Technocrat

Pirates of the English Channel

Uncle Entity
Tue May 13 17:24:51 -0700 2008
Freedom

The UK communication regulator's (Ofcom) plans to hunt down and silence pirate radio stations has been uncovered by The Register through Freedom of Information Act requests. Previous attempts that involved issuing licenses to the stations has only resulted in the 'mainstreaming' of the stations as the former pirates sold the licenses to 'large commercial radio groups' and lead to more pirate stations popping up to fill the void Ofcom claims.

"Pirate radio stations have been around for decades, and Ofcom tries hard to differentiate the happy crews of the 70s from today's gun-toting, drug-dealing gangsters: the former were, apparently, harmless hippies, while the latter are dangerous criminals. But unlike the regulator's public statements their internal documents make no mention of guns and little reference to drugs - although they do highlight pirate broadcasting interfering with emergency service radios:

'In 2006 Ofcom's field operations team responded to 70 safety-of-life cases (a significant increase from the 41 such cases reported in 2005).'"

What's a regulator to do when the majority of the people prefer the pirates to what the legal stations have to offer?

 

Pirates in the USA?

Julian Brookes
Wed May 14 05:44:18 -0700 2008
Does anyone here know if the FCC rules have been changed to allow "community" broadcasting, such as: http://radioveronica.us (which I don't live quite within range of)? Or is this a pirate?
  
Pirates of the English Channel
AB3A
Wed May 14 05:44:44 -0700 2008

This is a problem for all radio and television programming. Given the limited spectrum, they have to appeal to the largest audience. This results in very bland, very similar radio and TV programs.

People get fed up with this bland, lowest-common-denominator, sameness. They try to change it and get rebuffed at the door. Now, if you happen to live in North America, you might try knocking on someone's door who happens to own a radio station. They might give your different format a try. There are also outfits like XM and Sirius who are always looking for inexpensive content. But even they are starting to aim for that lowest common denominator of sameness.

In the US, we have Low-Power FM broadcast rules that allow for budding talent to try themselves out on a small audience first. That bleeds off a few potential pirates. I don't know if similar regulations exist in the UK.

The bottom line is that economics of scarcity and of advertising have pushed the programming to a very regular sameness. It's not just the content, though. It's the compression of audio (this is a subject all of its own), it's the stupidity of assuming a short attention span, and so on and so forth. A music track longer than five minutes is almost unworkable in today's markets.

Given these limits, it's not surprising that some people have grown so disgusted that they've been trying out pirate radio. The only thing I have against such behavior is that they need to ensure their signal doesn't stomp all over other key signals on the air. The transmitter needs to put a clean signal on the air, and the signal coverage area needs to be carefully considered.

I'm not sure what safety of life cases means. Are we talking about police or aircraft radios, or are we talking about another radio station with bland programming that might not be able to broadcast an alert?

This is just a taste of a much larger issue about the homogenization of society's tastes in to a single bland format. Eventually people want to spice things back up. But you can't trust a hungry program director or program consultant to take a chance on something like that yet. Pirate operations can lead the way...

  
Pirates of the English Channel
Nathan Smith
Wed May 14 07:26:28 -0700 2008

Ofcom found that only 14 per cent of listeners thought their radio was being interfered with by pirates . . .

Wow, another fascinating use of the term "pirate."  Also, I find it ironic that the broadcast of FM signals could be construed as "interfering with a radio."

  
Pirates of the English Channel
ziv
Sat May 17 03:06:16 -0700 2008

I have some sympathy for the pirates and it's not a huge problem but the reality is that some of the pirates do use cheap equipment with an unstable or dirty output.

In 2004 there was a pirate that was using a wide and drifting signal on 48.56MHz from the studio to the transmitter, the transmitter was some sort of badly filtered frequency doubler that produced 2x48.56=97.12 but produced enough energy at 3x48.56=145.68MHz to be heard across all the two meter ham band repeater output frequencys for a few miles.

 Last time I tuned to radio Genesis for somthing different to listen to while in the bath I could not get a good signal as they seemed to be overlapping with BBC radio 3 and unsurprisingly radio 3 was winning.

Driving around London listening to a licensed FM station I have ocasionally heard a pirate drift across the frequency.

  
 

Do you have questions about the site? Write to bruce at perens.com . List of all articles we've ever published. Source Code Developer's Documentation RSS XML Sitemap XML News Sitemap Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict Valid CSS! [Valid RSS]