@@Bromon655 - My brother ended up on the scammers and telemarketers do not call list. They stopped calling him. He would answer hello. And then tell them, "I'm naked. Are you naked? Its so nice to be naked." CLICK! He did it for years. They stopped calling. He has been dead since 2018 and his son took over his number because the trolls never call it. Years of peace because of the old mans hard work LOL. What a FORKING legend. I never knew he did that shit ha ha ha
why would they? most political figures and government alphabet soups get paid for allowing the things they're trying to prevent. if they ended roboscams and telemarketers, they'd find another way to siphon money from the public. at least (most) of the public is wise enough not to give in.
@@WN_Byers - He was... His forkery is fabled in legend and song ha ha. There are some crazy bastards out there. One guy was on the radio telling everyone that last christmas all he got was a pack of underware and a piece of ass and they were both three sizes too big LOL. What a nutjob LOL That happened on channel 19 CB. And the scary part is that there are people out there more forked up than that... stuff I am not comfortable talking about in the comments section here. Terrible cringy things that you wish you did not know about. Your parents were not lying when they told you there were weird people in the world... But I bet they did not know about some of these specimens. Look up on google "melanotan abuse n3glv" for the guy who turned himself black. Its one hell of a rabbit hole.
4:17 - Just a little context. Johnson wasn't some master spy for Germany, he was a college student with an interest in electronics. If he were alive today he would have been trolling Twitter.
The FCC coming to your house in vans is a real thing. I had a greenhouse powered by 50, 1000 watt digital ballasts for grow lights. Something about them turning on was jamming the local radio station and they called up FCC to complain. One day the FCC was at my place...
Likely your ballasts didn't have proper filters. Maybe just sticking a chicken wire cage (which will act as a faraday cage) around it could reduce the interference caused by those "faulty" ballasts. There's a reason those things are in metal boxes.
@@M3GAprincess It was when they first came out and the FCC guy had me put up some wire like that... I had been running the set up for months, even listened to that radio station, but thought the interference I was hearing was just at my place. So for anyone who doubts them being out there, I can say that they may not be fast, but they will find you.
@@GardenerEarthGuy Yeah it's pretty amazing how things can just randomly cause interference. I'm studying to get my amateur radio license, and to use uncommercial equipment (i.e. modified), you legally need a level 2 license, otherwise it's just easy to accidentally create signal jammers and not realize it. I had a fan on a car lightbulb (LED type headlight) where the fan to cool it down didn't spin at the proper speed, and I was able to identify it as the source of interference on the 600 Khz range (600 AM radio). Luckily it wasn't much interference (nothing like 1000W ballasts would produce). It's super easy to find the source of the interference if you have the right equipment, like the KrakenSDR, which has five antenna, you can drive around and with Google maps figure out pretty much exactly where it's coming from in a few minutes from really far away. So yeah the FCC has no trouble finding where the source it. I hope you made it out ok.
@@M3GAprincess Once they realized I was just a greenhouse grower, who's only background in radio was a C Crane radio, it seemed they thought it was funny. The first time they arrived though, it was intimidating because they had a federal search warrant and wore flak jackets. I would definitely not want to be arrested by the feds! 😆 I wonder how often things like that happen? Someone's headlight that jams a TV station when he takes lunch in his car outside of work, stuff like that... 😆
I bought LED headlights for my car from amazon, I noticed my radio was very poor quality one night, and when I turned off the lights when I got home it stopped. I fixed it wish a steel mesh lined with electrical tape.. funny to think my car might be jamming peoples radios as I drive by them
This is the proof that any medium, which anyone can use to reach out to many others while staying somewhat anonymous, will automatically create trolls.
Lewis, you never cease to amaze. Once again, this is brilliant. My only regret is that you weren't doing this when I was a young lad enamoured with SW radio in the 70s. There were so many 'unsolved' mysteries then. But truth be told, I enjoy our modern mysteries just as much today. And I'm certainly grateful you're doing this work in tracking down all kinds of anamolous transmissions. Back then I wasn't a license radio operator; now I am, but I still delight in these wonderful stories, which seem to change in context of each passing decade. Cheers, mate!
What is amazing is that the FCC in the United States doesn't seem to go after illegal operators any more. The posts and the personel are gone, Illegal operations in licensed spectrum is ignored for the most part. The supposed licensed business band which is supposed to have frequency coordination is like the wild west. Some licences claim huge areas of use with little justification, and others run high power transmitters well outside their actual needs. I honestly think that licensed stations don't bother to report intereference because they dont know they should or that anthing can be done to address the problem. How would you even report it? They claim they are underfunded, but the licensing and fines were supposed to deter misuse and pay for the enforcement.
@@billlumbergh9251 It's because of one party continuously defunding various agencies over and over again, with the intent to gut it. Like how a certain right-leaning party put a former Comcast CEO in-charge of the FCC and a former Fedex (or UPS) Exec in-charge of the USPS who then gutted the mail service. It's funny how the USPS actually used to turn a profit until that certain party keeps gutting it over and over and over again with mindless policies.
@@vxicepickxv First off, what the government spends has no relation to what it collects in tax. If tax doesn't cover it they just borrow - evidence being that in my 45 years on this Earth the Federal Government has never had a surplus (Not even during the Clinton years when there was a supposed surplus - it was an accounting trick) A department's budget is set by a process called 'baseline budgeting' which in simple terms means they take last years budget and assume they must have an increase - and if they ask for a 10% increase but only get a 5% increase they say their budget was cut. It is rare for there to ever be an actual cut to any agencies budget. About the only times a real budget cut has ever occurred that I'm aware of are after an 'emergency' spending binge where the bureaucrats pretend the 'emergency' spending is the baseline from which they should request their next budget. What is lacking is effectiveness and efficiency in the spending. Frankly if you could give someone the power to go through every Federal department who had permission to fire people at will, cancel contracts, and impose new policies (such as making easier to fire people who cannot perform the function for which they are hired) , and basically tell the petty, highly educated but thoroughly mentally un-impressive bureaucrats who are an absolute plague in government employment to get stuffed, you could probably cut the federal workforce by 80%, budgets by 50% and get 200% effectiveness.
@@Look_What_You_DidConsidering how radar was such a new technology, and the fact that the FCC would lag WAY behind military tech... We didn't even have radar set up at Pearl Harbor in 1942.
@@LegendStormcrow We did have radars at that point, the issue was operators were notoriously skeptical of their use and reliability. It was a problem when radar direction/range finders were installed on vessels during the war, there are a few reports of crews deliberately not using their new radar systems until their use in combat managed to change their mind.
The FCC sure liked the Hallicrafters SX-28 back then. I had one for a few years, and I can understand why. For 1930s/1940s technology, it wasn't bad at all and could hold its own even in the 1970s and 1980s.
It can still hold its own now. I have seen a Collins R390-A seriously outperform a currently made state of the art tranceiver. Using the same aerial it blew the new tech rig away in every respect. I am 74 and started swling when I was 6 and now have been a ham for 37 years.
@@AmishSpecialForcesAs much as I loved my SX-28, I would have gladly traded it for a R-309A had a good deal come along. As it was, I also acquired a 75A-4 which served me well on many a DX contact with my HT-32 transmitter. I miss those old boatanchors... 😟
@@silverhammer7779, cannot complain about the 75A-4, I have one myself. I find that I use the R-390-A or my R-725 even more than the 75A-4, mainly for the general coverage.
That sounds like a familiar story of radio interference. Apparently, he did not think he would get caught. From the time he started his antics, to the time of his arrest, I wonder how much time elapsed? Weeks, months?
Loved seeing all those Hallicrafters SX-28's the government was using. I have one, into a good speaker the audio is superb. But alas, the bandswitch is going bad and takes some jiggling around to work. Guess I'm lucky it works at all for a complex 83 year old receiver. 😃 (BTW, I've cleaned the bandswitch and worked on it several times. Like me, it's just wore out 😂).
That guy must have needed a wheelbarrow to carry his balls around, seeing as how he transmitted on FCC and military frequencies. He was just begging to be caught. Makes me wonder if he even knew that radio direction finding is possible.
Only if he bothered to read the periodicals, Wireless World and similar were full of technical articles. WW reported on soviet or republican illegals station in Spain in the early thirties. Germany was also busy expanding its DF resources to combat soviet illegal transmitters in Germany,.
In the late 70s early 80s i was in the Airforce communications service working with HF, satellite, microwave, and tropo links all over the world posting MIJI (Meaconing intrusion jamming Interference ) reports was a common occurrence. Would take tge RDF guys less than 5 minutes to locate the subject to within a few hundred yards anywhere on the earth.
3:58, The teletype there was used for communications between FCC DF field offices. Each office had rhombic antenna that were oriented to the FCC Net Control Station (NCS) and other DF field offices. The rhombics were full wave antenna on one frequency and partial wave on the other frequencies that were used in the communications network. The rhombics were mounted on top of poles that were 65 feet tall. Maximum operating power was 3000 watts (but were set to 2500 watts). The transmitters used were either the type used on U.S. Naval ships or aeronautical transmitters during the time period of this video. The receivers used during inter-station communications may well have been one of those that are also in the picture. 6:45, those poles to the left of the picture may have been part of the rhombic antenna system.
A 1940's troll. I wonder how many "pirates" there were in the 1910's, 20's, 30's, etc. Never really hear or read about that part of radio history in the US, UK, or Europe.I know in the 1910's there were a lot of "basement operators" walking all over each other and the commercial interests that resulted in the 1912 communications act in the USA.
Wow, talk about surveillance, eh? I love the story of pirate radio. Since the German movie "Radio Powerplay" and "Pogo 1104" I wanted to do my own station. The next best thing was my buddie´s VW Beetle with a CB radio- we were driving them nuts and had such fun broadcasting mostly music and stupid comments. Those were the days... Thanks to him having a magnet antenna we could disguise us fairly easy as VW Beetles were still very common around Wolfsburg at the time (1988/89) so we never got cought.
@@arostwocentsironic considering by then beetles were being made in Mexico! Note for those not aware: Wolfsburg is the home of VW and the location of the factory where beetles were produced until 1967
the first OG nailed by the FCC. Then they went after cb'ers..man the fcc was a tough cookie back then. I'd love to know more about the guy in MA since I'm a ham here .
Wow! Great information! I was just on Sheridan Road in Peoria yesterday as we have a friend who lives on a side-street, and we did some shopping on Sheridan. The State of Illinois agency I worked for had an office on that street in the 1990s. I need to look up more information on this case.
Wow! This could almost have been a Mark Felton video, I could actually hear his dramatic theme music at the beginning! 😁 Very good stuff, more similar vids please. 👍
Not mad Mark and his dramatic music always a tell tale of propoganda along with his way of portraying something which happened decades ago as of current importance
Can't restrict communications. If an individual wishes to communicate via any means to another country. So be it. If you want information to remain secrete... then don't make it public in the first place.
Why would they mention it? Or more accurately why would they even be aware it happened?? The odds of meeting someone who was alive and old enough at the time to have remembered is very very slim.
@@cactusjackNVmy city had a huge crocodile with a passive-aggressive personality and every cultured person here knows about it. It was in the nineteenth century and the city has about 480 k people on it... a so called German operator should be enough for people to mention. Wasting time with imbecile celebrities instead of getting acknowledged with our communities history is what is dragging America to stupidity and consequently failure.
I wonder what he thought he was accomplishing when he tried to smash his transmitter? What he going to tell a judge that that thing he was smashing just as agents burst in wasn't what they thought it was?
This would have been even better if you had some more info on Johnson and his motives and what happened to him. The human story not just the radio wave story.
Honestly chances are he was just some joker who thought the feds couldn't catch him. If he was an actual state actor or seriously trying to aid the nazi effort he'd probably try doing more than just talk himself up and piss off the feds. That he threatened them with being put in camps in particular makes me think that. maybe they were different before the war but I think an actual nazi sympathiser would've tried to downplay the camps or at least not call attention to them.
This is the most exciting video. I didn't know of this Fritz at all . Great video. Please do a video on the hams that talked to over seas hams . Interesting !
In 2008 on the 10 Meter Band in the Hudson Valley of NY State, this station was transmitting a lot of power and could clearly be heard all over the northeast, as far away as Florida and Michigan and Canada stations were hearing the station clearly. This station broadcast entire speeches of Adolf Hitler that had not been heard before or at least not made public and whoever had these tapes must have had been in Germany in the SS during and before World War II and kept these recordings Night after night for months these broadcasts were played It was said that someone had made a digital message on the same frequency about Obama who was running for president and that this was to protest against him. Vulgar language about Obama was used I never heard of this person being caught and the ham radio community thought that this person was actually mobile, changing location of the broadcast night after night. It was amazing that someone would be that dedicated to drive hundreds of miles and spend 8 hours in their car at each location just to play these hateful messages. But the fact that they had been previously unheard speeches of Hitler from before and during the war, in small towns, it was believed that the person who had the tapes and was doing the broadcast was German, and had been in the SS and had to be in their very late 80s or 90s. It was talked about at a privately owned radio network that owned commercial stations because most of the staff and all the owners were Jewish and they were very interested in finding the person behind these transmissions, believing that they were an SS officer in the communications or propaganda department and had changed their identity and either been brought over with operation paperclip by the OSS or entered America under a false identity and been living in the United States fot the last 50 or 60 years After the election the transmissions stopped And no one who was a regular 10 meter operator in the 4 states that they might have been from had anything that sounded as clear over such a great distance. It really is a mystery. I often wonder if they might have been an owner of one of the other Radio networks in the northeast. If the person owned a bunch of commercial towers and they had employees who were like minded, they could have run a 10 meter antenna and cable up the towers. They could have had an antenna connection panel and commercial grade Low Band FM transmitters and amplifiers. And with remote controllers they could have turned on the radio and begun transmitting with a phone call or using an RF link and DTMF tones and activated the remote playback It would have allowed them to see any vehicles near the transmitters and they could have remotely shut off the transmitters if they saw any vehicle approaching. Having a locked gate on the access road to each site and a locked fence around the tower and building, if the FCC had figured out the location was the tower they could shut down and they would not think it was the commercial station, but a mobile vehicle that escaped, especially if the next night they were 300 miles away. I imagine they looked into this. I still remember the day one of our towers went off the air. We drove out to the site. Unlocked the gate to the access road, unlocked the gate on the 12 foot high fence, unlocked the door to the building and then the door inside the building to our transmit room and the transmitter was gone. We just stared in disbelief The entire rack was missing. No tracks, no prints, no nothing. Someone had managed to get through all the security and remove the equipment and lock everything back up. It had to have been an inside job. We suspected that the security company employees were involved There was no way they could have gotten in without their help. But they were so good they didn't leave any tire tracks. They had raked the dirt and gravel on the access road and outside the fence. True professional theives
@@Composedandcontent OC as in Orange County California? Are you asking about my ID.? OC is not Orange County in my ID, but my ID is a abbreviation for the place where I used to work. Orbital Communication Satellite Relay Center OCSRC " Oscar" was used sometimes as shorthand for the facilities
0:30 what does breaking into an FCC net and engage the FCC stations mean? For starters FCC is regulator not a broadcaster. Does FCC have its own reserved frequency?
@@AlyssMa7rin I can believe that the government, maybe not the FCC, had/has non-commercial stations, but that does not explain what breaking into them means. I'm pretty sure anyone capable of "breaking" into GHz range would either be in a military program or a spy
This transmission also gave information about what the government was doing behind the media narratives. While we were all focused on one thing this station gave information about the governments activities.
While most of the Internet is the dregs of society occasionally a pearl pops out of the effluent. Thank you for something so obscure I would never have heard of this!
Crazy, I guess he'd never heard of HF DF or just didn't care. In my city a few years back there was a guy who would interfere with nets on 2m/70cm and say all sorts of outlandish things. It was just really annoying, and not funny at all. Eventually he disappeared, I have no idea what happened.
@@solinvictus39My dad grew up in Little Compton. He mentioned once that he remembered seeing a DF station during the war. I wonder if it was that one.
We have a lot of police/military/federal officers driving about with those bigger antennas these days. My guess is somebody has been acting up around 029 for the past six months. I have never seen them before this past year but now they're all over RI. Trying to triangulate somebody/someone and failing to do it clearly.
Reminds me of the people online who say nasty awful stuff over microphones thinking they are anonymous. This guy was on a radio and got pinpointed back in the mid 1900s. I don't how know why this reminded me of that lol.
thanks for the story. Reminds me of that French guy praising Saddam Hussein on 6.6 MHz during the Gulf War. That moron managed to address his usual speech to some American guys who where ...on an AWACS just above his head. A few hours later he had the regular cops, the radio cops plus all the counter spy services at his door 🤣
This sort of story proves that people really aren't that smart. All the gear needed could have fit in a car. The guy doing it could have gone into the middle of a national forest and changed locations each time.
@@1337Shockwav3Cars had batteries. Dynamotors could power the radio. For that era it wasn't rocket science. Before the flood[1] I had all that was needed to do it. [1] Not the bible one
@@brentsutherland6385 The video says "in the early days of 1941". The US only joined the war after Dec-7 of 1941. Rationing of gasoline was not a thing until Dec of 1942.
@@griffonboi Well sharing music and screaming for no reason can be done on the internet without pissing off the FCC and interfering with hams is just rude. So pirates should just knock it off.
Seems like an early version of contacting agents'. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. Remember, miles to go before I sleep. "
Our network used a Ku satellite to relay our studio podcasts to our transmitter sites We had interference with our signal as did other users on the satellite The fcc never revealed to us where exactly the transmitter was that was causing the interference but one of the maps that they showed us had the pirate sweeping the Arc and they said it was coming from the Midwest I don't know how they figure it out, but the antennas on the satellites must have directional finding ability
All the FCC-haters don't seem to recognize how much radio was connected to espionage activities at that time. The entire French resistance was operated on radio.
It seems that the days of pirate radio stations are drawing to a close as society moves ever so dependant on electronic communications. The technology has moved on.
Do you have any information about the Chillicothe (Ohio) FCC monitoring station? It was northwest of town, and may have been in or near the area where the US35 roadway now is located.
Well, in all fairness, we were in a fight for our survival and the national zeitgeist was very serious. There were legitimate fears of spies in the country. Several Nazi soldiers/ spies were busted making landfall off the coast of northeast Florida, for example. They were executed.
If only the FCC could apply that many resources to cell phone and telemarketing scammers.
For real though. I literally get calls from spoofed numbers on a weekly basis at this point.
@@Bromon655 - My brother ended up on the scammers and telemarketers do not call list. They stopped calling him. He would answer hello. And then tell them, "I'm naked. Are you naked? Its so nice to be naked." CLICK! He did it for years. They stopped calling. He has been dead since 2018 and his son took over his number because the trolls never call it. Years of peace because of the old mans hard work LOL. What a FORKING legend. I never knew he did that shit ha ha ha
why would they? most political figures and government alphabet soups get paid for allowing the things they're trying to prevent. if they ended roboscams and telemarketers, they'd find another way to siphon money from the public. at least (most) of the public is wise enough not to give in.
@KlodFather absolute legend! 🤣
@@WN_Byers - He was... His forkery is fabled in legend and song ha ha. There are some crazy bastards out there. One guy was on the radio telling everyone that last christmas all he got was a pack of underware and a piece of ass and they were both three sizes too big LOL. What a nutjob LOL That happened on channel 19 CB. And the scary part is that there are people out there more forked up than that... stuff I am not comfortable talking about in the comments section here. Terrible cringy things that you wish you did not know about. Your parents were not lying when they told you there were weird people in the world... But I bet they did not know about some of these specimens. Look up on google "melanotan abuse n3glv" for the guy who turned himself black. Its one hell of a rabbit hole.
4:17 - Just a little context. Johnson wasn't some master spy for Germany, he was a college student with an interest in electronics. If he were alive today he would have been trolling Twitter.
truly the first shitpost's ever.
this dude was an absolute G ahead of his time.
Dude would have been spectrum painting over the buzzer for sure
@@colemorrison8957oh there were shitposters in Roman and even Greek times!
Trolling is as old as humanity!
He would have been right at home on 14.313 MHz with all the slimes that used to hang out there.
guys were drawing dicks in the spectrum during the runup to the Ukraine war, over Russian broadcasts
it was pretty funny
The FCC coming to your house in vans is a real thing. I had a greenhouse powered by 50, 1000 watt digital ballasts for grow lights. Something about them turning on was jamming the local radio station and they called up FCC to complain. One day the FCC was at my place...
Likely your ballasts didn't have proper filters. Maybe just sticking a chicken wire cage (which will act as a faraday cage) around it could reduce the interference caused by those "faulty" ballasts. There's a reason those things are in metal boxes.
@@M3GAprincess
It was when they first came out and the FCC guy had me put up some wire like that... I had been running the set up for months, even listened to that radio station, but thought the interference I was hearing was just at my place. So for anyone who doubts them being out there, I can say that they may not be fast, but they will find you.
@@GardenerEarthGuy Yeah it's pretty amazing how things can just randomly cause interference. I'm studying to get my amateur radio license, and to use uncommercial equipment (i.e. modified), you legally need a level 2 license, otherwise it's just easy to accidentally create signal jammers and not realize it.
I had a fan on a car lightbulb (LED type headlight) where the fan to cool it down didn't spin at the proper speed, and I was able to identify it as the source of interference on the 600 Khz range (600 AM radio). Luckily it wasn't much interference (nothing like 1000W ballasts would produce).
It's super easy to find the source of the interference if you have the right equipment, like the KrakenSDR, which has five antenna, you can drive around and with Google maps figure out pretty much exactly where it's coming from in a few minutes from really far away. So yeah the FCC has no trouble finding where the source it.
I hope you made it out ok.
@@M3GAprincess
Once they realized I was just a greenhouse grower, who's only background in radio was a C Crane radio, it seemed they thought it was funny. The first time they arrived though, it was intimidating because they had a federal search warrant and wore flak jackets. I would definitely not want to be arrested by the feds! 😆 I wonder how often things like that happen? Someone's headlight that jams a TV station when he takes lunch in his car outside of work, stuff like that... 😆
I bought LED headlights for my car from amazon, I noticed my radio was very poor quality one night, and when I turned off the lights when I got home it stopped. I fixed it wish a steel mesh lined with electrical tape.. funny to think my car might be jamming peoples radios as I drive by them
This is the proof that any medium, which anyone can use to reach out to many others while staying somewhat anonymous, will automatically create trolls.
It seems to be a law of nature, or at least of human nature.
*truth
Just look at old school chain letters
Nobody really cared until Fritz mentioned "all your base are belong to us".
you have no chance to survive make your time
heil zig
Move zig
Lewis, you never cease to amaze. Once again, this is brilliant. My only regret is that you weren't doing this when I was a young lad enamoured with SW radio in the 70s. There were so many 'unsolved' mysteries then. But truth be told, I enjoy our modern mysteries just as much today. And I'm certainly grateful you're doing this work in tracking down all kinds of anamolous transmissions. Back then I wasn't a license radio operator; now I am, but I still delight in these wonderful stories, which seem to change in context of each passing decade. Cheers, mate!
"Snitch"...
I was born and raised within 100 miles of Peoria and hadn’t heard about this incident until now. Not surprising.
What is amazing is that the FCC in the United States doesn't seem to go after illegal operators any more. The posts and the personel are gone, Illegal operations in licensed spectrum is ignored for the most part. The supposed licensed business band which is supposed to have frequency coordination is like the wild west. Some licences claim huge areas of use with little justification, and others run high power transmitters well outside their actual needs. I honestly think that licensed stations don't bother to report intereference because they dont know they should or that anthing can be done to address the problem. How would you even report it?
They claim they are underfunded, but the licensing and fines were supposed to deter misuse and pay for the enforcement.
Like every tax imposed in the US , it's supposed to fund something until it doesn't. But you still pay the tax.
@@billlumbergh9251 It's because of one party continuously defunding various agencies over and over again, with the intent to gut it. Like how a certain right-leaning party put a former Comcast CEO in-charge of the FCC and a former Fedex (or UPS) Exec in-charge of the USPS who then gutted the mail service. It's funny how the USPS actually used to turn a profit until that certain party keeps gutting it over and over and over again with mindless policies.
@@billlumbergh9251that's because the funding for services is cut so that tax cuts for the most wealthy can be "paid for".
@@vxicepickxv First off, what the government spends has no relation to what it collects in tax. If tax doesn't cover it they just borrow - evidence being that in my 45 years on this Earth the Federal Government has never had a surplus (Not even during the Clinton years when there was a supposed surplus - it was an accounting trick)
A department's budget is set by a process called 'baseline budgeting' which in simple terms means they take last years budget and assume they must have an increase - and if they ask for a 10% increase but only get a 5% increase they say their budget was cut.
It is rare for there to ever be an actual cut to any agencies budget. About the only times a real budget cut has ever occurred that I'm aware of are after an 'emergency' spending binge where the bureaucrats pretend the 'emergency' spending is the baseline from which they should request their next budget.
What is lacking is effectiveness and efficiency in the spending. Frankly if you could give someone the power to go through every Federal department who had permission to fire people at will, cancel contracts, and impose new policies (such as making easier to fire people who cannot perform the function for which they are hired) , and basically tell the petty, highly educated but thoroughly mentally un-impressive bureaucrats who are an absolute plague in government employment to get stuffed, you could probably cut the federal workforce by 80%, budgets by 50% and get 200% effectiveness.
This is fascinating, the FCC monitoring stations and the WWII rules on hams is something I've never heard before. Pretty cool.
I had a collection of war era QST mags, there were advertisements for new radio equipment available "After Hostilities"
I cannot believe they were so accurate in DF back in 1940's. Mind blown
@@Veslanjejezivot Your lack of understanding does not increase the complexity of the world around you.
@@Look_What_You_DidConsidering how radar was such a new technology, and the fact that the FCC would lag WAY behind military tech...
We didn't even have radar set up at Pearl Harbor in 1942.
@@LegendStormcrow We did have radars at that point, the issue was operators were notoriously skeptical of their use and reliability. It was a problem when radar direction/range finders were installed on vessels during the war, there are a few reports of crews deliberately not using their new radar systems until their use in combat managed to change their mind.
"Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis."
The Blues Brothers.
So chicago and the people who administer it
The FCC sure liked the Hallicrafters SX-28 back then. I had one for a few years, and I can understand why. For 1930s/1940s technology, it wasn't bad at all and could hold its own even in the 1970s and 1980s.
It can still hold its own now. I have seen a Collins R390-A seriously outperform a currently made state of the art tranceiver. Using the same aerial it blew the new tech rig away in every respect. I am 74 and started swling when I was 6 and now have been a ham for 37 years.
The Collins R-390A is an amazing piece of engineering. They are the finest tube receivers ever made.
@@AmishSpecialForcesAs much as I loved my SX-28, I would have gladly traded it for a R-309A had a good deal come along. As it was, I also acquired a 75A-4 which served me well on many a DX contact with my HT-32 transmitter. I miss those old boatanchors... 😟
@@silverhammer7779, cannot complain about the 75A-4, I have one myself. I find that I use the R-390-A or my R-725 even more than the 75A-4, mainly for the general coverage.
bro decided to do a little trolling
🤏 just a little, yeah? 🤣
OG troll.
Based.😂😂😂
Emojis, slogans, abreviations, this comment got all the pleb responses!
Treason.
The huge aerial in his back garden was a clue to his location...
Psshh shows how much you know about antennas... it would just look like a normal clothesline...
That sounds like a familiar story of radio interference. Apparently, he did not think he would get caught. From the time he started his antics, to the time of his arrest, I wonder how much time elapsed? Weeks, months?
I am out of jail now and back at it!
@@wa1ufo based
I love what was classed as "mobile equipment" in those days... not quite "double DIN"
its mobile if you can move it :D
@@gaijin5557With a forklift
Loved seeing all those Hallicrafters SX-28's the government was using. I have one, into a good speaker the audio is superb. But alas, the bandswitch is going bad and takes some jiggling around to work. Guess I'm lucky it works at all for a complex 83 year old receiver. 😃 (BTW, I've cleaned the bandswitch and worked on it several times. Like me, it's just wore out 😂).
That guy must have needed a wheelbarrow to carry his balls around, seeing as how he transmitted on FCC and military frequencies. He was just begging to be caught. Makes me wonder if he even knew that radio direction finding is possible.
Only if he bothered to read the periodicals, Wireless World and similar were full of technical articles.
WW reported on soviet or republican illegals station in Spain in the early thirties. Germany was also busy expanding its DF resources to combat soviet illegal transmitters in Germany,.
In the late 70s early 80s i was in the Airforce communications service working with HF, satellite, microwave, and tropo links all over the world posting MIJI (Meaconing intrusion jamming Interference ) reports was a common occurrence. Would take tge RDF guys less than 5 minutes to locate the subject to within a few hundred yards anywhere on the earth.
Those FCC staff would be very disappointed with TikTok being allowed in the US.
3:58, The teletype there was used for communications between FCC DF field offices. Each office had rhombic antenna that were oriented to the FCC Net Control Station (NCS) and other DF field offices. The rhombics were full wave antenna on one frequency and partial wave on the other frequencies that were used in the communications network. The rhombics were mounted on top of poles that were 65 feet tall.
Maximum operating power was 3000 watts (but were set to 2500 watts). The transmitters used were either the type used on U.S. Naval ships or aeronautical transmitters during the time period of this video. The receivers used during inter-station communications may well have been one of those that are also in the picture.
6:45, those poles to the left of the picture may have been part of the rhombic antenna system.
we had a guy for years who used to randomly play hitler speeches on our repeater...
wow..
I remember hearing about that in Penna.
Cool, did you learn anything?
Not all heroes wear capes.
Some people are that desperate for attention I guess. Now they just tweet.
A 1940's troll. I wonder how many "pirates" there were in the 1910's, 20's, 30's, etc. Never really hear or read about that part of radio history in the US, UK, or Europe.I know in the 1910's there were a lot of "basement operators" walking all over each other and the commercial interests that resulted in the 1912 communications act in the USA.
Wow, talk about surveillance, eh? I love the story of pirate radio. Since the German movie "Radio Powerplay" and "Pogo 1104" I wanted to do my own station. The next best thing was my buddie´s VW Beetle with a CB radio- we were driving them nuts and had such fun broadcasting mostly music and stupid comments. Those were the days... Thanks to him having a magnet antenna we could disguise us fairly easy as VW Beetles were still very common around Wolfsburg at the time (1988/89) so we never got cought.
Awesome 😎
@@arostwocentsironic considering by then beetles were being made in Mexico! Note for those not aware: Wolfsburg is the home of VW and the location of the factory where beetles were produced until 1967
I lived in London at the end of the 90s, late night FM pirates were fantastic, dozens of stations and you just spent all night scanning for weirdos
I've lived in Peoria my entire life, been on that road and passed by that house hundreds of times. This is wild. I never knew anything about this.
I got a degree in electrical engineering at Bradley, and I'm surprised this isn't part of the school's lore.
Wow I didn’t know 4 Chan existed in the 40s
the first OG nailed by the FCC. Then they went after cb'ers..man the fcc was a tough cookie back then. I'd love to know more about the guy in MA since I'm a ham here .
Wow! Great information! I was just on Sheridan Road in Peoria yesterday as we have a friend who lives on a side-street, and we did some shopping on Sheridan. The State of Illinois agency I worked for had an office on that street in the 1990s. I need to look up more information on this case.
Only thing I know about Illinois is Barry O and the Illinois Enema Bandit.
@@donwayne1357 Don't forget the Mad Gasser of Mattoon! Ha ha.
@@KarlWitsman Yeah, that too!
Wow! This could almost have been a Mark Felton video, I could actually hear his dramatic theme music at the beginning! 😁
Very good stuff, more similar vids please. 👍
Not mad Mark and his dramatic music always a tell tale of propoganda along with his way of portraying something which happened decades ago as of current importance
Mark Felton is a known plagiarist, please dont compare this masterpiece of a video to him reading wikipedia articles
Why is some guy copy and pasting from wikipedia to make videos important? Hes an irrelevant and dubious natured fool
Can't restrict communications. If an individual wishes to communicate via any means to another country. So be it. If you want information to remain secrete... then don't make it public in the first place.
Back in 1941 american HAM naz15 were trolling the FCC just for the LOLZ.
They were not laughing when the Feds busted down their doors.
I had no idea this was in Peoria. I live in Peoria, moved here about 10 years ago. No one's ever mentioned this happened.
Not surprised. If they had done, how many copycats would have sprung up?
Wait until someone tells you about Pekin.
I think I heard something about the klan down there.@@SuzuranMajere
Why would they mention it? Or more accurately why would they even be aware it happened?? The odds of meeting someone who was alive and old enough at the time to have remembered is very very slim.
@@cactusjackNVmy city had a huge crocodile with a passive-aggressive personality and every cultured person here knows about it. It was in the nineteenth century and the city has about 480 k people on it... a so called German operator should be enough for people to mention. Wasting time with imbecile celebrities instead of getting acknowledged with our communities history is what is dragging America to stupidity and consequently failure.
I wonder what he thought he was accomplishing when he tried to smash his transmitter? What he going to tell a judge that that thing he was smashing just as agents burst in wasn't what they thought it was?
The “these are t my pants” argument.
I remember reading about this some years ago. Thanks Lewis.. Interesting. :-)
2:44 Had a good laugh at their antenna rotator, a true 'ArmStrong', or is that strongarm
😅 Hah! I bet I haven't heard that description in 30 years, since power windows & steering became the norm
Was sure that a "Quinn's Ideas" (a YT sci-fi channel) video started playing in the background during the end credits :D
Jeez, cant even support your favorite artist without the FCC stepping in
Bobby Fischer was right.
Well done on the research..and content..
This would have been even better if you had some more info on Johnson and his motives and what happened to him. The human story not just the radio wave story.
There’s nothing out there, I looked. It was over 80 years ago…
Honestly chances are he was just some joker who thought the feds couldn't catch him. If he was an actual state actor or seriously trying to aid the nazi effort he'd probably try doing more than just talk himself up and piss off the feds.
That he threatened them with being put in camps in particular makes me think that. maybe they were different before the war but I think an actual nazi sympathiser would've tried to downplay the camps or at least not call attention to them.
No more brother wars
ok thug
@@graysid9769ok bug
watching this from peoria, illinois 👁️👄👁️
This is the most exciting video. I didn't know of this Fritz at all . Great video. Please do a video on the hams that talked to over seas hams . Interesting !
In 2008 on the 10 Meter Band in the Hudson Valley of NY State, this station was transmitting a lot of power and could clearly be heard all over the northeast, as far away as Florida and Michigan and Canada stations were hearing the station clearly.
This station broadcast entire speeches of Adolf Hitler that had not been heard before or at least not made public and whoever had these tapes must have had been in Germany in the SS during and before World War II and kept these recordings
Night after night for months these broadcasts were played
It was said that someone had made a digital message on the same frequency about Obama who was running for president and that this was to protest against him. Vulgar language about Obama was used
I never heard of this person being caught and the ham radio community thought that this person was actually mobile, changing location of the broadcast night after night.
It was amazing that someone would be that dedicated to drive hundreds of miles and spend 8 hours in their car at each location just to play these hateful messages.
But the fact that they had been previously unheard speeches of Hitler from before and during the war, in small towns, it was believed that the person who had the tapes and was doing the broadcast was German, and had been in the SS and had to be in their very late 80s or 90s.
It was talked about at a privately owned radio network that owned commercial stations because most of the staff and all the owners were Jewish and they were very interested in finding the person behind these transmissions, believing that they were an SS officer in the communications or propaganda department and had changed their identity and either been brought over with operation paperclip by the OSS or entered America under a false identity and been living in the United States fot the last 50 or 60 years
After the election the transmissions stopped
And no one who was a regular 10 meter operator in the 4 states that they might have been from had anything that sounded as clear over such a great distance.
It really is a mystery.
I often wonder if they might have been an owner of one of the other Radio networks in the northeast.
If the person owned a bunch of commercial towers and they had employees who were like minded, they could have run a 10 meter antenna and cable up the towers.
They could have had an antenna connection panel and commercial grade Low Band FM transmitters and amplifiers.
And with remote controllers they could have turned on the radio and begun transmitting with a phone call or using an RF link and DTMF tones and activated the remote playback
It would have allowed them to see any vehicles near the transmitters and they could have remotely shut off the transmitters if they saw any vehicle approaching.
Having a locked gate on the access road to each site and a locked fence around the tower and building, if the FCC had figured out the location was the tower they could shut down and they would not think it was the commercial station, but a mobile vehicle that escaped, especially if the next night they were 300 miles away.
I imagine they looked into this.
I still remember the day one of our towers went off the air.
We drove out to the site.
Unlocked the gate to the access road, unlocked the gate on the 12 foot high fence, unlocked the door to the building and then the door inside the building to our transmit room and the transmitter was gone.
We just stared in disbelief
The entire rack was missing.
No tracks, no prints, no nothing.
Someone had managed to get through all the security and remove the equipment and lock everything back up.
It had to have been an inside job. We suspected that the security company employees were involved
There was no way they could have gotten in without their help.
But they were so good they didn't leave any tire tracks.
They had raked the dirt and gravel on the access road and outside the fence.
True professional theives
Wow, this is fascinating. I hope Ringway Manchester makes a video about this!
@@VeslanjejezivotAgreed!
Hateful messages..you should try learning about the talmud, their main holy book.
This was a very interesting read
@@Composedandcontent OC as in Orange County California? Are you asking about my ID.?
OC is not Orange County in my ID, but my ID is a abbreviation for the place where I used to work.
Orbital
Communication
Satellite
Relay
Center
OCSRC
" Oscar" was used sometimes as shorthand for the facilities
Illinois, huh? The Blues Brothers really were onto something.
0:30 what does breaking into an FCC net and engage the FCC stations mean? For starters FCC is regulator not a broadcaster. Does FCC have its own reserved frequency?
At the time, it would be in reference to government owned and operated radio stations (mostly defense radar, and the like)
@@AlyssMa7rin I can believe that the government, maybe not the FCC, had/has non-commercial stations, but that does not explain what breaking into them means. I'm pretty sure anyone capable of "breaking" into GHz range would either be in a military program or a spy
We were so wrong..
When this happens and the sob has the balls to tell the truth, youre in serious trouble.
This transmission also gave information about what the government was doing behind the media narratives. While we were all focused on one thing this station gave information about the governments activities.
what equipment was used ? power, antenna aso...
He was a 21 year old edgelord for his time. Funny thing is he claimed to be pro Nazi, yet registered for the draft in 1942 like everyone else.
People never change... 40's era trolling 😂
i mean...the alternative was prison for draft dodging.
While most of the Internet is the dregs of society occasionally a pearl pops out of the effluent. Thank you for something so obscure I would never have heard of this!
Crazy, I guess he'd never heard of HF DF or just didn't care. In my city a few years back there was a guy who would interfere with nets on 2m/70cm and say all sorts of outlandish things. It was just really annoying, and not funny at all. Eventually he disappeared, I have no idea what happened.
That $2,000 bond in 1941 is over $43,000 in today's money.
4.3 mil bond, i can see that as possible
Sounds like something you'd hear on 7200 kHz in North America today
I believe this is obliquely referenced in Steven Spielberg's film 1941.
That was cool and I love the outro music! I'd like to hear more of it.
...Just listened to the whole thing, very nice, thank you.
Whoa, I live in Scituate, RI, I didn't even know we had an FCC Intercept Station...Then again, that was probably years before I was born, LOL.
And Scituate is pretty small town, if I remember correctly.
@@solinvictus39My dad grew up in Little Compton. He mentioned once that he remembered seeing a DF station during the war. I wonder if it was that one.
We have a lot of police/military/federal officers driving about with those bigger antennas these days. My guess is somebody has been acting up around 029 for the past six months. I have never seen them before this past year but now they're all over RI. Trying to triangulate somebody/someone and failing to do it clearly.
@christophercarlone9945 hopefully it wasn't all that metal tape I used to pick up the wifi in the backyard, LOL.
That's how history/algebra lessons are. You never know where the music is coming from
Dude you are really playing at my interests now.... secret radio stations, WW2 jeeeeeeeeeeeez
Reminds me of the people online who say nasty awful stuff over microphones thinking they are anonymous. This guy was on a radio and got pinpointed back in the mid 1900s. I don't how know why this reminded me of that lol.
Cringe
@@generalmarkmilleyisbenedic8895
Yeah cool name lmao
thanks for the story. Reminds me of that French guy praising Saddam Hussein on 6.6 MHz during the Gulf War. That moron managed to address his usual speech to some American guys who where ...on an AWACS just above his head. A few hours later he had the regular cops, the radio cops plus all the counter spy services at his door 🤣
There are still a few French Echo Charlie stations around 6.6MHz and 3.48MHz
This sort of story proves that people really aren't that smart.
All the gear needed could have fit in a car.
The guy doing it could have gone into the middle of a national forest and changed locations each time.
During the war? Where would he get the gasoline ration just to drive around?
Yup, we all know battery tech was extremely mature in the 1940s
@@1337Shockwav3Cars had batteries. Dynamotors could power the radio. For that era it wasn't rocket science. Before the flood[1] I had all that was needed to do it.
[1] Not the bible one
@@brentsutherland6385 The video says "in the early days of 1941". The US only joined the war after Dec-7 of 1941. Rationing of gasoline was not a thing until Dec of 1942.
fair enough@@kensmith5694
Thanks again for an extremely interesting video. We still have pirates in the US, but they are not political.
So people who just want to share the music they like?
@@MakerInMotion Yes and also people screaming into the mic for no reason, also idiots who interfere with hams
@@griffonboi Well sharing music and screaming for no reason can be done on the internet without pissing off the FCC and interfering with hams is just rude. So pirates should just knock it off.
@@MakerInMotionno it isnt
Yeah all the politics are on 80 meters now, no need to be a pirate.
where can i find more info on the massachusetts mystery station?
Wow that’s crazy, I live in Peoria Illinois on north Sheridan! I wonder how close this was happening to where I live now
I was just watching a video from the Lincoln Project about a Nazi rally in Madison Square Gardens in New York, and then I find this in my watchlist...
In the 1930s they even held parades in Yorkville (Kleines Deutcshland) in New York City, uniforms and all. Not that neighborhood's finest hour.
Welcome to algorithims and cookies and shit old man
Seems like an early version of contacting agents'. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. Remember, miles to go before I sleep. "
I understood that reference 😁
Wow. I'm an hour east of Peoria. Never would have thought Something this massive would be so close to my backyard.
Those mobile loop DF pictures very intriguing. I would like to know more about those types of setups now, so thanks for that.
Does anyone know if the UK authorities were also involved in similar , trace and track operations ?
Our network used a Ku satellite to relay our studio podcasts to our transmitter sites
We had interference with our signal as did other users on the satellite
The fcc never revealed to us where exactly the transmitter was that was causing the interference but one of the maps that they showed us had the pirate sweeping the Arc and they said it was coming from the Midwest
I don't know how they figure it out, but the antennas on the satellites must have directional finding ability
You just measure the delay from 3 locations and triangulate
The FCC won’t let fritz be free… They tried to shut him down on MTV
Listen to 80 meters now in the US. It’s chock full of people quoting Hitler. I’m not joking.
So basically this was one of the early trolls. A proto-troll, if you will.
I'm sure every medium has had its trolls. Before this they must've been doing up add letters to the editor in the papers
No. Trolls go back thousands of years.
Thanks RM*** Another Super Video. Keep up the Awesome Work**** Take Care and Radio On****
Great story, thanks!
Incredibly based radio operator
Nazis are not based.
@@Ohfiveeightteen based on what?
Amazing story.
I've heard of an interesting phenomenon in the US involving someone using the callsign Mud Duck that might be a bit of a rabbit hole
All the FCC-haters don't seem to recognize how much radio was connected to espionage activities at that time. The entire French resistance was operated on radio.
Atomic clocks made pinpointing locations much simpler.
How much time did he do for this?
Love the new sound track at the end!👍
I was tempted to read nursery rhymes on the ham station.
Ngl they had some bangers tho
love the informatoin that you are sharing. Your number station vids are excellent and erriely creepy. Thank you so much!!!
Amazing how there is a never ending supply of people who don't know about them haha
*Adjusted for inflation, $2,000 in 1941 is equal to $42,099 in 2023. Annual inflation was 3.79%. Average income was about $1,400.*
$4,300,000 bond
Interesting video. Well researched
Thank you as always!
They always hunt the ones telling the truth the most.
Based.
@@dirtysoul2178 o/
Fascinating stuff and well researched!
Thanks Dave
Great video, thanks!🇺🇸
Pictures of antennas located in Charles County Maryland?
Perhaps the amount of pirate broadcasters remained the same, but the FCC simply payed more attention during WW2.
It seems that the days of pirate radio stations are drawing to a close as society moves ever so dependant on electronic communications. The technology has moved on.
Very interesting. Thank You. What happened to "Fritz"?
Fascinating stuff!
Do you have any information about the Chillicothe (Ohio) FCC monitoring station? It was northwest of town, and may have been in or near the area where the US35 roadway now is located.
Very interesting video. Love this stuff
The FCC has never had even the tiniest hint of a sense of humor. Ever.
Well, in all fairness, we were in a fight for our survival and the national zeitgeist was very serious. There were legitimate fears of spies in the country. Several Nazi soldiers/ spies were busted making landfall off the coast of northeast Florida, for example. They were executed.
Stifling inventing and hacking.
That's not an agency I want to have a sense of humor.
That's because you give people an inch and they take a parsec
They have to steal money and oppress you anyway they can, why are you surprised
You say that over the radio now and you will still get raided by people with guns.