Unlicensed radio broadcasters have been around practically since governments started trying to control and regulate the airwaves. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right. Click here to view a list of all sponsors. Total . 2 talking about this. But the FCC, Congress and the commercial broadcasting industry don't see the pirates as serving such a benign purpose. You can sign up for the newsletter by emailing any of their edittors: John Brewer ([emailprotected]), Ragnar Danskjold ([emailprotected]), Harold Frodge ([emailprotected]), Dave Turnick ([emailprotected]) or Larry Will ([emailprotected]), OK, I suppose I must also mention my own humble blog, where I continue to amass numerous pirate radio loggings and off-air recordings. MR. DOMBROWSKI: You know, that's hard to say. MR. DOMBROWSKI: It is. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Got you. VIEWS. comment. It lasted three years there and then I had an opportunity to get to the Philadelphia Office Enforcement Bureau with the field work and that's been -- I was there for 20 years. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Pirate radio. So when they say, oh, I don't need a license to operate I'm a Part 15 transmitter, well we have to do studies and measurements to see if that's true. Yes, so it's kind of like a cascade of options --. Enter ZIP code or city, state as well. So when we finally are able to pick up the signal in our car we then drive in the area in kind of a circle around the source and we plot lines, we call them lines of bearing on a map, and where they intersect is where this transmission source is originating. David, thanks so much for joining. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, there was a case back in the 1990s, late 1990s. Tribute to Pirate Radio, KQLZ 100.3 FM Los Angeles. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Do the pilots only complain if it's a song that they don't like? 19. r/HamRadio. Moreover, summer conditions in the North American 43 meter band are often much noisier, thus pirates know theyll be fighting static crashes to be heard during the summer months. And they also would be able to contact us and find out where the complaint is in the queue and, you know, what's going on with the complaint and have we investigated it yet. That would allow us to increase the fine to $100,000. And then they said to me well here is ten jobs that you potentially could have which one is your top choice? Additionally, pirate broadcasters don't have to deal with all the legal complexities of setting up and running a streaming internet service, such as writing terms of service or meeting contractual obligations, he notes. Pirates tend to occupy swatches of the shortwave spectrum that are relatively quiet, avoid intentionally broadcasting on top of one another, and typically operate at fairly low power. I am a Philadelphia native, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I graduated Temple University and my first job was the FCC right out of college and interestingly --. "He was waiting several months to come back on the air (and therefore was only willing to speak off the record to me). Airchecks from unauthorized broadcast radio stations throughout the years. Let's say you don't get cooperation from a building owner, you don't get cooperation from the eventual studio, maybe it's in their apartment and they're not opening the door, obviously, because they don't want to get caught. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Well that's what I went up with. Alan Roes Music Programmes on Shortwave, List of QRP General Coverage Amateur Radio Transceivers, List of VHF/UHF Multimode Amateur Radio Transceivers, How To Tune In Pirate Radio Broadcasts on Shortwave, https://swling.com/blog/category/pirate-radio/, LRA 36 (Arcangel San Gabriel, Antarctica) Test Broadcasts on March 1st and 4th, 2023, Radio Waves: AM Buzzkill, AM FEMA Push, AM Devitalization, and RFI-Blocking Chips, Bob Zanottis presentation to the Fairlawn Amateur Radio Club (Part 2), Radio Waves: The DLARC, NASA Citizen Science, PopShopRadio DRM to Europe, Hackers Disrupt Russian Radio, and Afghan Radio Closures, LRA 36 (Arcangel San Gabriel, Antarctica) Test Broadcast Today at 20:00 UTC. Give me an address or an intersection in the town that you are picking it up on. Now stop your Googling right now because that is illegal, right? A lot of times you can tell by the audio quality. The FCC argued that we were here to regulate the airwaves. Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article: Patrick J. Kiger And you have tools to escalate the situation. Broadcasting at 250,000 watts, XERF was five times as powerful as the most high-powered Top 40 AM stations on the West Coast. There is a studio somewhere. I mean are there tell-tale signs or are some of these stations so sophisticated that it's really hard for the average person to distinguish? Very old school, and cheap enough for anyone's budget. Marshal Service and seize all of the equipment that is associated with the operation of a radio station, really anything physically connected to the transmitter. And they come -- I've worked with them when they have bulletproof vests on and automatic weapons. Its much better, of course, if you have a table-top receiver, software-defined radio, or ham radio transceiver with a general coverage receiver hooked up to a resonant outdoor antennaespecially if you live outside Europe and North America. Like if a pirate, you know, gets his station up and running, he finds that no one is in a channel, and he says, oh, I guess I'll set myself here, other than the law, which is obviously important to some people, most people it should be, but why should we care that they are using vacant spectrum? KQLZ Pirate Radio stormed the Southern California airwaves in 1989, and. Friday March 17, 1989 5:00 am. Sometimes we find stations that just access the rooftops without anybody knowing and put the transmitter kind of hidden in a wall somewhere or a crevice and the antenna on the roof and remain anonymous for months without anybody knowing that the station is there. If you click on "radio" you'll come to a page where you can input your address and your phone number and email and a description of like what, you know, what you are experiencing. With that said (and for reasons I dont fully understand) depending on where you live in the world, you will either find it very easy to locate piratesor extremely difficult. Pirate Radio goes on the air in Los Angeles by "taking over" K-Lite 100 (KIQQ). MR. DOMBROWSKI: The majority of the people do not give us truthful information and so our agents have to be trained to do interviews to know when people are telling the truth or not and it may just require keep asking the right questions and keeping after it. So we typed up this -- They showed me a license and it was something typed up on the computer that said we're licensed by their statutes of the Moors people and so they felt that they have a right to operate. It was a three bay antenna for any of the those tech-y's out there, so it was a high efficient antenna and a very high powered transmitter. MR. DOMBROWSKI: So we have two ways to file a complaint. We have talked about other challenges in densely populated areas just like traffic jams, you're driving around in this van and you can't go anywhere because it's rush hour in New York City. In the late 1980s, unlicensed operators tried broadcasting from a Honduran-flag freighter in the waters off Long Island, according to The New York Times. So the avenues of working with the district attorneys is a great way to get the injunctions, the court orders, for the pirate station to cease operating permanently. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Probably just workload is another challenge in addition to folks moving the antennas around or taking them down during the day or only operating on weeknights and weekends, as you have said, which forces agents to work overtime. Some stations think that it's best to flood the FCC with complaints. The original converted ferry sank in 1980, but the five DJs on board and the ship's canary, Wilson, named after British Prime Minister Harold Wilson all were rescued, according to O'Rahilly's New York Times obituary. You know, when they do that they get a ticket number when they file the ticket online so the broadcasters can call us and find out, let us know that they filed the complaint and follow up with us. Coffee helps fuel the SWLing Post! MR. DOMBROWSKI: Sure. URL Here: https://dkng.co/rogue-----For entertainment purposes only. The SWLing Post now participates in two affiliate advertising programs with two large retailers that still sell shortwave radios, the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and the eBay Partnership, designed to provide a means for sites like ours to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to these retailers of radio products. Well I want to, you know, just emphasize the importance of this issue. We take it all. The Offshore Radio Museum website commemorates many of those pirates. The most popular frequency is arguably 6,925 kHz, but I often log pirates on 6,935 and 6,950 kHz. Additionally, you can always tune a remote receiver, via the Internet on the Global Tuners website, or via the University of Twentes SDR in the Netherlands. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Hometown. Again, I turned to Andrew Yoder for insight about pirate radio activity in the rest of the world; his reply: Im always amazed at how few areas in the world have pirates that are connected to any scene. A lot of stations conceal their antennas, they hide behind things, they take the antennas down during they day, so they try avoid detection. They inventory it all and then they sign it over to the FCC to hold and then we finally get the courts to order that it's released to the federal government and it's our property. On Easter Sunday in 1964, the station went on the air, playing the Rolling Stones' single "It's All Over Now" as its first song. The HF Underground: http://www.hfunderground.com. We also recommend that the complainant contact the station that they are getting interference to --. Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist preacher who briefly broadcast fire-and-brimstone sermons from a converted minesweeper off the coast of New Jersey, as this 2014 NJ.com article details. And so he kind of gets shielded, right, you know the operators who are operating the station because they advertise their phone numbers in social media and so we can easily identify them, but you always have somebody that's the money guy that's safely hiding behind all these other staff and --. But O'Rahilly was undeterred, even after his ship was seized briefly by Dutch authorities. 10. Marshals actually seize it. The price of the equipment is $2,960.51. This is likely due to the early sunsets and cold winter nights of the northern hemisphere that tend to keep people indoors, which in turn encourages pirates to hit the air. If you have information about a pirate radio station, you can notify the FCC by calling 888-CALLFCC or filing a complaint online at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov. Marshals went in with us and we seized the equipment. He's the station manager for today's legal, land-based version of Radio Caroline, which obtained a license to broadcast at 648 Khz on the AM band in 2017, but still strives to preserve the rebellious spirit of the original operation. Where are you hearing this interference problem? MR. DOMBROWSKI: So we have fines that we could issue. bclc lotto app not working; signs your internship will turn into a job; mary suehr schmitz. We have had cases where we have gone in on in rem seizures and found drug paraphernalia inside the building and so that becomes now a law enforcement issue and they take care of that, they handle that situation. It takes a lot of time to process just one complaint and so it is distracting our agents of getting into the database and populating all the fields and calling the complainant. March 13 2022 . You know, there was a glowing article in a certain New York publication that at least one FCC commissioner was irked by because it seemed to be kind of glorifying this underground practice and making it seem like some interesting thing, but you really got to keep in mind not just the radio stations that are interfered with, but emergency communications. If you've been binge-watching movies lately, you may have come across "Pirate Radio." It had a 20-mile range. Back in the 1980s, before the Internet and its online bulletin boards, I thought finding pirates was truly a huntrandom and altogether unpredictable. Thank you! MR. DOMBROWSKI: And so they said well because we were here before it was colonized our federal laws don't apply to us. To track pirates, youll need a radio with both AM and SSB modes. Over the past few years, Ive found that one of my favorite listening activities has become searching for unique pirate radio stations, and readers of my blog appear to have followed suit. Even then, though, Radio Caroline wouldn't go away. MR. DOMBROWSKI: It's not, you know, and we didn't talk about, there are other legal ways to go about it. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes. Want to buy me a cup of coffee? Now I know that finding pirates is reasonably achievable; at least, it is possible to know roughly where, and generally when, to find them. So we have a lot of those stations operating, so it's big revenue for them. Addeddate 2022-03-13 23:21:58 . MR. DOMBROWSKI: Raise it all the way up 100 feet and our director at the time rode up there and got the antenna down. This includes the FM, AM and shortwave radio bands. Ive noticed increased pirate radio activity during the winter months, as well. MR. DOMBROWSKI: So this equipment helps us track us down. Now many listeners as you know have the experience of tuning their dial and there appear to be vacant channels you have said that one of the reasons for that is to guard against interference, but someone listening might say well why do we care, right. That's part of it, right, and you rely on some cooperation in some instances to get it done. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Yes, so you have options. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So what is the current state of pirate radio? Set up your Raspberry Pi You'll need to get Raspbian, the Linux-based operating system for the Raspberry Pi. As Yoder goes on to explain in his introduction of the 2012 Pirate Radio Annual, pirates are often confused with radio bootleggers (who conduct unlicensed two-way conversations), clandestine stations (usually political stations), and jammers (who intentionally try to block broadcasts). Shortwave DX Blog - A blog with loggings and information relating to shortwave pirate radio in Europe. They could stream. So a transmitter that complies with the Part 15 requirements has a very small operating range, about 100 feet. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: That's some great local cooperation right there. Chasing pirates has also increased my technical know-how. Sweet! MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So let's say that either a broadcaster or a listener files a complaint, what happens then, what tools do you, your colleagues in the FCC, have to go about finding a station, shutting it down, bringing people to justice? Finding Shortwave Stations and Broadcasts. . So when we license stations, you know, I used to work in the FM branch so I am very knowledgeable about the process, but there is a whole legal and engineering study that has to be done before you get a license and it takes resources to do that, financial resources. ACTIVITY. And did I mention the cool QSL cards? When do you hear the station? And so these transmitters that they are purchasing and pirate stations are using do not go through the equipment process, the equipment authorization process, and that is a problem. Indeed, since pirates are operating at lower power, they get much more bang-for-the-watt out of SSB. I started as a field agent doing inspections and doing pirate radio enforcement was one of my jobs and then I moved into a senior agent position and then eventually the District Director, which the manager of the Philadelphia office. You still have to go down on foot and go out onto maybe the rooftop where the antenna is to confirm that that is the source. He was going around the country and stirring the pot and getting a lot of people excited about microbroadcasting, so that's really where it started to really proliferate. "These transmissions can interfere with licensed radio signals including broadcasters' sharing of vital public safety information with their communities," FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement. So what is the state of pirate radio in the U.S. and how is the FCC taking it on? April 8, 2015 - 10:43 am. That happens a lot. 2022-03-13 23:21:58 Storage_size 430.3 GB (in 25,377 files) Title Pirate Radio Airchecks. To have a radio station here helps to establish the station's operator as an important source of information and influence in the community.". They label the equipment as something else. VIEWS. Now you usually get one of your top, you know, first or second choice. So hopefully that's enough for them to get the station taken down and maybe share some information about who the real operator is. Well joining me to discuss this topic is David Dombrowski, Regional Director for Region One in the FCC Enforcement Bureau. They can be highly entertaining or thought-provoking, and thus are, themselves, a unique art form. Radio Caroline because so influential that, pretty soon, other ships were broadcasting rock off the coast as well. We have pirate radio there, too, not as bad as we did in New York. But so when we say Region One I think even most people in the FCC are not necessarily aware of how the country is carved up when it comes to enforcement and the field offices, et cetera, so can you give the listeners a brief sense of what do we mean by Region One, what areas do you cover? These pirate stations pose a host of problems for public safety, including interference with emergency alerts and air traffic control. They just twist the dial. The station is capable of running off of 13.8/28 volts DC battery, which can even be charged with solar power. Now that maybe gets us down to the building, you know, where it might be operating. It is portable, but can also be used as a permanent FM radio station. PROMAX designs several monitoring and spectrum surveillance systems. They can call their State Broadcast Association to get our contact information. They also cover your wireless routers in your house. You might need that sensitivity and an outdoor antenna to pull these relatively low-powered signals from the ether. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Because you don't know what you are running into. PIRATE RADIO Once you remove the idea of pirate radio from its mythology, you. Among the most popular queries made by readers is, How can I find and hear pirate radio stations? To help answer this question, Im writing this primer. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, it's -- Pirate radio has been around for decades. And when KIWI went silent, that was it. It eventually regrouped and resurfaced as an internet station, which gave it a global reach. Borderhunter Radio is one of the strongest Euro Pirates Ive ever heard. The BBC played catch-up launching Radio One and recruiting the same pirates for their roster. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Is that a point of pride for you from Philadelphia? If you live in North Americaparticularly on the east coastor in Europe, youre in luck: these are the hottest geographic locations for shortwave pirate radio activity. A new, raw, grassroots kind of pirate radio exploded from 1992 onwards. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Okay. 2022-03-13 23:21:58 Storage_size 430.7 GB (in 25,393 files) Title Pirate Radio Airchecks. And so that impedes the investigation a little bit because it is difficult to find where that studio is located, but we do, we do a lot of interviews. Powerful, uncertified transmitters manufactured in foreign countries easily slip through customs at U.S. ports. They don't know how to reach us? We'd like to contact you. One of the first pirate radio operators we know of was Ronan O'Rahilly. So what is pirate radio? The result was a border-blaster that covered a wide geographical area. I know that lots of pirates operate there, mostly on AM and FM, but no one is on SWand if they are, they arent sending QSLs, [or] operating in places where radio hobbyists would hear them. MR. DOMBROWSKI: So some States have laws on the book that prohibit pirate radio operation, States like New Jersey and New York and Florida. Director Richard Curtis' 2009 comedy-drama stars the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, a disc jockey for an unlicensed rock radio station that broadcast from a rusty, decrepit ship off the British coast in the mid-1960s, defying government authorities to spin the rock records that weren't allowed on the BBC at the time. Please leave us a review because it will help others find this show. But most of the current American pirates are based on dry land, broadcasting from clandestine antennas on rooftops in places such as Brooklyn. MR. DOMBROWSKI: And so that's not practical for somebody that wants to operate a radio station to cover an entire community. In the U.S., pirate stations have popped up in recent years all over the country, from West Virginia to Washington state, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which plays a continual game of whack-a-mole in an effort to keep them off the airwaves used by licensed broadcasters. HowStuffWorks may earn a small commission from affiliate links in this article. After that when we don't get compliance from somebody he gets a warning letter and comes back on the air and then we do get the warrant with the U.S. marshals. Now one thing I want to talk about is Part 15. The U.S. Now if you go that menu there are several options of different radio services. My most recent logging of a Euro pirate from North America was Radio Borderhunter on 15,500 kHz; his signal was quite amazing. 2. Well, I can't say exactly what it is, but, yes, they're --. In January, President Donald Trump signed into law the Preventing Illegal Radio Abuse Through Enforcement (PIRATE) Act, which gives regulators the ability to hit pirate stations with fines of up to $2 million, according to this summary from Radio World. I am Evan Swarztrauber. These guys aren't blowing off their listeners like the other radio stations. Compared to big-gun broadcasters, pirates are much more elusive game as very few announce their broadcasts in advance, and theres no telling where a pirates transmitter is located: it could be in their home, on a boat, or a portable one dropped in a remote location and later retrieved. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Oh, yes. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, we don't have a rule in the books that prohibits that from happening. Thank you, too, for your support of these sites. MR. DOMBROWSKI: So all that good equipment just gets recycled. Airchecks from unauthorized broadcast radio stations throughout the years. Do we have a right under the first amendment to speak via a radio station even if it is unlicensed by the FCC and is there potentially a case that can kind of exemplify why pirate radio is not protected under the First Amendment?