving big business.
Pirate Radio is an act of civil disobedience.
There is an old saying - Want a free press? Buy one. Of course, for those of us that can't buy one - you can start your own!
Just imagine 1,000 Slashdotters rebroadcasting Airamerica Radio across the midwest. We might finally have a voice to reckon with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
Speaking as a Ham,
Sending music over the ham bands using ANY encoding is illegal it was banned back in 1934 as part of the Communications Act.
Even singing "Happy Birthday" can win you a "Notice of Apparent Violation" from your friendly local fed.
"""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