I worked at a AM Radio Station that went off at midnight. Sometimes i would go up around 3am anf just turn it on amd start playing music 🎶. Never got caught by bosses or anyone else. I worked part time there on a Sunday night til midnight. About the last hour of my 6 hour shift, I'd ignore the programming printout and play entire Albums from 11pm to midnight. Well, after a few weeks i got caught and got fired. Ended up having a following and some commercial got pulled because i wasn't there . The Station manager got FIRED, and i was brought back lol.
i was stationed at an air force base in the 1980s and ran a pirate FM station from the barracks for several months. my "exciter"was an old car radio where i used the local oscillator and fed the mono audio in through the AFC diodes. then i modified a cheap FM microphone PCB with a 5 watt output transistor as the output device (i was probably only getting 2 watts out of it) . i ran antenna wire out of my 3rd story window to the top of a nearby tree. it was a thin wire, so it was not visible from the ground. i ran that station for several months from midnight to 3am until my schedule changed and i was moved to a different room on a lower floor of the barracks. quite a few people in that barracks listened to it, but were befuddled that they could only find the signal between midnight and 3am. i only played good music, no speaking, so nobody ever figured out it was me.
I once helped out at a local 30 day licensed station as a teenager, one of the guys gave me a little plastic box that contained a PCB, and showed me it could transmit on FM, I took it home, connected a rather large wire to it, popped it out the upstairs bedroom window and up over the roof, I tested the signal out and got easily 5 miles out of it , those were fun times :)
Could see lots of pirate stations popping up if the world goes mad max. It isn't too difficult to build a transmitter, but it is difficult to get propagation and not to step on other stations.Lots if vacancies on the lower end if the FMB.❤
Wait tho, but what if I want to get caught so I can brag to all the chicks about how FLY I am because I run a pirated radio station? If that won't get the ladies pants off my plan b is showing them pictures of my huge Dungeons And Dragons dice collection.
I was a an FM pirate running 10W into a well tuned antenna. Got out very well. The FCC came around after a few months of broadcasting 2 times a week. We took requests for music and had the best sound. This was 1973. FCC decided to just let it go. I told them everything was destroyed.
@@Barry-Watson - We ran an unlicenced AM station for 2 weeks at 1KW day and night on two inverted V antennas so we had North South and East West covered. Drove the local stations crazy because we were killing them in rations and using a cell phone as a call in line. Ran old commercials from the 50's. The DJ and owner of the motorhome with the 1KW installed in it is a silent key now. I still have the Tshirt for helping... He gave away lots of prizes from the station and had us passing them out at a local bar he loved in town. It really drew a crowd for them and people still talk about the weekend the booming station was on the air and promoted the town and this favorite bar/eatery. The 11th commandment. THOU SHALT NOT GET CAUGHT. ha ha
My only run-in with the F.C.C. was in 1978. I was an novice amateur radio operator. I got a Notice of Violation for operating CW on a frequency of 7,099.95 kc/s. The low end of the Novice CW band was 7,100 kc/s. PICKY, PICKY, PICKY! I answered the notice with an explanation, never heard anything else about it.
thats sad because NOBODY listents to terrestrial radio anymore...i havent tuned into a "radio station" in more than 5 yrs . why would anyone want to hear 45 minutes of commercials and chortling for 15 minutes of "music" . At this point the FCC should give licenses away.
Hi Barry, I'm a fellow Minnesotan. As a high school student, I was also on pirate radio in St. Paul a long time ago. the station stated after 3 pm and all day Saturday and Sunday with some fellow friends and young radio enthusiasts. Our FM station did not get out as far as yours, only about 2-5 miles depending on the terrain. We used a Radio Shack wireless mic (p-Box Kit) and substituted parts for a stronger output. The power source was two 12-volt car batteries in series (24 volts). We also made sure not to interfere with other stations. After broadcasting for a year we discovered other pirate stations that existed in Minneapolis and made friends with them. The guys at our station and the other pirates had a love of radio and most went on to work for major commercial stations. I eventually did evenings at a 50,000-watt Country FM station in Minneapolis. Others did bigger things, one guy working at our St. Paul station went to work in Dallas and was named the Billboard major-market program director of the year 2-year in a row. Another worked at a Minneapolis 50,000-watt AM station doing overnights, and one became a well-known program director and later operations manager at the major Classic Rock station in Minneapolis. These stories, airchecks, and photos can all be seen and heard at the following website: TwinCitiesRadioAirchecks.com/pirateradiotwincities.html A number of us went to Brown Institute, a broadcast school in Minneapolis. The Saint Paul owner/operator and site owner worked up near you in Northern MN in at a station in Grand Rapids, MN in 1972 on the air and as the chief engineer. Fortunately, we did not get a visit from the FCC. Not sure how that happened. We had a request phone number given over the air and took requests., We were on regular hours every week. Doing all the things that can get you a door knock from the FCC. We were underage at the time, not hurting anyone or any station, just having lots of fun. Thanks, Barry for a great story. Hope you like the website.
Alright, I gotta chime in. I ran a pirate FM for a decade in my hometown. God bless my parents for letting me do it. My dad even built a mast on the roof for my 1/4 ground plane antenna that was fed by a ten watt transmitter. Only stopped because I moved out, never got caught. Signal wasn't too bad even though the heavy foliage ate up the RF quite a bit. I started when I was 16 or so, slowly over time improved the audio and signal, and brought in many of my friends. Towards the end of the station when I was much older and wiser, it was running 24/7 using RadioDJ and StereoTool for processing. The damn thing sounded better than many of the local FMs! Once you experience the thrill of running your own station, you really can never shake it off. Not saying to go out and build your own, but..y'know.
Know exactly what you're saying, I was an indoor grower for 11 years and every single day I laughed at the fact that I was "Gettin' over on da man". And you know what? It's the only time in my life that things worked they way that they told me they do in America when I was growing up, the better of a job I did the more I prospered, the harder I worked at it the more I made, the smarter I was than others trying the same thing the more I was in demand, instead of like every job I've ever had where I was smarter than everyone around me and solved all the problems but it was always a suck up or someone's relative or friend that got the promotion or raise, I'm an honorably discharged veteran that was on armored vehicles in the Army that were very similar to the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and I couldn't even get a job in my hometown at a defense plant that opened up rebuilding Bradley's because they were too busy hiring friends and family at the place, and the VA or no one else would do a thing about it, that's when I said "OK, you don't wanna play by the same rules you tell me I have to live by, fine, I know what to do", and for 11 years the world was fair with me and it was the 11 happiest years of my life, then they legalized it and put me in the poor house, but hey, I still had those 11 years where I wasn't anybody's stooge for once in my life, and nobody can ever take that away from me.
I ran a pirate radio station for 2 years as a commercial business. Got a 30 mile range with 100 watts and never had an issue with the FCC, but that's because I stayed away from FM. I eventually shut it down after my neighbor got cable installed and I was getting my station on his TV, phone line, and every band on his radio. I'm not an engineer and I couldn't figure out how to make it stop, so that was the day the station died.
Great story. Had a friend that set up a pirate FM station in the mid 90s' Was totally automated and ran about 40 watts. He operated that 24/7 for about 25 years and was never caught. Covered the entire town. One day it was off, so I figured he had a knock at the door, but as it turned out a wind storm took down the tree the antenna was in.
FCC has a long history of intentionally overlooking low-ish power 'pirate' broadcasters. Unless you do something which messes with another station's transmission or gets people to complain, it isn't worth their time and is even seen by a few folks as a good thing (especially in case of emergencies). We really should fix the laws to encourage more local non-profit radio.
@@travcollier But PBS/NPR doesn't want that and previously killed such laws. They want to support big pharma, globalism, communism, etc., and their argument is that an organized non-profit, cookie-cutter approach is the best. I disagree as people are different, and have different needs, values, and cultures.
I knew a guy who broadcasted a Pirate station in Philadelphia on the weekends. He said after a few months he received a letter from the FCC stating what he was doing was illegal and prompting him to take advantage of the Public Broadcasting stations in his area that were available to him. This went on for a few more months when one weekend he decided to mention a local Pizza Place that told him they’d hook him up with some free food in exchange for mentioning them on the air. That next Monday Feds raided his house and confiscated all of his broadcasting equipment. The Feds told him they would probably have never made physical contact with him if he didn’t advertise that Pizza place, as soon as he benefited monetarily the game was over.
It is a lot deeper than this but the FCC was established to keep pirate stations from stealing the revue of the licenced stations. Someone would pay writers and performers to do show so they could make their money back selling commercials. Then some "smart" people would just set up on the same frequency and sell their own commercials in an area, pirating the show. The point, even today is to keep stations on the same frequency from interfering with each other. To enforce the whole system, you are not allowed to charge money while using the public airways without doing what everyone else has to do. There are a lot of non-monetary rules a legit station has to follow to keep from interfering with everyone else's use. That is why you need a licenced engineer. (Not that hard to get your cert guys and you no longer need code).
Never ran a pirate radio, but we built a giant Tesla Coil , by giant it was about 25 feet and powered by arc welders driving two pole pigs. It lobbed sparks from the top that were 50 feet long. We played with old 8 foot floresent tubrs running the thing while we were having a pretty lively house party. Anyway a few hours in, we had cops and the FCC show up. Turns out it was jamming most of the AM band as well as nany FM bands. They told us to cease and desist, dismantle the tesla coil, and a few people got ticketed. 😂
Several decades ago, while I was in college, I worked in the college's FM radio station, 100,000 watts and classical music. In those days the station signed off at midnight and I often worked the sign off shift. I would hit the switch to shut off the transmitter at midnight and then run to my dorm room where I would fire up my own FM radio station. It was a crude oscillator that was FM modulated and I had it tuned to the exact frequency of the college's station. There was a flurry of activity in and out of our dorm room as calls would come in from students in other dorm rooms all around the campus requesting songs to be played so we often had to run around to our neighboring rooms to find the specific albums we needed. We didn't play classical music.
How were people able to listen to your FM station broadcasting on Am frequencies? Were they just all close enough that the FM signal could be heard on AM, or did it require special equipment?
Have you guys heard of FM pirate radio stations on boats broadcasting 12 miles from Los Angeles in the Pacific Ocean ? International waters, no FCC enforcement.
Barry if you are interested, in the UK their was a pirate radio station called Rinse FM that went legit. They set up and broadcasted on an antenna erected on a tall high rise and then connected to the antenna via wi-fi. Enforcement could find the antenna but not the location where the wi-fi was coming from with 1,000s of wi-fi enabled apartments nearby.
You had me with Rush dude!🤩Attention all listeners of this neighborhood radio station, we have assumed control, we have assumed control, we have assumed control.
Great story. I never bothered with AM. Just FM. I tweaked a RadioShack Wireless mic and got out about two miles. I was running a 40 watts FM stereo transmitter in 2003. I'm pretty sure my ex friend ratted me out to the FCC. They drove 100 miles to my house. They complemented me on how good it sounded then told me to turn it off. They made me sign a paper, and they left. Never heard from them again. A few months later I was back on the air at 40 watts, and never had another visit. A few years ago my wife suggested I put on a low power FM transmitter for our park. I decided to bring out the old the 40 RF Amp. We are a bit high in elevation. The station got out 20 miles west. That was fun! So I scaled it back to almost nothing. One day I get a visit from the local radio engineers. They came right up to the door of my house. They didn't even see the antenna. The only way they could have done that was that someone tipped them off, and gave them my address. Only one person had that address, and that was my ex friend. Never never tell anyone what you're doing. Especially a friend who you might piss off sometime.
What @Dudleyism1 said. It's actually VERY easy to locate the source of a signal, even a very weak one. At 40w, a constant broadcast would take almost no time at all to locate. All this coming from one of many amateurs with the ability to do this. The FCC is way more proficient, they have vehicles designed specifically for this purpose. We use Yagi antennas and generally take several hours or a whole day. I think they use field strength measurements and will only take an hour or less. You should feel lucky, honestly. They sometimes make examples of people and slam them with a six digit fine, though those folks mostly are interfering with others. Anyway, your ex is probably off the hook for this one.
its really easy to locate a radio. All you need is a spectrum analyzer and a directional antenna a map and a pencil. take a reading from two different locations and draw a line on the map the direction your antenna is pointing. that. will get you really close. Then you just need to take a ride with a handheld. There is also radio equipment that uses 4 antennas on a van that's basically the electronic version of that technique, but the old methods still work really well. Going mobile is the best way. Remember if the person coming to your door doesn't work for a federal agency, the water hose is a great solution for getting unwanted guests to leave.
😀 I’m a licensed ham geek and well, overall electronics geek. Always pursuing the knowledge for that next project, so I really appreciated this video. Thank you for sharing!
Fascinating story. I played around with a low powered kit FM transmitter at age 13 with my cousin. We mucked about transmitting mock Pythonesque audio interviews, news reports, radio ads and some music. I doubt more than few people heard our nonsense, but it was fun. Enjoyed the video, thanks.
I'm a retired CATV tech. Back in the mid 90's when I lived in a trailer park, I back fed my cable line and tap with about 60 Db of a xxx ( American Exxxtasy) channel from my big dish. I remember calling my friend next door and asking him to tune to such and such channel. His response was "WTF" LOL. The signal would have covered about half of the trailer park in the FWD direction of the line amps. I only ran it for a few minutes just so I could see if it would work.
Enjoyed the video as it's something fresh for once, and also something of the US and not of the UK, etc.. I've ran a periotic station for 30 years. Never once been bothered by the feds. I worked in commercial radio too as on air dj and technical engineering as needed. I would work my jobs then come home and fire up my own operation. Today I no longer work in the commercial field but I still have my pirate operation. I don't put it on antenna very often these days, mainly because times have changed and is difficult to really get any following via terrestrial broadcasting. Also my older age has played a factor. Not that I don't enjoy working with the stuff. FCC enforcement so I have discovered, clearly depends where you are, and the operation. I have talked to the enforcement bureau and actually had a very polite one on one conversation with a fellow at the FCC. They knew of my operations but told me they didn't care about it because of my location. At the time, I was a 500W too. The agent told me they were concerned about operations in large markets and those selling ads. Also that they didn't have the time and money to go after even legit commercial stations that aren't following the rules. Today, being an over the air pirate really isn't worth the time, effort, money and even risks as most people don't even have radios to listen to such broadcast, sadly. From what it is today, the only ones that play with it logically are like myself that are more interested in the actual radio aspect, not so much being a radio DJ. In a way, the old song does hold true, video killed the radio star but with cell phones and spotify. Maybe at some point like records and tapes, it will make a comback.
A fascinating tale and well narrated. Some parallels in my life too, I built an FM transmitter when I was at school, my radio amateur father just let me get on with this stuff. The transmitter was very low powered and i knew nothing about aerials/antennas. No idea if I had any audience at all, used a reel to reel tape recorder as an audio source, took a portable radio out to see how far away it could be heard. Later on a friend and I built a 3 element cubical quad antenna for it using scrap aluminium from window extrusions. Was never caught, probably due to low power and very little air time. About a decade later I was working for the UK equivalent of the FCC. I went on to spend about 40 years in legitimate radio.
Thanks for sharing. I started my LPFM station in NZ in 2006 after working in commercial radio. Still running today and turning 18 years old on July 1st
I ran a 150W FM pirate station when I was a youth. Best fun I've ever had. Right now I'm learning to build RF transmitters. Never got busted here in the UK.
Dude, this is a great story. So earlier in my life i lived in a crappy apartment at a certain beach town somewhere... While I was there a guy in the apartment next to me that was a very well educated guy who used to be a criminal defense attorney that had been disbarred for doing drugs and some other stuff... But anyway, he and I hung out a bunch and mostly just goofed off and laughed at tourists trying to get at quarters we had glued to the sidewalk while we knocked back cold ones on the weekends. We would go to local bars where you could only play music with those stupid 0.75c per song juke boxes that always seemed to be run by shady ppl. But some bars would put on the radio when it was early for the locals. Anyway, one day my neighbor, lets call him, "Jared" asked me, "Dude I want to start a pirate radio station and play great music with no ads for the local bars". So eventually he got a transmitter and set it up in his place because "Jared" always said that he would use his extensive legal background to throw anyone off. Someone... used a network analyzer to tune up an antenna that was put on the roof. Also an empty FM band was chosen to not conflict with anyone. The FCC never showed up and that thing played ad-free music for several summers until some lightning hit the antenna during a storm and killed it. But for a while, locals would go to bars for 10 or so miles around and they would tune in to non-stop 24/7 classic rock!
I used to run a non licensed FM station in Houston over 20 years ago. I used a one watt driver which I hooked to the sound port on my computer and then I hooked the driver to the final box which was about 35 watts. . I had a antenna about 30 feet in the air . I would broadcast various on line radio shows etc. I got good coverage in the Houston area. What's funny about its that sometimes when I was out riding my bike here and there, I would hear someone listening to my radio station , while they were walking in the park etc. Thank goodness Uncle never bothered me even though their office was just a few miles from my house. I think in the early 2000's the FCC busted a bunch of micro stations in the Austin area but many more popped up after that .
So many parallels. At age 12 I got so busted by Uncle Charlie in the early 70's running an old Tempo One (very early tube Yaesu) SSB on 11 meters. (slightly extended band). The same charge and it scared me pretty bad. Remember sweep tubes? They and the driver tubes would have such a glow in the dark. I've had the bug since infancy. Radio has followed me (happily) all my life. A true joy. Antennas to me are an object of great beauty. I am subbed.😀
I ran many unlicensed am and FM stations over the years from the 1950s up to about year 2000. I stopped partly because of a loss of interest and partly because there were no more available clear channels on the radio due to the 1996 FCC ruling that allowed a lot of drop in class A radio stations. But at the peak of my quote unquote career, I was running 5,000 Watts effective radiated power using a California systems RF amplifier that was on loan to me from a licensed radio station operator who was supportive of my operations. We had signals reaching into three states and some of the best audio on the FM dial. Those were fun years but they were also stressful.
Great story thanks for sharing! This reminds me of a few stories Jean Shepherd told one time on his radio show out of NYC back in the 60's - 70's. When he got his HAM license he found out there were "outlaw" HAM operators in his area when he was a teenager. One actually got not just once , but twice ended up going to jail. Best story he had was one were a couple of guys wanted to get into radio so bad, that they started procuring the proper equipment illegally and actually even had a building to broadcast from. They got got quickly broadcasting one day. Of course they were totally stunned. The FFC couldn't believe all the equipment they had.
Fantastic, makes two of us. Built my own 20W AM transmitter many moons ago. I then learnt how to build FM transmitters (once I got the pre-emphasis, PLL properly locked and stereo MUX working). The FM transmitter was running about 10 watts. Used RF power transistors from a two way radio I bought for a few bucks. They were fun days, I still remember the Gerard turntables I used and an old Philips mic, which sounded great. For antennas, on AM I used a shortened vertical whip which was base loaded and a pretty good earth system. For FM, just used a 4 way power divider feed into four dipoles. That pretty much got me a 360 degree radiation pattern. On AM got about 50 miles while FM was around 10 or so miles. Thanks for reminding me of those carefree teenage years. BTW for FM, you can actually use Class C amps (no linear amps required) as long as you properly filter the output before feeding into the antenna.
Power is important but matching is critical. The better your match between TX and antenna, the more power will actually go out and increase range. Of course an efficient antenna is equally as important. You could transmit into a dummy load and have a perfect 1:1 match but that wouldn't get you very far. 😅
My how times have changed. I cover basically three or four residential blocks but it's all MPX, RDS and HD1 done in SDR inside the same Linux PC that plays the music processes the audio and other crap that I do. If they do show up because I pissed off a neighbor or something I just hand them my HackRF1, about the size of a pack of smokes. There is literally nothing else to it but for a couple blocks whatever, as long as I don't start looping George Carlin's list of words.
Before I retired, I worked for a local government agency. One day, after just finishing my lunchbreak, I was driving back toward my shop. (I worked in 2-way radio communications). I tuned in the vehicle's FM radio to catch some tunes on the way back. I caught a station, playing some decent music. I quickly realized that it was not licensed. Pretty strong signal. Being experienced with direction finding, I found the transmitter without much time or effort. As I passed the house, the signal left the air. I guess the sight of a white van with a yellow government tag and "Communications" printed on the side of it, didn't set well with the broadcaster. I never heard the station again.
It would have been nice if the FCC had allowed for something like 85-88 MHz (either edge of the FM or AM bands) to be for public use, with power restrictions, id requirements, etc, so folks could have neighborhood chatrooms without needing a special radio.
Great story! I am a ham radio operator, and one thing is clear when it comes to the FCC- they only care about the money. There's been a few amateur frequencies where the rules have been being broken daily for decades- music, illegal power, intentional jamming- you name it. The FCC does NOTHING about this, and I can only assume it's because once you pay a small fee for your license, use of those airwaves is free. Now, in the commercial spectrum- broadcast radio, television, business bands, etc., The FCC makes A LOT of money off of the leases of those frequencies. If you go clowning around in the frequencies that butter the FCC's bread, they'll throw down the hammer, and they're not much interested in easily letting a small hobbyist play- even if there are huge gaps between stations. but enforcing their own rules on the amateur bands? Nah, they can't be bothered with that.
I think I have to agree. 7200 kHz is just one of many frequencies that is full of bullshit transmissions. Listen to WebSDR and I have heard people actually using foul language like they don’t care. It sometimes sounds like the 27 MHz children band and I sometimes get a good laugh out of it too.
I agree about the buttered bread, along with the insane corporate lobbying of congress by the broadcast industry that result in massive campaign contributions..
I have been in both Commercial and private broadcast and two way land mobile radio since the 80s. In those days, the FCC "Charlie" as it was referred to, would hit an area in their mobile lab and monitor operations off the air. If you weren't doing what you were supposed to do, you would get a notice in the mail of the violation. They would show your station frequency as licensed, and then what they measured down to 6 places to the right of the decimal. As well as transcribed conversations at the timestamp. This happened routinely. I haven't seen or heard of any FCC field work in over 30 years. All about the money
While in the U S Navy stationed in Sicily, my roommate, an AE, Aviation Eltronics Mate, and I ordered up a Radio Shack FM transmitter. He boosted the output to 15 watts. We lived off base in a three story apartment. We rigged an antenna above the third floor patio. We linked our two reel to reel machines to t h e transmitter and we're able to broadcast 6 hours of music. We made little sounders between full length albums to simulated live broadcasting. We then would turn it on and then drive around in our Fiat 500 listen to our pirate radio station. We would broadcast on Saturday and Sunday. In listen to the local teen population, they knew of the venture and tuned into our programing. It was a bit strange to hear our channel on radios in the little shops in the town. We never got caught in the 6 months or so we operated KLSD FM.
I was a Radio and electronics hobbyist as an adolescent in the 60s. I started with crystal radio receivers and eventually built an FM stereo transmitter from a radio Shack kit. I exceeded recommended antenna length and overpowered it with parallel 9v batteries. I could reach several blocks away. I had a rad Shack stereo mixer, turntable, reel to reel deck, headphones and mic. I told kids at school where to tune.
When I got my first full band scanner with all mode I was scanning the TV UHF band and I picked up the mic packs from my nearby TV station. I was Shocked how far those reached Listening to the behind the scenes talk was cool
That's called an Interruptible Fold Back System, has to deal with remote stations in the field being able to hear control channels and know when to start their live segment or when commercials are coming in.
I think I am a tiny bit older but it's not surprising to hear you operated a pirate broadcast station in the 70s. There were quite a few pirate stations across the country. Most that could be picked up ran only in the early morning for only two or three hours. But the 70s were a cool time to be a teenager / young adult. Rock on dude. . . .
Loved your story. Always great to hear and be reminded what a curious youth's mind can accomplish when they've put their energy into something. Never get old, people. 😀
I too put together a pirate radio station. It was 24/7. It was stereo. First was a 5 watt exciter. We had a Beringer compressor, a Radio Shack mixer, phone patch, a Free Radio Berkeley exciter, a homemade transmission line bandpass filter, SWR meter,100 feet of Belden 9913 feeding a J-pole antenna made of 1/2" copper tube. BTW you can run Class C on FM with good filtration. We switched to a 35 Watt final amp and a commercial 5/8 wave antenna. The mistake that you made was broadcasting from a house with a ham license attached to it and secondarily inviting the agents in. Our (and I said our because I invited the community in) policy was to ask for a warrant. The transmitter was in an activist flop house. One day, two suits were at the door. One suit said that they were from the FCC and they wanted to inspect the transmitter. The 12 year girl that answered the door said "Ya got a warrant?" The one suit said "No mam". So she replied "Hit the road. ". Years later they came back with a warrant. The person who was on the air announced the raid. Members of the community came down and darned if all of the air leaked out of their tires. They took all of our equipment and a month later FRSC went on the internet and a different group of people (the same people) brought another transmitter back up with a headless computer, a sound card and an internet connection in a different location. I had three shows. A political call in called Connect the Dots with a theme song TVII by Ministry. A call in talk show called alt.talk. The theme was things like paganism, S&M, Cosplay, gaming and stuff. I had a third show called Cold Dark Matter that was an Industrial/Gothic music show. I had Netwerk, Wax Trax et. al. sending me free CDs. We had (I guess they still have) 2 turntables, 2 cassette players, a phone patch, a couple of SM78s, an SM7 and 2 CD players in the studio. The FCC couldn't touch that stuff and they never came back to the transmitter site either.
Hey Barry I was busted by the feds too back in 1975 as a teenager in Tucson, Az. but I was running illegal on the CB radio. I got visited by 2 FCC agents at my house. I was 18 and got fined by the FCC for various offenses. I learned also but quite an experience for me too! I became an electronics technician a little later in life myself. 73 Barry and stay out of trouble!
Thank you for that story, Mr. Watson. I dont even know why this popped up in my RUclips suggestions, but I am pleased. I would love to hear more of your antics.
I own a part 15 C Crane FM transmitter in my room and I operate CJW Radio 95.7 FM. I play song requests on late Sunday night early Monday morning from 2am to 3am and I play mostly Smooth Jazz on iheart radio on the station. I go off the air Friday evening on weekends and go back on the air Sunday night, and I also play some lander lady bearcat basketball games on there as well as the DL Hughley Show, DeDe in the Morning and Love and R B with Ralph Tresvant at night.
Your story brought back a lot of memories from the 60's for me.. I did exactly the same as you, on the AM band with a bit more power than your transmitter (around the 100 watt region), fed into a tuned long wire, end fed antenna between two buildings, hardly visible from the street below. This was not in the U.S., in fact I was in a southern European country. I broadcasted regularly for over 4 years, between 9.00 pm and midnight without been detected by the authorities. I was a bit smarter though, not giving my phone number on the air for requests. Instead, the number of a friend of mine was given (with his approval of course), some 5 miles away from the transmitter site. He was taking the requests and then phone me and pass them on. He was raided by the police who searched in vain to find the "illegal equipment" without any success. What made triangulation difficult for them was the fact that, I lived in a very densely populated area full of tall buildings with many floors of apartments. This ended when I decided to go abroad and, by then, there was already a few private but licensed FM stations which was a new thing at the time. Yet, I had a lot of fun broadcasting and, to my surprise, I had reports of people receiving my broadcasts well over 100 miles away. That of course was the night propagation that increased the signal traveling much further. Thanks for sharing your childhood adventures with us. BTW, in my case, I was around 17 y.o. when I did this so, I should have known better! Best regards from Australia.
Now THAT was a good story. I'm not much younger but as a kid in the 80's I hung around similar people as my mother was a licensed HAM operator and went to the local meetings, etc. I'm I.T. guy by trade but never ventured into HAM, GMRS, etc. or any other kind of radio transmitting. But i'm starting to become interested in it. Don't worry i'm not going to be standing up any kind of pirate broadcasting, either radio or IP based, lol. But yeah I very much enjoyed you telling this story from your teenage years, Barry!
Great story bro….. I had uncle Charlie pay me a visit also back in the early 80s….. I was running 800 watts on my CB radio…… They came in my room and checked out my equipment….. luckily got off without a fine or jail time….. but I ended up being the local CB hero in the neighborhood….. I left out some details to keep it short….. Now I’m a licensed Ham ……… Life is crazy……☮️
I once got an fm signal to go out about 15 miles in every direction. I only tried it once. I still own an old Unikit UX100 transmitter with a whip antenna and do part 15 yardcasting. I am very much into the audio processing aspect of transmission. I run the audio through a Behringer Ultra-Dyne Pro 9023 and an Alto CLE 2.0 compressor/limiter/gate. Medium settings on Behringer and aggressive settings on Alto. Sounds really good with emphasis on de-essing and a smooth rich sound.
Once upon a time, i had a friend, let's call him Mike. I changed his name to protect the innocent. I bought a Knight Kit broadcast transmitter. Am -ancient modulation, it probably makes one watt. Mike got the bright idea to connect it to the ground wire for the phone company. His reason why was the telephone wire ran in front of all the houses. Not only did it couple in the phone line of everyone on the party line, but everyone who had a telephone. We got requests from 3 miles away. The final requests was from the telephone company, disconnect the transmitter or we will disconnect your parents phone. That was the most covert unlicensed transmitter ever because there was no antenna. I had two turntables, two reel to reel, two cassette decks, and a Soundsign microphone that came with one of the tape decks. I would record the audio and play it back when I was not home. It was live, but hard to prove that it was me because I was outside listening with my friends when it played. Late at night i would record, my parents were concerned that I was taking to myself. And that was the best way to run a illegal radio station.
Great story, thanks! I played around also starting in the late 70's, first with 100mW AM from plans in some electronic projects book.. then a tube transmitter of my own hacked together design, parts harvested from old tube audio gear that everyone was throwing away at the time. Also had the reel to reel, turntables pulled from the trash at Garrard/Dual distributor which was in a nearby industrial park.. built my own console with a simple optical compressor with a lamp and CDS cell. I doubt I ever topped 20W and my antenna wasn't too great but it worked :) What you did was a lot cooler, I wanted all that but my attempts to build a really good FM transmitter didn't go so well. But.. because of all this, what I did do was study up for my 1st Phone with the Broadcast Endorsement, which I eventually passed.. to the amusement and amazement of the staff at the FCC office, definitely the youngest person they had coming in there for the exam. Some years later that license came in handy, I worked repairing paging transmitters for a couple of years, which required minimum 2nd Class. Oh, you mentioned the 6 watt LPB transmitter, I first learned on similar but slightly bigger 20W LPB which was coupled into the power lines at summer camp. In my college they had a carrier current setup which used your 6W LPB model, one for each building on campus. That was pretty nice equipment for the time...
I was quite a precocious young brat myself, back in the 90's, so this rings true for me! I didn't engage in this particular shenanigan myself - mostly for lack of access to the equipment - but I do remember thinking about it and wanting to run a pirate radio station. BTW, your dad sounds so much cooler than mine! Mine regularly admonished me for my "don't get caught" philosophy.
Junior High, Glendale California, 1971. My friend bought a radio shack fm transmitter kit and had an exciter. We chopped up a CB ground plain to tune it and we were on the air. We covered pretty well, a few good miles. Never busted.
I worked for a small college in the '80s with its own perfectly legal 10 watt AM station on 1400Khz .. the town had a population of about 4000, and it covered the town more or less. I lived on the edge of town , and could get the station clearly. It used to be sort of a technical challenge to find pirate stations, and to record them as proof you heard it...some advertised! In the '70s and '80s, you would occasionally see small flyers in used bookstores or any place with a corkboard ( like laundromats or small diners).. frequency and type of music were given, but not times. Punk was really common at the time ( early '80s). I never managed to hear a pirate station , though some coworkers did and recorded it. To me, it sounded fairly professional...at least that particular one.
@@Barry-Watson I (like u) wanted to play music..... never concidered the trouble..... but in the uk.....it was the DTI (department of trade and industry) but the siyuation equates to the same..... but i still have not lost the bug!!! ooooppppppssss.... thank you for the reply...i truly appriciate it!....
I was a Dxer back in the 80s and 90s scanning the shortwave frequencies for all the pirate stations. I still have cards from plenty of far off stations.
If you would have worked there in the 70's and 80's it would have been a better experience , cell phones took off in Radio Shack and that's what killed their business IMO ...
We used to have a legit high power station called KOME. They called it the **m spot on your radio dial. Then one day somebody thought they would change it up just a wee bit and said "Don't touch that dial! It might have **m on it." He found the fine line, crossed it and got walked.
I also ran a pirate radio station(s). Much like you, I started with a part 95 AM station and I was hooked! An older gentleman who was a ham, gave us a 3 watt AM transmitter. I was in heaven! I was in Jr HS and I was not very technical at the time. I had a similar horizontal wire (about 250') and, interestingly, we played very similar genre music as you, but add Sabbath, Iron Butterfly and a few others. In my senior year of high school, we acquired a 50 watt, FM stereo transmitter. We made a 1/2 wave ground plane antenna and my friend, Steve climbed a big old oak tree and
Love your story! I had always wanted to do the same, probably just as well I didn’t! Listened to a “legit” station in the SF Bay Area circa ‘75-84. KFAT 94.5 “Between the Cheeks of your Radio Dial.”They were caught running through Coit tower illegally and running phone lines without paying among other things… and they played pretty much anything they wanted, Country, Cajun, Tex-Mex, Hawaiian Cowboy, Bluegrass, some rock and blues, and comedy…some of which they made up themselves. You certainly couldn’t get away with that nowadays! Good job, brother!
I ran an fm pirate station back in the 90s in Corpus Christi on the Southside. Put out flyers in clubs and music stores. My efforts were to play 80's hair metal and to expand what Corpus didn't have, and San Antonio did (99.5 kiss). 2 watt amp and a j-pole antenna, Ramsey transmitter kit, rat shack mixer, the works on 100.5. Fun times back in the day. 🎸
Great story - thanks for taking the time to tell it! My only related memory would be in high school around 2005ish I made a very simple crystal AM radio receiver for a project, but on the day of presenting it didn't work because of (unbeknowsnt to me at the time) a broken wire. It had worked great and was a pretty cool novelty of the past for some of my closer friends that had heard it outside of school. It was such a let down and I got like a low B, still remember it very well. What is worse is later in the day I discovered the issue, but it was too late. Going to explore some of your other videos!
I have the documentation for some old LPB transmitters. The way that these were typically used on college campuses was a technology called "carrier current." Instead of using an antenna, the transmitter's RF output was sent to a coupler circuit that injected the AM signal into the electrical wiring--typically that of the dormitory buildings. With these setups, the signal did not radiate very far outside of the buildings.
I was 10 years old in 1972 and were were smelt fishing up on the Baptism River on the Minnesota side of Lake Superior and it was like the 24th of April and while all the adults were pounding beers around the campfire, I was in our old '66 Buick Wildcat and was creeping (small moves, Ellie!) on the radio dial (of course AM), and I picked up KAAY (Beaker Street with Cylde Clifford) from Little Rock, AR clear the heck up in northern MN along the shore of Lake Superior! We lived in Des Moines, IA and when we got home, I was bummed I couldn't hear my new favorite station, so I strung a single strand copper wire from the longest peaks of our roof and ran a wire into my bedroom window and started my scan and sure enough! I found KAAY again! It was coming in great! Never got into transmitting on any radios until *CONVOY* (movie) and of course Smokey and The Bandit, lol - it was then I got into CB and when I was 20, got my first SSB radio with a Palomar 1KW linear amp and I had a 40' free standing Rohn Tower with an 18' pipe on top with a HyGain CLR-2 antenna and then a buddy showed me how to tweek my SSB radio from 11 meter to also being able to go well below channel 1 and way up in the 10 meter band (28.000mHz). I would DX "skip" and easily be talking to stations in AZ, CA, then later in the evening, Hawaii and around midnight, I was 'blowing the doors off' a radio in Auckland, NZ!!!! Fun times indeed!
I happen to have, just chilling, the backup transmitter from an old local AM station that is now defunct. Its an OLD General Electric complety tube based transmitter. I have all 3 parts of it. Power supply, exciter, and amplifier. The data tag says it runs a whole whopping 100 watts. Each cabinet is about the size of a 2 drawer filing cabinet, but all three combined weigh just over 500 pounds. I am debating in trying to apply for an experimental license, or build a big liquid cooled dummy load in a 55-gallon drum. For right now, it is being used as a work bench with two pieces of ½" sheetrock across the top.
Give it a thorough check up. Make sure there are no paper caps that can electrically leak and destroy a tube, or blow up. For 100w you don't need a huge dummy load. An 110v 100w light bulb will work well enough as a dummy load, if the transmitter has a tuner associated with it. The about 100 ohm is probably within the range of a tuner. You could maybe use just the exciter (if it's not too powerful) for a Part 15 license free LPAM station as a start. Perhaps use an attenuator to get to the required 300mW. If you're doing it for the love of tech and not necessarily music, you can see if you can re-tune the stuff for the 475kHz (cw and digimodes) or 1800kHz (all modes) amateur bands.
I enjoyed your story, I did same too but didn't get busted. I started broadcasting on fm by using those toy walkie talkies and intended those just for audio extension so that i could listen my tunes on the outside. Those toys i got is not on pairs so i have tune and tweak those coils to get it matched. It works and has a crappy audio until my neighbors told me that my music is on fm at 100 and they liked it. So i made some improvement on the audio by taming the audio using resistors. Later that i modified a wireless microphone and use it as my transmitter and the audio quality improves also been trying to get the coverage farther by using the final output on old vhf transceiver but those needs atleas half a watt to work. Then i use the cable coax booster to boost its power and use the amplifier. Things getting warm so probably working, grab my walkman and my bicycle and found out it reaches really far. I immediately get home and turn it off.. I still have that kit somewhere on the box, might fire it up someday.
Yo, this is a really cool story bro and, just the element that you simply a, young, intelligent, innovative and exploratory kid, at the time is entertaining and im waiting to here they recognized your potential, and hired you!
I worked at an FM Rock Radio station in the 80's. Several times I noticed the FCC monitoring vehicle in the area. They stopped once as we were slightly out of phase. We got a notice but no fine. Engineers cleaned it up the next few days.
Great story! I built a stereo FM transmitter when I was about 8 or 9 years old and had a lot of fun running a local unlicensed station. Mine was considerably less than a watt and I remember doing all I could to optimize my antenna situation to get the most coverage I could, and I think it went at most a mile. Luckily nobody listened or cared. But man, that FCC field agent should have handed you his card and offered you a job!!
@@Barry-Watson FCC Field Agents don't laugh, they write people up and that makes them feel good, then they laugh about the fool that was broadcasting without a license. You should write your legislators to open up Channel 5 and 6 (76 to 88 Mhz) for 7-watt community radio stations owned by citizens.
In the late 80's I was working for one of the major FM's in town, I managed to get their old 30w exciter when they upgraded (and a bunch of other equipment.) I had a nice setup at home, but didn't broadcast a lot. I didn't want to get busted for running an illegal station while working at a legal station, not worth a third degree felony and prison. Most pirate radio stations now days are online, (or so i have heard.) 🤫
Wow really great story. You are a great story teller. Very relaxed and engaging narrative. My friends and I built an FM transmitter on a small chassis but I don't remember every trying to put it on the air. We were all in high school in the mid seventies and met in the electronics class. I think the fun part was just building it. TYFP!
Today with broadband internet, you can do radio over the internet where there is no FCC broadcast license needed to broadcast over the internet. All you need to do internet radio is a computer and a audio mixer board and of course a broadband internet connection into your place of residence
Many years ago I also broadcast on FM for about 30 minuets while I tried to see how far I could pick up the signal. I played a few tunes including some recordings of my own band (of chorus) But after 30 minuets I said to myself "I cant afford getting caught and I know how easy it is to find the origin of this signal." so I put it away. Ive always been infatuated with the idea of pirate radio stations and the stories of Wolfman Jack from years before my time. Radio in my area is so syndicated and full of commercials that its just painful but I listen to FM anyway. Id love to see a time when radio is more like it was before I was borne. At one time there was a station that played local bands and they were around for about 2 years before getting bought out by a country station and now they play the same crap every day. The rock station has "Mission Metalica" and dont get me wrong, I like Metalica but whats the mission? they are already big enough and we dont need to hear 3 Metalica songs every night at 10. There are bands out there that can use exposure and Metallica is not one of them. Where are the real live DJs? why is it all pre-recorded? Any way. "grumble grumble grumble."
I'm 65 years old and boy do I miss pirate radio. Radio today is so bad I haven't listened to it in over 30 years. Now I have my own collection of music that I run off my own server. Thanks for the video, good stuff!
Fantastic the way you told us your story. Overhere in europe there are still a lot of pirate stations around. Not so on fm because these now are licensed, but around 6200 khz and also at the end of the MW band +/- 1600 to 1770 khz, these are AM stations.
Yes, most pirates are rather small and use AM for the reason of simplicity. However, there have also been larger operations: In 2004, pirates near Twente set up a 12kW FM station (!) with a 100m mast (!) and operated it on 97.0 MHz for 3 days. Thanks to the 8 vertical dipoles, they even achieved an EIRP of ~100 kilowatts. Of course, they didn't even try to remain undetected... :D
If you play terrible music and lots of ads you will never get shut down by the FCC.
nah, you gotta pay them off, and you can do anything in this world.. money rules
What you say is why I have not been a regular AM/FM broadcast listener for over 10 years.
Uhmm was that shots fired? Sounds kinda personal or directed to a particular radio station 😆
I worked at a AM Radio Station that went off at midnight.
Sometimes i would go up around 3am anf just turn it on amd start playing music 🎶.
Never got caught by bosses or anyone else.
I worked part time there on a Sunday night til midnight.
About the last hour of my 6 hour shift, I'd ignore the programming printout and play entire Albums from 11pm to midnight.
Well, after a few weeks i got caught and got fired.
Ended up having a following and some commercial got pulled because i wasn't there .
The Station manager got FIRED, and i was brought back lol.
Money talks and BS walks LOL... And the BS boss ended up walking ha ha
That's RIGHT!
No idea where I am… but when this man says he ran a pirate radio station, I believe him.
its a 1/3 of a marathon because one has to carry 50 records along
I had the same thought 😂 not sure how I ended up here, but very glad I did.
I see what you did there 👀
i was stationed at an air force base in the 1980s and ran a pirate FM station from the barracks for several months. my "exciter"was an old car radio where i used the local oscillator and fed the mono audio in through the AFC diodes. then i modified a cheap FM microphone PCB with a 5 watt output transistor as the output device (i was probably only getting 2 watts out of it) . i ran antenna wire out of my 3rd story window to the top of a nearby tree. it was a thin wire, so it was not visible from the ground. i ran that station for several months from midnight to 3am until my schedule changed and i was moved to a different room on a lower floor of the barracks. quite a few people in that barracks listened to it, but were befuddled that they could only find the signal between midnight and 3am. i only played good music, no speaking, so nobody ever figured out it was me.
I wish i could have met you when i was a young teen. Thats the kind of things i loved to experiment with but didnt know what i was doing. 😂
I once helped out at a local 30 day licensed station as a teenager, one of the guys gave me a little plastic box that contained a PCB, and showed me it could transmit on FM, I took it home, connected a rather large wire to it, popped it out the upstairs bedroom window and up over the roof, I tested the signal out and got easily 5 miles out of it , those were fun times :)
i did as well in the army in germany. we recorded on a vcr tape and it would play for 8 hours
Some survival tips are #1. Never tell anyone or friends...#2. Never keep a regular Schedule. ... #3. Keep it Short
Great tips!
Could see lots of pirate stations popping up if the world goes mad max. It isn't too difficult to build a transmitter, but it is difficult to get propagation and not to step on other stations.Lots if vacancies on the lower end if the FMB.❤
@@christopherleubner6633 Literally the only channel in my area that's not belting out kw is 88.5.
Let's see, the second of 87.9 is 175.8. What am I missing?
Great video, I really enjoyed it. 73!
"Don't get caught" is the best advice anyone can give
"It ain't illegal if you don't get caught." LOL!
Wait tho, but what if I want to get caught so I can brag to all the chicks about how FLY I am because I run a pirated radio station? If that won't get the ladies pants off my plan b is showing them pictures of my huge Dungeons And Dragons dice collection.
@@JaymeSplendid 10/10 for sarcasm and im a Londoner.... however.. i now need to mop my floor because I just pissed myself! haah
I was a an FM pirate running 10W into a well tuned antenna. Got out very well. The FCC came around after a few months of broadcasting 2 times a week. We took requests for music and had the best sound. This was 1973. FCC decided to just let it go. I told them everything was destroyed.
Very nice!
@@Barry-Watson - We ran an unlicenced AM station for 2 weeks at 1KW day and night on two inverted V antennas so we had North South and East West covered. Drove the local stations crazy because we were killing them in rations and using a cell phone as a call in line. Ran old commercials from the 50's. The DJ and owner of the motorhome with the 1KW installed in it is a silent key now. I still have the Tshirt for helping... He gave away lots of prizes from the station and had us passing them out at a local bar he loved in town. It really drew a crowd for them and people still talk about the weekend the booming station was on the air and promoted the town and this favorite bar/eatery. The 11th commandment. THOU SHALT NOT GET CAUGHT. ha ha
@@KlodFather Was the DJ an geriatric punk rocker? This seems an awful lot like Blank Reg from Max Headrom.
My only run-in with the F.C.C. was in 1978. I was an novice amateur radio operator. I got a Notice of Violation for operating CW on a frequency of 7,099.95 kc/s. The low end of the Novice CW band was 7,100 kc/s. PICKY, PICKY, PICKY! I answered the notice with an explanation, never heard anything else about it.
Nice
thats sad because NOBODY listents to terrestrial radio anymore...i havent tuned into a "radio station" in more than 5 yrs . why would anyone want to hear 45 minutes of commercials and chortling for 15 minutes of "music" . At this point the FCC should give licenses away.
Hi Barry, I'm a fellow Minnesotan. As a high school student, I was also on pirate radio in St. Paul a long time ago. the station stated after 3 pm and all day Saturday and Sunday with some fellow friends and young radio enthusiasts.
Our FM station did not get out as far as yours, only about 2-5 miles depending on the terrain. We used a Radio Shack wireless mic (p-Box Kit) and substituted parts for a stronger output. The power source was two 12-volt car batteries in series (24 volts). We also made sure not to interfere with other stations. After broadcasting for a year we discovered other pirate stations that existed in Minneapolis and made friends with them.
The guys at our station and the other pirates had a love of radio and most went on to work for major commercial stations. I eventually did evenings at a 50,000-watt Country FM station in Minneapolis. Others did bigger things, one guy working at our St. Paul station went to work in Dallas and was named the Billboard major-market program director of the year 2-year in a row. Another worked at a Minneapolis 50,000-watt AM station doing overnights, and one became a well-known program director and later operations manager at the major Classic Rock station in Minneapolis. These stories, airchecks, and photos can all be seen and heard at the following website: TwinCitiesRadioAirchecks.com/pirateradiotwincities.html
A number of us went to Brown Institute, a broadcast school in Minneapolis. The Saint Paul owner/operator and site owner worked up near you in Northern MN in at a station in Grand Rapids, MN in 1972 on the air and as the chief engineer.
Fortunately, we did not get a visit from the FCC. Not sure how that happened. We had a request phone number given over the air and took requests., We were on regular hours every week. Doing all the things that can get you a door knock from the FCC. We were underage at the time, not hurting anyone or any station, just having lots of fun.
Thanks, Barry for a great story. Hope you like the website.
Wow, that's fantastic!
Alright, I gotta chime in. I ran a pirate FM for a decade in my hometown. God bless my parents for letting me do it. My dad even built a mast on the roof for my 1/4 ground plane antenna that was fed by a ten watt transmitter. Only stopped because I moved out, never got caught. Signal wasn't too bad even though the heavy foliage ate up the RF quite a bit. I started when I was 16 or so, slowly over time improved the audio and signal, and brought in many of my friends. Towards the end of the station when I was much older and wiser, it was running 24/7 using RadioDJ and StereoTool for processing. The damn thing sounded better than many of the local FMs! Once you experience the thrill of running your own station, you really can never shake it off. Not saying to go out and build your own, but..y'know.
Know exactly what you're saying, I was an indoor grower for 11 years and every single day I laughed at the fact that I was "Gettin' over on da man".
And you know what? It's the only time in my life that things worked they way that they told me they do in America when I was growing up, the better of a job I did the more I prospered, the harder I worked at it the more I made, the smarter I was than others trying the same thing the more I was in demand, instead of like every job I've ever had where I was smarter than everyone around me and solved all the problems but it was always a suck up or someone's relative or friend that got the promotion or raise, I'm an honorably discharged veteran that was on armored vehicles in the Army that were very similar to the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and I couldn't even get a job in my hometown at a defense plant that opened up rebuilding Bradley's because they were too busy hiring friends and family at the place, and the VA or no one else would do a thing about it, that's when I said "OK, you don't wanna play by the same rules you tell me I have to live by, fine, I know what to do", and for 11 years the world was fair with me and it was the 11 happiest years of my life, then they legalized it and put me in the poor house, but hey, I still had those 11 years where I wasn't anybody's stooge for once in my life, and nobody can ever take that away from me.
I ran a pirate radio station for 2 years as a commercial business. Got a 30 mile range with 100 watts and never had an issue with the FCC, but that's because I stayed away from FM. I eventually shut it down after my neighbor got cable installed and I was getting my station on his TV, phone line, and every band on his radio. I'm not an engineer and I couldn't figure out how to make it stop, so that was the day the station died.
lol you could have really done some stuff to mess with that person
That red shirt, looked like a prisoner's jumpsuit... thought at first you were broadcasting from inside the penitentiary. Haha. Great story!
LOL, I thought the same thing!
hahahaaha same thought
I'm sure that was not accidental
I was like daaaaamn, they threw the book at him.
same lol
Great story. Had a friend that set up a pirate FM station in the mid 90s' Was totally automated and ran about 40 watts. He operated that 24/7 for about 25 years and was never caught. Covered the entire town. One day it was off, so I figured he had a knock at the door, but as it turned out a wind storm took down the tree the antenna was in.
Bummer
Needs to grow another antenna tree.
FCC has a long history of intentionally overlooking low-ish power 'pirate' broadcasters. Unless you do something which messes with another station's transmission or gets people to complain, it isn't worth their time and is even seen by a few folks as a good thing (especially in case of emergencies).
We really should fix the laws to encourage more local non-profit radio.
@@travcollier But PBS/NPR doesn't want that and previously killed such laws. They want to support big pharma, globalism, communism, etc., and their argument is that an organized non-profit, cookie-cutter approach is the best. I disagree as people are different, and have different needs, values, and cultures.
Good. The air waves belong to the people!!! Take back the air
I knew a guy who broadcasted a Pirate station in Philadelphia on the weekends. He said after a few months he received a letter from the FCC stating what he was doing was illegal and prompting him to take advantage of the Public Broadcasting stations in his area that were available to him. This went on for a few more months when one weekend he decided to mention a local Pizza Place that told him they’d hook him up with some free food in exchange for mentioning them on the air. That next Monday Feds raided his house and confiscated all of his broadcasting equipment. The Feds told him they would probably have never made physical contact with him if he didn’t advertise that Pizza place, as soon as he benefited monetarily the game was over.
It is a lot deeper than this but the FCC was established to keep pirate stations from stealing the revue of the licenced stations. Someone would pay writers and performers to do show so they could make their money back selling commercials. Then some "smart" people would just set up on the same frequency and sell their own commercials in an area, pirating the show. The point, even today is to keep stations on the same frequency from interfering with each other. To enforce the whole system, you are not allowed to charge money while using the public airways without doing what everyone else has to do. There are a lot of non-monetary rules a legit station has to follow to keep from interfering with everyone else's use. That is why you need a licenced engineer. (Not that hard to get your cert guys and you no longer need code).
Never ran a pirate radio, but we built a giant Tesla Coil , by giant it was about 25 feet and powered by arc welders driving two pole pigs. It lobbed sparks from the top that were 50 feet long. We played with old 8 foot floresent tubrs running the thing while we were having a pretty lively house party. Anyway a few hours in, we had cops and the FCC show up. Turns out it was jamming most of the AM band as well as nany FM bands. They told us to cease and desist, dismantle the tesla coil, and a few people got ticketed. 😂
Oh wow, that sounds amazing. I've always wanted to build a Tesla coil, but never got to it. Stay dangerous. ;)
How did they find you?
You broke the 11th commandment. THOU SHALT NOT GET CAUGHT. ha ha ha
😂😂 W
@@KlodFather Nah, thats the "#0" commandment. Most important and before all others.
Several decades ago, while I was in college, I worked in the college's FM radio station, 100,000 watts and classical music. In those days the station signed off at midnight and I often worked the sign off shift. I would hit the switch to shut off the transmitter at midnight and then run to my dorm room where I would fire up my own FM radio station. It was a crude oscillator that was FM modulated and I had it tuned to the exact frequency of the college's station. There was a flurry of activity in and out of our dorm room as calls would come in from students in other dorm rooms all around the campus requesting songs to be played so we often had to run around to our neighboring rooms to find the specific albums we needed. We didn't play classical music.
100,000 watts? Are you sure about that!
@@NigelDixon1952 WREK or WRAS, both are 100kW college stations. Are you sure about your naysaying?
How were people able to listen to your FM station broadcasting on Am frequencies? Were they just all close enough that the FM signal could be heard on AM, or did it require special equipment?
@@callhoonrepublicanwhere did they say anything about AM in their comment?
Class c1 @@NigelDixon1952
Have you guys heard of FM pirate radio stations on boats broadcasting 12 miles from Los Angeles in the Pacific Ocean ? International waters, no FCC enforcement.
How do I listen to
Omg listen to the song Mexican Radio by Wall of Voodoo. Border blasters or whatever they were called were a real thing!
I think that was a movie called pirate radio with Phillip Seymour Hoffman
@@calumevo88 There was another one with Christian Slater as well, it was called "Pump up the Volume."
Barry if you are interested, in the UK their was a pirate radio station called Rinse FM that went legit. They set up and broadcasted on an antenna erected on a tall high rise and then connected to the antenna via wi-fi. Enforcement could find the antenna but not the location where the wi-fi was coming from with 1,000s of wi-fi enabled apartments nearby.
You had me with Rush dude!🤩Attention all listeners of this neighborhood radio station, we have assumed control, we have assumed control, we have assumed control.
Haha, most definitely! 2112 was an epic album.
And then. I'm on a train to Bangcock
Great story. I never bothered with AM. Just FM. I tweaked a RadioShack Wireless mic and got out about two miles.
I was running a 40 watts FM stereo transmitter in 2003. I'm pretty sure my ex friend ratted me out to the FCC. They drove 100 miles to my house. They complemented me on how good it sounded then told me to turn it off. They made me sign a paper, and they left. Never heard from them again.
A few months later I was back on the air at 40 watts, and never had another visit.
A few years ago my wife suggested I put on a low power FM transmitter for our park. I decided to bring out the old the 40 RF Amp. We are a bit high in elevation. The station got out 20 miles west. That was fun! So I scaled it back to almost nothing.
One day I get a visit from the local radio engineers. They came right up to the door of my house. They didn't even see the antenna. The only way they could have done that was that someone tipped them off, and gave them my address. Only one person had that address, and that was my ex friend.
Never never tell anyone what you're doing. Especially a friend who you might piss off sometime.
you know people in the hobby like to do foxs hunts (looking for illegal stations) I doubt your friend remembered
@@Dudleyism1
Wow, that's a shame...
What @Dudleyism1 said. It's actually VERY easy to locate the source of a signal, even a very weak one. At 40w, a constant broadcast would take almost no time at all to locate. All this coming from one of many amateurs with the ability to do this. The FCC is way more proficient, they have vehicles designed specifically for this purpose. We use Yagi antennas and generally take several hours or a whole day. I think they use field strength measurements and will only take an hour or less. You should feel lucky, honestly. They sometimes make examples of people and slam them with a six digit fine, though those folks mostly are interfering with others. Anyway, your ex is probably off the hook for this one.
its really easy to locate a radio. All you need is a spectrum analyzer and a directional antenna a map and a pencil. take a reading from two different locations and draw a line on the map the direction your antenna is pointing. that. will get you really close. Then you just need to take a ride with a handheld. There is also radio equipment that uses 4 antennas on a van that's basically the electronic version of that technique, but the old methods still work really well. Going mobile is the best way. Remember if the person coming to your door doesn't work for a federal agency, the water hose is a great solution for getting unwanted guests to leave.
That person was a fair weather friend, probably a narcissist.
😀 I’m a licensed ham geek and well, overall electronics geek. Always pursuing the knowledge for that next project, so I really appreciated this video. Thank you for sharing!
Great to hear!
Fascinating story. I played around with a low powered kit FM transmitter at age 13 with my cousin. We mucked about transmitting mock Pythonesque audio interviews, news reports, radio ads and some music. I doubt more than few people heard our nonsense, but it was fun. Enjoyed the video, thanks.
I'm a retired CATV tech. Back in the mid 90's when I lived in a trailer park, I back fed my cable line and tap with about 60 Db of a xxx ( American Exxxtasy) channel from my big dish. I remember calling my friend next door and asking him to tune to such and such channel. His response was "WTF" LOL. The signal would have covered about half of the trailer park in the FWD direction of the line amps. I only ran it for a few minutes just so I could see if it would work.
Enjoyed the video as it's something fresh for once, and also something of the US and not of the UK, etc.. I've ran a periotic station for 30 years. Never once been bothered by the feds. I worked in commercial radio too as on air dj and technical engineering as needed. I would work my jobs then come home and fire up my own operation. Today I no longer work in the commercial field but I still have my pirate operation. I don't put it on antenna very often these days, mainly because times have changed and is difficult to really get any following via terrestrial broadcasting. Also my older age has played a factor. Not that I don't enjoy working with the stuff. FCC enforcement so I have discovered, clearly depends where you are, and the operation. I have talked to the enforcement bureau and actually had a very polite one on one conversation with a fellow at the FCC. They knew of my operations but told me they didn't care about it because of my location. At the time, I was a 500W too. The agent told me they were concerned about operations in large markets and those selling ads. Also that they didn't have the time and money to go after even legit commercial stations that aren't following the rules. Today, being an over the air pirate really isn't worth the time, effort, money and even risks as most people don't even have radios to listen to such broadcast, sadly. From what it is today, the only ones that play with it logically are like myself that are more interested in the actual radio aspect, not so much being a radio DJ. In a way, the old song does hold true, video killed the radio star but with cell phones and spotify. Maybe at some point like records and tapes, it will make a comback.
A fascinating tale and well narrated. Some parallels in my life too, I built an FM transmitter when I was at school, my radio amateur father just let me get on with this stuff. The transmitter was very low powered and i knew nothing about aerials/antennas. No idea if I had any audience at all, used a reel to reel tape recorder as an audio source, took a portable radio out to see how far away it could be heard. Later on a friend and I built a 3 element cubical quad antenna for it using scrap aluminium from window extrusions. Was never caught, probably due to low power and very little air time. About a decade later I was working for the UK equivalent of the FCC. I went on to spend about 40 years in legitimate radio.
Thanks for sharing. I started my LPFM station in NZ in 2006 after working in commercial radio. Still running today and turning 18 years old on July 1st
I ran a 150W FM pirate station when I was a youth. Best fun I've ever had. Right now I'm learning to build RF transmitters. Never got busted here in the UK.
300watt double stack all over London on 87.5 big up uks finest and uk raw radio
Dude, this is a great story. So earlier in my life i lived in a crappy apartment at a certain beach town somewhere... While I was there a guy in the apartment next to me that was a very well educated guy who used to be a criminal defense attorney that had been disbarred for doing drugs and some other stuff... But anyway, he and I hung out a bunch and mostly just goofed off and laughed at tourists trying to get at quarters we had glued to the sidewalk while we knocked back cold ones on the weekends. We would go to local bars where you could only play music with those stupid 0.75c per song juke boxes that always seemed to be run by shady ppl. But some bars would put on the radio when it was early for the locals. Anyway, one day my neighbor, lets call him, "Jared" asked me, "Dude I want to start a pirate radio station and play great music with no ads for the local bars". So eventually he got a transmitter and set it up in his place because "Jared" always said that he would use his extensive legal background to throw anyone off. Someone... used a network analyzer to tune up an antenna that was put on the roof. Also an empty FM band was chosen to not conflict with anyone. The FCC never showed up and that thing played ad-free music for several summers until some lightning hit the antenna during a storm and killed it. But for a while, locals would go to bars for 10 or so miles around and they would tune in to non-stop 24/7 classic rock!
Barry this is amazing. Not going to lie enjoyed every moment of this
Fantastic, glad you enjoyed it.
You won my thumbs up and sub after saying your type music you were playing was rush. 🤘🤘🤘🤘
I used to run a non licensed FM station in Houston over 20 years ago. I used a one watt driver which I hooked to the sound port on my computer and then I hooked the driver to the final box which was about 35 watts. . I had a antenna about 30 feet in the air . I would broadcast various on line radio shows etc. I got good coverage in the Houston area. What's funny about its that sometimes when I was out riding my bike here and there, I would hear someone listening to my radio station , while they were walking in the park etc. Thank goodness Uncle never bothered me even though their office was just a few miles from my house. I think in the early 2000's the FCC busted a bunch of micro stations in the Austin area but many more popped up after that .
We need more pirate stations like yours everywhere now broadcasting conservative radio to balance out the liberal media's lies and propaganda.
So many parallels. At age 12 I got so busted by Uncle Charlie in the early 70's running an old Tempo One (very early tube Yaesu) SSB on 11 meters. (slightly extended band). The same charge and it scared me pretty bad. Remember sweep tubes? They and the driver tubes would have such a glow in the dark. I've had the bug since infancy. Radio has followed me (happily) all my life. A true joy. Antennas to me are an object of great beauty. I am subbed.😀
I ran many unlicensed am and FM stations over the years from the 1950s up to about year 2000. I stopped partly because of a loss of interest and partly because there were no more available clear channels on the radio due to the 1996 FCC ruling that allowed a lot of drop in class A radio stations. But at the peak of my quote unquote career, I was running 5,000 Watts effective radiated power using a California systems RF amplifier that was on loan to me from a licensed radio station operator who was supportive of my operations. We had signals reaching into three states and some of the best audio on the FM dial. Those were fun years but they were also stressful.
5 KW ERP - I am impressed! Best I ever ran was abut 450 watts.
Great story thanks for sharing! This reminds me of a few stories Jean Shepherd told one time on his radio show out of NYC back in the 60's - 70's. When he got his HAM license he found out there were "outlaw" HAM operators in his area when he was a teenager. One actually got not just once , but twice ended up going to jail. Best story he had was one were a couple of guys wanted to get into radio so bad, that they started procuring the proper equipment illegally and actually even had a building to broadcast from. They got got quickly broadcasting one day. Of course they were totally stunned. The FFC couldn't believe all the equipment they had.
You are very relaxing to listen to, I’m happy that this appeared in my recommended. Great story.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Fantastic, makes two of us. Built my own 20W AM transmitter many moons ago. I then learnt how to build FM transmitters (once I got the pre-emphasis, PLL properly locked and stereo MUX working). The FM transmitter was running about 10 watts. Used RF power transistors from a two way radio I bought for a few bucks.
They were fun days, I still remember the Gerard turntables I used and an old Philips mic, which sounded great.
For antennas, on AM I used a shortened vertical whip which was base loaded and a pretty good earth system.
For FM, just used a 4 way power divider feed into four dipoles. That pretty much got me a 360 degree radiation pattern.
On AM got about 50 miles while FM was around 10 or so miles.
Thanks for reminding me of those carefree teenage years.
BTW for FM, you can actually use Class C amps (no linear amps required) as long as you properly filter the output before
feeding into the antenna.
Wow, that sounds like a good time. Looks like you got more coverage than I did, fantastic!
Power is important but matching is critical. The better your match between TX and antenna, the more power will actually go out and increase range. Of course an efficient antenna is equally as important. You could transmit into a dummy load and have a perfect 1:1 match but that wouldn't get you very far. 😅
My how times have changed. I cover basically three or four residential blocks but it's all MPX, RDS and HD1 done in SDR inside the same Linux PC that plays the music processes the audio and other crap that I do. If they do show up because I pissed off a neighbor or something I just hand them my HackRF1, about the size of a pack of smokes. There is literally nothing else to it but for a couple blocks whatever, as long as I don't start looping George Carlin's list of words.
Before I retired, I worked for a local government agency. One day, after just finishing my lunchbreak, I was driving back toward my shop. (I worked in 2-way radio communications). I tuned in the vehicle's FM radio to catch some tunes on the way back. I caught a station, playing some decent music. I quickly realized that it was not licensed. Pretty strong signal. Being experienced with direction finding, I found the transmitter without much time or effort. As I passed the house, the signal left the air. I guess the sight of a white van with a yellow government tag and "Communications" printed on the side of it, didn't set well with the broadcaster. I never heard the station again.
😂😂😂😂😂
Yeah right lol
That was me! I flipped the switch just in time too!
It would have been nice if the FCC had allowed for something like 85-88 MHz (either edge of the FM or AM bands) to be for public use, with power restrictions, id requirements, etc, so folks could have neighborhood chatrooms without needing a special radio.
@@dengyun846 that's just ham, but a neighborhood amateur radio group would be sick as hell
Great story! I am a ham radio operator, and one thing is clear when it comes to the FCC- they only care about the money. There's been a few amateur frequencies where the rules have been being broken daily for decades- music, illegal power, intentional jamming- you name it. The FCC does NOTHING about this, and I can only assume it's because once you pay a small fee for your license, use of those airwaves is free. Now, in the commercial spectrum- broadcast radio, television, business bands, etc., The FCC makes A LOT of money off of the leases of those frequencies. If you go clowning around in the frequencies that butter the FCC's bread, they'll throw down the hammer, and they're not much interested in easily letting a small hobbyist play- even if there are huge gaps between stations. but enforcing their own rules on the amateur bands? Nah, they can't be bothered with that.
In Italy is even worse than that. Eh eh
I think I have to agree. 7200 kHz is just one of many frequencies that is full of bullshit transmissions. Listen to WebSDR and I have heard people actually using foul language like they don’t care. It sometimes sounds like the 27 MHz children band and I sometimes get a good laugh out of it too.
I agree about the buttered bread, along with the insane corporate lobbying of congress by the broadcast industry that result in massive campaign contributions..
I have been in both Commercial and private broadcast and two way land mobile radio since the 80s. In those days, the FCC "Charlie" as it was referred to, would hit an area in their mobile lab and monitor operations off the air. If you weren't doing what you were supposed to do, you would get a notice in the mail of the violation. They would show your station frequency as licensed, and then what they measured down to 6 places to the right of the decimal. As well as transcribed conversations at the timestamp. This happened routinely.
I haven't seen or heard of any FCC field work in over 30 years. All about the money
Commercial radio licenses only cost about a thousand dollars per year for the first 5 years, and then less after that.
While in the U S Navy stationed in Sicily, my roommate, an AE, Aviation Eltronics Mate, and I ordered up a Radio Shack FM transmitter.
He boosted the output to 15 watts. We lived off base in a three story apartment. We rigged an antenna above the third floor patio.
We linked our two reel to reel machines to t h e transmitter and we're able to broadcast 6 hours of music. We made little sounders between full length albums to simulated live broadcasting.
We then would turn it on and then drive around in our Fiat 500 listen to our pirate radio station.
We would broadcast on Saturday and Sunday. In listen to the local teen population, they knew of the venture and tuned into our programing.
It was a bit strange to hear our channel on radios in the little shops in the town.
We never got caught in the 6 months or so we operated KLSD FM.
BTW It reached about 25 miles with a clear signal.
Don't know why the FCC would be interested in pirates. 🏴☠️🏴☠️
I was a Radio and electronics hobbyist as an adolescent in the 60s. I started with crystal radio receivers and eventually built an FM stereo transmitter from a radio Shack kit. I exceeded recommended antenna length and overpowered it with parallel 9v batteries. I could reach several blocks away. I had a rad Shack stereo mixer, turntable, reel to reel deck, headphones and mic. I told kids at school where to tune.
Fantastic story and storytelling as well!
Thank you!
When I got my first full band scanner with all mode I was scanning the TV UHF band and I picked up the mic packs from my nearby TV station.
I was Shocked how far those reached
Listening to the behind the scenes talk was cool
That's called an Interruptible Fold Back System, has to deal with remote stations in the field being able to hear control channels and know when to start their live segment or when commercials are coming in.
YES!! I used to listen to those frequencies as well. Very interesting while watching the news
I think I am a tiny bit older but it's not surprising to hear you operated a pirate broadcast station in the 70s. There were quite a few pirate stations across the country. Most that could be picked up ran only in the early morning for only two or three hours. But the 70s were a cool time to be a teenager / young adult. Rock on dude. . . .
Nice story! The joy of being young and precocious, thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Loved your story. Always great to hear and be reminded what a curious youth's mind can accomplish when they've put their energy into something. Never get old, people. 😀
they just showed 'Rick O'Shea' 🔫 and his pirate radio space capsule last week on 'The Thunderbirds'. KLA was the callsign.
Nice story! Thanks for sharing the memories
Glad you enjoyed it
I too put together a pirate radio station. It was 24/7. It was stereo. First was a 5 watt exciter. We had a Beringer compressor, a Radio Shack mixer, phone patch, a Free Radio Berkeley exciter, a homemade transmission line bandpass filter, SWR meter,100 feet of Belden 9913 feeding a J-pole antenna made of 1/2" copper tube.
BTW you can run Class C on FM with good filtration. We switched to a 35 Watt final amp and a commercial 5/8 wave antenna.
The mistake that you made was broadcasting from a house with a ham license attached to it and secondarily inviting the agents in.
Our (and I said our because I invited the community in) policy was to ask for a warrant.
The transmitter was in an activist flop house. One day, two suits were at the door. One suit said that they were from the FCC and they wanted to inspect the transmitter. The 12 year girl that answered the door said "Ya got a warrant?" The one suit said "No mam". So she replied "Hit the road. ".
Years later they came back with a warrant. The person who was on the air announced the raid. Members of the community came down and darned if all of the air leaked out of their tires.
They took all of our equipment and a month later FRSC went on the internet and a different group of people (the same people) brought another transmitter back up with a headless computer, a sound card and an internet connection in a different location.
I had three shows. A political call in called Connect the Dots with a theme song TVII by Ministry. A call in talk show called alt.talk. The theme was things like paganism, S&M, Cosplay, gaming and stuff. I had a third show called Cold Dark Matter that was an Industrial/Gothic music show.
I had Netwerk, Wax Trax et. al. sending me free CDs.
We had (I guess they still have) 2 turntables, 2 cassette players, a phone patch, a couple of SM78s, an SM7 and 2 CD players in the studio. The FCC couldn't touch that stuff and they never came back to the transmitter site either.
That’s where it’s at! 😮
Hey Barry I was busted by the feds too back in 1975 as a teenager in Tucson, Az. but I was running illegal on the CB radio. I got visited by 2 FCC agents at my house. I was 18 and got fined by the FCC for various offenses. I learned also but quite an experience for me too! I became an electronics technician a little later in life myself. 73 Barry and stay out of trouble!
Thanks! Crazy wild times!
Cool story. I’m happy that they let things slide. Thanks for the good advice. 🎉
Thank you for that story, Mr. Watson. I dont even know why this popped up in my RUclips suggestions, but I am pleased. I would love to hear more of your antics.
Welcome aboard!
Thanks for sharing, love this story!❤
Glad you enjoyed it!
That was a good story, thanks for sharing it here. It was also delightful to hear that you were playing Rush :)
Glad you enjoyed it!
I own a part 15 C Crane FM transmitter in my room and I operate CJW Radio 95.7 FM. I play song requests on late Sunday night early Monday morning from 2am to 3am and I play mostly Smooth Jazz on iheart radio on the station. I go off the air Friday evening on weekends and go back on the air Sunday night, and I also play some lander lady bearcat basketball games on there as well as the DL Hughley Show, DeDe in the Morning and Love and R B with Ralph Tresvant at night.
Your story brought back a lot of memories from the 60's for me..
I did exactly the same as you, on the AM band with a bit more power than your transmitter (around the 100 watt region), fed into a tuned long wire, end fed antenna between two buildings, hardly visible from the street below.
This was not in the U.S., in fact I was in a southern European country.
I broadcasted regularly for over 4 years, between 9.00 pm and midnight without been detected by the authorities.
I was a bit smarter though, not giving my phone number on the air for requests. Instead, the number of a friend of mine was given (with his approval of course), some 5 miles away from the transmitter site. He was taking the requests and then phone me and pass them on.
He was raided by the police who searched in vain to find the "illegal equipment" without any success.
What made triangulation difficult for them was the fact that, I lived in a very densely populated area full of tall buildings with many floors of apartments.
This ended when I decided to go abroad and, by then, there was already a few private but licensed FM stations which was a new thing at the time.
Yet, I had a lot of fun broadcasting and, to my surprise, I had reports of people receiving my broadcasts well over 100 miles away. That of course was the
night propagation that increased the signal traveling much further.
Thanks for sharing your childhood adventures with us. BTW, in my case, I was around 17 y.o. when I did this so, I should have known better!
Best regards from Australia.
Nice, and those are some good ideas!
Now THAT was a good story. I'm not much younger but as a kid in the 80's I hung around similar people as my mother was a licensed HAM operator and went to the local meetings, etc. I'm I.T. guy by trade but never ventured into HAM, GMRS, etc. or any other kind of radio transmitting. But i'm starting to become interested in it. Don't worry i'm not going to be standing up any kind of pirate broadcasting, either radio or IP based, lol. But yeah I very much enjoyed you telling this story from your teenage years, Barry!
Brilliant. All the way around! Thank you for this great story- Rock on- 🎉
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great story bro….. I had uncle Charlie pay me a visit also back in the early 80s….. I was running 800 watts on my CB radio…… They came in my room and checked out my equipment….. luckily got off without a fine or jail time….. but I ended up being the local CB hero in the neighborhood….. I left out some details to keep it short….. Now I’m a licensed Ham ……… Life is crazy……☮️
Oh wow!
I once got an fm signal to go out about 15 miles in every direction. I only tried it once. I still own an old Unikit UX100 transmitter with a whip antenna and do part 15 yardcasting. I am very much into the audio processing aspect of transmission. I run the audio through a Behringer Ultra-Dyne Pro 9023 and an Alto CLE 2.0 compressor/limiter/gate. Medium settings on Behringer and aggressive settings on Alto. Sounds really good with emphasis on de-essing and a smooth rich sound.
Bro, u totally look like someone who would run a pirate radio station
Your story brought back fond memories of some of my childhood. It's an honor to meet you.
Once upon a time, i had a friend, let's call him Mike. I changed his name to protect the innocent.
I bought a Knight Kit broadcast transmitter. Am -ancient modulation, it probably makes one watt.
Mike got the bright idea to connect it to the ground wire for the phone company.
His reason why was the telephone wire ran in front of all the houses.
Not only did it couple in the phone line of everyone on the party line, but everyone who had a telephone.
We got requests from 3 miles away.
The final requests was from the telephone company, disconnect the transmitter or we will disconnect your parents phone.
That was the most covert unlicensed transmitter ever because there was no antenna.
I had two turntables, two reel to reel, two cassette decks, and a Soundsign microphone that came with one of the tape decks.
I would record the audio and play it back when I was not home.
It was live, but hard to prove that it was me because I was outside listening with my friends when it played.
Late at night i would record, my parents were concerned that I was taking to myself.
And that was the best way to run a illegal radio station.
Great story, thanks! I played around also starting in the late 70's, first with 100mW AM from plans in some electronic projects book.. then a tube transmitter of my own hacked together design, parts harvested from old tube audio gear that everyone was throwing away at the time. Also had the reel to reel, turntables pulled from the trash at Garrard/Dual distributor which was in a nearby industrial park.. built my own console with a simple optical compressor with a lamp and CDS cell. I doubt I ever topped 20W and my antenna wasn't too great but it worked :) What you did was a lot cooler, I wanted all that but my attempts to build a really good FM transmitter didn't go so well. But.. because of all this, what I did do was study up for my 1st Phone with the Broadcast Endorsement, which I eventually passed.. to the amusement and amazement of the staff at the FCC office, definitely the youngest person they had coming in there for the exam. Some years later that license came in handy, I worked repairing paging transmitters for a couple of years, which required minimum 2nd Class. Oh, you mentioned the 6 watt LPB transmitter, I first learned on similar but slightly bigger 20W LPB which was coupled into the power lines at summer camp. In my college they had a carrier current setup which used your 6W LPB model, one for each building on campus. That was pretty nice equipment for the time...
I was quite a precocious young brat myself, back in the 90's, so this rings true for me! I didn't engage in this particular shenanigan myself - mostly for lack of access to the equipment - but I do remember thinking about it and wanting to run a pirate radio station. BTW, your dad sounds so much cooler than mine! Mine regularly admonished me for my "don't get caught" philosophy.
Fantastic. Glad you could relate to the story, and that you pursued your passions!
Junior High, Glendale California, 1971. My friend bought a radio shack fm transmitter kit and had an exciter. We chopped up a CB ground plain to tune it and we were on the air. We covered pretty well, a few good miles. Never busted.
I worked for a small college in the '80s with its own perfectly legal 10 watt AM station on 1400Khz .. the town had a population of about 4000, and it covered the town more or less. I lived on the edge of town , and could get the station clearly.
It used to be sort of a technical challenge to find pirate stations, and to record them as proof you heard it...some advertised! In the '70s and '80s, you would occasionally see small flyers in used bookstores or any place with a corkboard ( like laundromats or small diners).. frequency and type of music were given, but not times. Punk was really common at the time ( early '80s).
I never managed to hear a pirate station , though some coworkers did and recorded it. To me, it sounded fairly professional...at least that particular one.
You brought back memories being young along with my brother that has long passed . Thankyou ! WA3FRD
....you...your dad....and grandpa.... are LEGENDS!! ........ great video... i smiled non-stop!
Haha... thank you! Glad you enjoyed the story.
@@Barry-Watson I (like u) wanted to play music..... never concidered the trouble..... but in the uk.....it was the DTI (department of trade and industry) but the siyuation equates to the same..... but i still have not lost the bug!!! ooooppppppssss.... thank you for the reply...i truly appriciate it!....
That was an awesome story. Thanks
I was a Dxer back in the 80s and 90s scanning the shortwave frequencies for all the pirate stations. I still have cards from plenty of far off stations.
Cool story, and you told it wonderfully. Glad you didn't get a fine! Thank you for sharing it!
Thanks for watching!
Some of the best days of my life were spent working for Radio Shack back in 2005. Good times!
If you would have worked there in the 70's and 80's it would have been a better experience , cell phones took off in Radio Shack and that's what killed their business IMO ...
Called mine WTNT ..."The Burnt spot on your Dial" !!....
We used to have a legit high power station called KOME. They called it the **m spot on your radio dial. Then one day somebody thought they would change it up just a wee bit and said "Don't touch that dial! It might have **m on it." He found the fine line, crossed it and got walked.
I also ran a pirate radio station(s). Much like you, I started with a part 95 AM station and I was hooked! An older gentleman who was a ham, gave us a 3 watt AM transmitter. I was in heaven! I was in Jr HS and I was not very technical at the time. I had a similar horizontal wire (about 250') and, interestingly, we played very similar genre music as you, but add Sabbath, Iron Butterfly and a few others.
In my senior year of high school, we acquired a 50 watt, FM stereo transmitter. We made a 1/2 wave ground plane antenna and my friend, Steve climbed a big old oak tree and
Love your story! I had always wanted to do the same, probably just as well I didn’t! Listened to a “legit” station in the SF Bay Area circa ‘75-84. KFAT 94.5 “Between the Cheeks of your Radio Dial.”They were caught running through Coit tower illegally and running phone lines without paying among other things… and they played pretty much anything they wanted, Country, Cajun, Tex-Mex, Hawaiian Cowboy, Bluegrass, some rock and blues, and comedy…some of which they made up themselves. You certainly couldn’t get away with that nowadays! Good job, brother!
I ran an fm pirate station back in the 90s in Corpus Christi on the Southside. Put out flyers in clubs and music stores. My efforts were to play 80's hair metal and to expand what Corpus didn't have, and San Antonio did (99.5 kiss). 2 watt amp and a j-pole antenna, Ramsey transmitter kit, rat shack mixer, the works on 100.5. Fun times back in the day. 🎸
Great story - thanks for taking the time to tell it! My only related memory would be in high school around 2005ish I made a very simple crystal AM radio receiver for a project, but on the day of presenting it didn't work because of (unbeknowsnt to me at the time) a broken wire. It had worked great and was a pretty cool novelty of the past for some of my closer friends that had heard it outside of school. It was such a let down and I got like a low B, still remember it very well. What is worse is later in the day I discovered the issue, but it was too late. Going to explore some of your other videos!
I have the documentation for some old LPB transmitters. The way that these were typically used on college campuses was a technology called "carrier current." Instead of using an antenna, the transmitter's RF output was sent to a coupler circuit that injected the AM signal into the electrical wiring--typically that of the dormitory buildings.
With these setups, the signal did not radiate very far outside of the buildings.
I was 10 years old in 1972 and were were smelt fishing up on the Baptism River on the Minnesota side of Lake Superior and it was like the 24th of April and while all the adults were pounding beers around the campfire, I was in our old '66 Buick Wildcat and was creeping (small moves, Ellie!) on the radio dial (of course AM), and I picked up KAAY (Beaker Street with Cylde Clifford) from Little Rock, AR clear the heck up in northern MN along the shore of Lake Superior! We lived in Des Moines, IA and when we got home, I was bummed I couldn't hear my new favorite station, so I strung a single strand copper wire from the longest peaks of our roof and ran a wire into my bedroom window and started my scan and sure enough! I found KAAY again! It was coming in great! Never got into transmitting on any radios until *CONVOY* (movie) and of course Smokey and The Bandit, lol - it was then I got into CB and when I was 20, got my first SSB radio with a Palomar 1KW linear amp and I had a 40' free standing Rohn Tower with an 18' pipe on top with a
HyGain CLR-2 antenna and then a buddy showed me how to tweek my SSB radio from 11 meter to also being able to go well below channel 1 and way up in the 10 meter band (28.000mHz). I would DX "skip" and easily be talking to stations in AZ, CA, then later in the evening, Hawaii and around midnight, I was 'blowing the doors off' a radio in Auckland, NZ!!!! Fun times indeed!
I happen to have, just chilling, the backup transmitter from an old local AM station that is now defunct. Its an OLD General Electric complety tube based transmitter. I have all 3 parts of it. Power supply, exciter, and amplifier. The data tag says it runs a whole whopping 100 watts. Each cabinet is about the size of a 2 drawer filing cabinet, but all three combined weigh just over 500 pounds. I am debating in trying to apply for an experimental license, or build a big liquid cooled dummy load in a 55-gallon drum. For right now, it is being used as a work bench with two pieces of ½" sheetrock across the top.
Give it a thorough check up. Make sure there are no paper caps that can electrically leak and destroy a tube, or blow up.
For 100w you don't need a huge dummy load. An 110v 100w light bulb will work well enough as a dummy load, if the transmitter has a tuner associated with it. The about 100 ohm is probably within the range of a tuner.
You could maybe use just the exciter (if it's not too powerful) for a Part 15 license free LPAM station as a start. Perhaps use an attenuator to get to the required 300mW.
If you're doing it for the love of tech and not necessarily music, you can see if you can re-tune the stuff for the 475kHz (cw and digimodes) or 1800kHz (all modes) amateur bands.
I enjoyed your story, I did same too but didn't get busted. I started broadcasting on fm by using those toy walkie talkies and intended those just for audio extension so that i could listen my tunes on the outside. Those toys i got is not on pairs so i have tune and tweak those coils to get it matched. It works and has a crappy audio until my neighbors told me that my music is on fm at 100 and they liked it. So i made some improvement on the audio by taming the audio using resistors. Later that i modified a wireless microphone and use it as my transmitter and the audio quality improves also been trying to get the coverage farther by using the final output on old vhf transceiver but those needs atleas half a watt to work. Then i use the cable coax booster to boost its power and use the amplifier. Things getting warm so probably working, grab my walkman and my bicycle and found out it reaches really far. I immediately get home and turn it off.. I still have that kit somewhere on the box, might fire it up someday.
Yo, this is a really cool story bro and, just the element that you simply a, young, intelligent, innovative and exploratory kid, at the time is entertaining and im waiting to here they recognized your potential, and hired you!
Love the story. You're a great storyteller. Thanks for uploading this!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I worked at an FM Rock Radio station in the 80's. Several times I noticed the FCC monitoring vehicle in the area. They stopped once as we were slightly out of phase. We got a notice but no fine. Engineers cleaned it up the next few days.
Great story! I built a stereo FM transmitter when I was about 8 or 9 years old and had a lot of fun running a local unlicensed station. Mine was considerably less than a watt and I remember doing all I could to optimize my antenna situation to get the most coverage I could, and I think it went at most a mile. Luckily nobody listened or cared. But man, that FCC field agent should have handed you his card and offered you a job!!
Haha, I bet those field agents went back to the office and had a good laugh. Glad they didn't throw the book at me!
@@Barry-Watson I bet they secretly like discovering industrious kids like you were.
@@Barry-Watson FCC Field Agents don't laugh, they write people up and that makes them feel good, then they laugh about the fool that was broadcasting without a license. You should write your legislators to open up Channel 5 and 6 (76 to 88 Mhz) for 7-watt community radio stations owned by citizens.
Great video thanks, sounds like you had fun times , awesome music choice too 👍
Great talk. I was in the cb game a while!
Cool story man! Ive always been excited about radio because my grandfather was a ham radio operator.
In the late 80's I was working for one of the major FM's in town, I managed to get their old 30w exciter when they upgraded (and a bunch of other equipment.) I had a nice setup at home, but didn't broadcast a lot. I didn't want to get busted for running an illegal station while working at a legal station, not worth a third degree felony and prison. Most pirate radio stations now days are online, (or so i have heard.) 🤫
A really enjoyable story. You are a master storyteller! Thanks for sharing 👍
Glad you enjoyed it!
Wow really great story. You are a great story teller. Very relaxed and engaging narrative. My friends and I built an FM transmitter on a small chassis but I don't remember every trying to put it on the air. We were all in high school in the mid seventies and met in the electronics class. I think the fun part was just building it. TYFP!
Wow, thank you!
Today with broadband internet, you can do radio over the internet where there is no FCC broadcast license needed to broadcast over the internet. All you need to do internet radio is a computer and a audio mixer board and of course a broadband internet connection into your place of residence
Good point, I think that's a much better option where you have more reach and less likelihood of getting arrested.
Like listening to a story from an old friend. Thanks for sharing that, it was a nice calm listen
Glad you enjoyed it
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Glad you got off easily.
i've always wanted to run a radio station....thanks for the info...very inspiring!
Great story! Thanks for sharing it with us.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Many years ago I also broadcast on FM for about 30 minuets while I tried to see how far I could pick up the signal. I played a few tunes including some recordings of my own band (of chorus) But after 30 minuets I said to myself "I cant afford getting caught and I know how easy it is to find the origin of this signal." so I put it away. Ive always been infatuated with the idea of pirate radio stations and the stories of Wolfman Jack from years before my time. Radio in my area is so syndicated and full of commercials that its just painful but I listen to FM anyway. Id love to see a time when radio is more like it was before I was borne. At one time there was a station that played local bands and they were around for about 2 years before getting bought out by a country station and now they play the same crap every day. The rock station has "Mission Metalica" and dont get me wrong, I like Metalica but whats the mission? they are already big enough and we dont need to hear 3 Metalica songs every night at 10. There are bands out there that can use exposure and Metallica is not one of them. Where are the real live DJs? why is it all pre-recorded? Any way. "grumble grumble grumble."
I'm 65 years old and boy do I miss pirate radio. Radio today is so bad I haven't listened to it in over 30 years. Now I have my own collection of music that I run off my own server. Thanks for the video, good stuff!
Thanks for listening
Fantastic the way you told us your story. Overhere in europe there are still a lot of pirate stations around. Not so on fm because these now are licensed, but around 6200 khz and also at the end of the MW band +/- 1600 to 1770 khz, these are AM stations.
Yes, most pirates are rather small and use AM for the reason of simplicity. However, there have also been larger operations: In 2004, pirates near Twente set up a 12kW FM station (!) with a 100m mast (!) and operated it on 97.0 MHz for 3 days. Thanks to the 8 vertical dipoles, they even achieved an EIRP of ~100 kilowatts. Of course, they didn't even try to remain undetected... :D