MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And obviously as a good citizen I have never to my knowledge listened to a pirate radio station. A few of them broadcast from ships, such as Rev. That would be not a good practice. PIRATE RADIO Once you remove the idea of pirate radio from its mythology, you. 1. So that is quite a large area. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: There is not a sign on the box that says illegal pirate radio transmitters. It's not. So we have had the most success in getting stations off the air when the district attorney is involved, because the U.S. Attorney's Office when we do the in rem seizures, they have a lot of case work and very high profile cases so there is a little reluctance sometimes because of the case precedence for the U.S. attorneys to take on our cases. Now all those things have one thing in common. Do a little pirate radio hunting yourself. Total Views 29,203 (Older Stats) ITEMS. The original 60s pirate station, playing fresh pop / rock music to Britain's young masses from a boat in the North Sea, floating in international waters four and a half miles off the Essex coastline. 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. Violators faced two years of imprisonment and fines. 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. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes. 2 talking about this. They can call their State Broadcast Association to get our contact information. Some of those, you know, if you tune your dial and find some spaces where there is some dead air, well those are intentionally put there in order so that stations don't cause interference to each other. Shortwave DX Blog - A blog with loggings and information relating to shortwave pirate radio in Europe. 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. Here's a test shot without the line or antenna attached. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: No. Most pirates transmit using SSB with modern ham radio equipment, others use AM utilizing vintage or homebrew equipment. But the easiest way to file a complaint is go online. A lot of stations conceal their antennas, they hide behind things, they take the antennas down during they day, so they try avoid detection. These pirate stations pose a host of problems for public safety, including interference with emergency alerts and air traffic control. Just browse the pirate radio category: https://swling.com/blog/category/pirate-radio/. MR. DOMBROWSKI: And so that's not practical for somebody that wants to operate a radio station to cover an entire community. Even as many legacy international broadcasters are abandoning the shortwave bands, shortwave remains active and vibrant in another quadrant: namely, on shortwave pirate radio. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Do the pilots only complain if it's a song that they don't like? But O'Rahilly was undeterred, even after his ship was seized briefly by Dutch authorities. (Listen to one of Ronins broadcasts below.). MR. SWARZTRAUBER: They could stream it just like this podcast we're doing. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And that is obviously at the highest importance when we are talking about public safety. 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. They were also changing frequency. And that's a pretty big deterrent when you show up with police officers threatening to arrest somebody because they are operating a pirate radio station. Ive had great results in the past with an old Icom IC-735 and a 40-meter dipole antenna. In the quieter winter months, stations seem to pop out of the ether. 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. I received this QSL from the amazing Radio Ronin Shortwave shortly before he received the knock from the FCC and stopped transmitting. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Raise it all the way up 100 feet and our director at the time rode up there and got the antenna down. He has taken, you know, money from under the table to allow the station to operate from the rooftop without the property owner's knowledge. And so, yes, we may -- We have a warrant for the property. These include Amateur Radio Newsline, a weekly audio news [] They just twist the dial. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes. Across the country FCC officials are working to identify and take action against illegal unlicensed radio operators using frequencies allocated for legitimate radio operators that are causing interference and other issues. They are not advertising. So you couldn't be blamed for assuming that it depicts a long-vanished phenomenon, like Nehru jackets with iridescent scarves and psychedelic-patterned paper mini dresses. "How Pirate Radio Rocked the 1960s Airwaves and Still Exists Today" Why? HowStuffWorks may earn a small commission from affiliate links in this article. 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. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360 interactive panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and route planning . MR. DOMBROWSKI: And so they said well because we were here before it was colonized our federal laws don't apply to us. After the reorganization and modernization of the field I then became the Regional Director and manage several offices now. It's eminently cheaper to purchase or build an unlicensed radio station than it is to set up a robust streaming channel online, especially if you're looking to cover a local area. What would that bill do differently? Thanks to e-commerce, it's also easier than ever for a would-be pirate to find the necessary equipment and have it delivered to his or her door, as FCC enforcement official David Dombrowski described in this 2019 podcast. They lose advertisers because of it, they lose coverage area because of it, and it all comes down to dollars and cents. MR. DOMBROWSKI: No, it doesn't have -- It's not marked with pizza delivery guy either. 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. Now, of course, my favorite thing that I want to ask you is what are some fun examples, maybe not fun, but interesting examples of cases that you have closed where maybe the circumstances were a bit bizarre or interesting that might help a listener understand just how weird some of this stuff can get and just how interesting some of these operations can be. And when KIWI went silent, that was it. Thank you! And so he brought this argument up when we tried to get his station off the air by using the court proceedings and he fought that we were violating his First Amendment rights. "Pirate Radio" is a period piece, set in a time when the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" and the Who's "My Generation" were still scandalous and controversial rather than nostalgic anthems for today's aging baby boomers. March 13 2022 . Please support this website by adding us to your whitelist in your ad blocker. "Private radio was prohibited and only the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was part of the political establishment, sent radio to the British people with the remit to be morally uplifting, informative and educational," Moore says. 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. If you live in a geographic hotbed of pirate activity (again, eastern/central North America and Europe) you might find a portable radio ample for hearing a number of pirates. 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. Radio Caroline. We have a call center, it's 888-CALL-FCC where we have staff there during business hours to take your complaint. 10. I keep a copy handy as it helps me identify stations and better understand their format. Unauthorized stations are particularly prolific in the New York City area, where a 2016 study by the New York State Broadcasters Association (NYSBA) found that there actually were more pirates then on the FM band than legal licensed stations. I was still a teenager. Indeed, since pirates are operating at lower power, they get much more bang-for-the-watt out of SSB. KQLZ Pirate Radio stormed the Southern California airwaves in 1989, and. Enter a location to find a nearby pirate radio stations. 2022-03-13 23:21:58 Storage_size 430.3 GB (in 25,377 files) Title Pirate Radio Airchecks. Now I know that finding pirates is reasonably achievable; at least, it is possible to know roughly where, and generally when, to find them. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So when it comes to local law enforcement are they generally uninterested in taking this on or, you know, because you mentioned federal agents are often involved, it's federal courts, U.S. Pirate radio or a pirate radio station is a radio station that broadcasts without a valid license. We have language to kind of consider them an operator, so they could be liable for a fine and we do issue them a warning letter. More areas, more just the urban areas. And an overall limit of $2 million. Weve now covered the who, what, where, when, and how of pirate huntingbut what about why? Even then, though, Radio Caroline wouldn't go away. Chasing pirates has also increased my technical know-how. Its a simple technique, and although it takes some practice, will work on most any radio with a stable BFO (beat frequency oscillator). And another thing, also, we would have to direct our attention annually to five markets that are most affected by pirates and we would do some step-up enforcement. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes. Note: This podcast was recorded on June 21st. And one of the reasons that they are causing harmful interference, in particular to the FAA operations, is because they are not tested, right. It will also help to have some sort of adjustable bandwidth filter (wide/narrow). And he had some good backing, financial backing, by the ACLU who were fighting for him, and he was a microbroadcaster and he tried to encourage others to follow in his footsteps and protect our First Amendment rights, so he was --. An excellent and active pirate radio forum hosted by Chris Smolinski. We get them in Virginia, we get them out in Illinois, even just remote areas of West Virginia they pop up. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And those, and I think we mentioned New York, we mentioned Philadelphia, are there other hot spots in particular where this seems to just be a bigger problem than elsewhere in the country? So --. Everyone should agree that pirate radio stations - by any definition - are completely illegal. Other times though you might have reason to suspect that they are in on it, they are getting a kickback. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, we don't have a rule in the books that prohibits that from happening. MR. DOMBROWSKI: So the complainant needs to tell us where they hear the station. A new, raw, grassroots kind of pirate radio exploded from 1992 onwards. There is always a building manager they call the supra and he has a shop down in the basement and a lot of times we find the equipment down in his shop. We do that with every pirate station. Unlike trying to locate China Radio International, Radio Australia, or the BBC World Service, hunting pirates requires a decent-quality radio and antenna. Tribute to Pirate Radio, KQLZ 100.3 FM Los Angeles. The most popular frequency is arguably 6,925 kHz, but I often log pirates on 6,935 and 6,950 kHz. 3. And while pirate radio stations can be found across the radio spectrum, especially on AM and FM in urban areas, in this primer Ill be focusing on those that inhabit the shortwaves. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes. Indeed, this past November, I listened to the pirate Channel Z while sitting in my truck; I was only using a Tecsun PL-660 with the antenna extended out of my opened drivers-side window. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And it's important to clarify that FCC enforcement agents are not law enforcement agents, but I was struck by how some of the work that goes into identifying and shutting down a station is like good old-fashioned police work, like knocking on doors saying, hey, have you seen anything weird, have you seen people carrying around transmitters or antennas. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right. 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