The BBC played catch-up launching Radio One and recruiting the same pirates for their roster. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, everyone's dream job. VIEWS. I was still a teenager. Bruce will host a new daily show for Bauer's station Greatest Hits Radio, taking his iconic PopMaster game with him. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Well let that be a lesson to the youngsters listening. Our agency was delegated by Congress to allocate frequencies and allocate it in the public interest and it's a resource. Now I know that finding pirates is reasonably achievable; at least, it is possible to know roughly where, and generally when, to find them. Click here to donate via PayPal. Now when we talk about enforcement actions, you know, I'd like to kind of paint a picture for our listeners. He got the craft back and kept at pirate radio for nearly another quarter century. 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. And what the pirate radio operators do is they don't obtain a license, they don't go through this process, and they try to find vacant spectrum between these stations. 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. Google Maps is a web mapping service developed by Google. Since FM radio is broadcast as a mono signal, with a left-minus-right signal sent alongside, they can make a two-channel stereo station by recreating the stereo pilot carrier and then adding in. 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. We get them in Virginia, we get them out in Illinois, even just remote areas of West Virginia they pop up. "One reason I've found as to why people are still using pirate radio is that these communities have very strong cultural and historic connections to radio," Goren explains. Just browse the pirate radio category: https://swling.com/blog/category/pirate-radio/. Why? But most of the current American pirates are based on dry land, broadcasting from clandestine antennas on rooftops in places such as Brooklyn. 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. "I spoke with a pastor of a church in the community which had a station and the antenna was taken down by the FCC," Goren says. That was right when the internet really started exploding so he was able to get his message out. So just keep in mind next time you read some nice hipster article about how great pirate radio is in your community, that there are serious issues at play and what the FCC is doing is really important and that's why it's so great to have you on here to share your perspective and some of your history working on this and we really just want to thank you for your service. They label the equipment as something else. Pirate radio guru Andrew Yoder started his own pirate blog last year, and has already began populating it with regular updates, QSLs, and recordings. Ex-Beatle George Harrison was sufficiently appreciative of Radio Caroline's mission that he even wrote a sizable check in the early 1970s to help keep the ship in operation, according to Ray Clark's book "Radio Caroline: The True Story of the Ship That Rocked.". So we eventually went to the courts and fought. Addeddate 2022-03-13 23:21:58 . Collection Info. comment. Select a station from the list and it will play on the tuner. Here's a test shot without the line or antenna attached. And one of the reasons that they are causing harmful interference, in particular to the FAA operations, is because they are not tested, right. Pirates broadcast a wide variety of content, but are usually motivated by sharing their messageor favorite musicon the air. Thank you, too, for your support of these sites. It would identify what are the legitimate stations and also identify what stations we sanctioned so they could better get an understanding, you know, is this a legitimate station I am hearing or not. We do a field strength measurement to see if their power exceeds that threshold and if they meet the Part 15 requirements or not. There was an operator named Stephen Dunifer. Give us a sense of the universe of this problem given that it is such a priority for this FCC to crack down on it. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Yes. ACTIVITY. 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. 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. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: My guest has been David Dombrowski, Regional Director for Region One in the FCC Enforcement Bureau. We were able to prove that it wasn't a violation of the First Amendment rights and so that set the precedence for any future case for that argument. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And we talked a little bit about why this is a problem. MR. DOMBROWSKI: It is. 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. Unlike the rock 'n' roll hipsters of 1960s British pirate radio, who aimed at a mass audience, most of Brooklyn's unlicensed broadcasters seem to be immigrants and members of ethnic and religious minorities trying to reach their own groups and neighborhoods. And so, yes, we may -- We have a warrant for the property. Before we talk about where to hunt pirates, however, we need to talk about the necessary equipmenti.e., your radio and antenna. 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. 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. tyson jost dad; sean penn parkinson's disease; mockingbirds attacking my cat 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. 3. If you just use an internet browser and search FCC complaint you will come to the link for filing a complaint. Its a simple technique, and although it takes some practice, will work on most any radio with a stable BFO (beat frequency oscillator). There were helicopters flying over and taking videos, so we got on a little TV, and that helps to go a long way when we get a little media coverage. Additionally, we always try to include links to other retail options if they are available, as we support and freely advertise independent ham radio retailers. And as a bonus, Radio Caroline still exists though, ironically, it's gone legal. Pirates Week: http://shortwavepirate.info. This book makes it easier for you to locate and tune in pirate stationsand tells you all about the unlicensed broadcasters who play David to broadcasting conglomerates Goliath. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So everyone can now breathe a deep a sigh of relief, you are not going to have to go out and get a license for your security camera and you garage door opener. 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. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, it's -- Pirate radio has been around for decades. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes. Marshals, Department of Justice, because we are a federal agency, but have we leveraged the resources and the knowledge of local law enforcement in working on this, are there, you know, different approaches from different States? MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Got you. And, of course, just finding the antenna is not the end of the story, because it's not like when you find the antenna the DJ is standing right next to the antenna being like, uh, you got me. Many are confused by the term pirate radio, otherwise known as free radio. Either term is sufficient, and some stations prefer one designation or the other. It's covert surveillance equipment. In the quieter winter months, stations seem to pop out of the ether. The FRW is an email-only newsletter devoted to the hobby of pirate radio listening, and is distributed free to those who contribute. It's something we have been doing as long as the equipment has been available we've always had pirate radio operators. It is illegal for companies to market equipment that hasn't gone through what we call a certification process, equipment authorization process, where they get a company to look at their transmitter to make sure it complies with our technical rules and doesn't have potential to cause interference to other radio services. 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. Whether youre a QSL collector, a content DXer, or the casual SWLer, I find theres something in pirate radio listening for everyone. The Offshore Radio Museum website commemorates many of those pirates. And an overall limit of $2 million. There is a reason that those devices operate in an unlicensed manner because they are not transmitting very far. MR. DOMBROWSKI: And there is a lot of digital FM stations out there that are looking for programming so they could maybe work out at least an arrangement. For consistencys sake, I will use the term pirate radio in this article. Liverpool vs Wolves will kick-off on Wednesday, March 1 at 8pm. Listening to pirate radio is perfectly legaland frequently an ear-opening experience. "By playing nonstop current pop music in a situation where this had never before been available, Caroline had within months a larger audience than all the BBC stations combined," Moore explains. Yoder actually addresses this apparent restriction, to some degree, in the 2013 Pirate Radio Annual, which has only just been released. He then obtained another ship, a German trawler called the Ross Revenge, which continued to host the station until it ran aground along the British coast in 1991. The warrant is issued to the U.S. Now that maybe gets us down to the building, you know, where it might be operating. comment. So they thought that was a way for them to avoid detection by hopping from building to building and frequency to frequency. We do contact the property owner before we execute the warrant to let them know we are at the door and we don't want to break the door down but we need them there to open it. Enter Ronan O'Rahilly, who learned that the U.K. government's jurisdiction ended 3 miles (5 kilometers) off the coast, and that stations from other countries already were exploiting that loophole by putting transmitters on offshore ships, according to Moore. 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. Now this is not just a focus of the FCC, Congress is also interested in this. That was particularly true on the other side of the Atlantic, where the U.K. allowed only state-controlled radio from the 1920s through the mid-1960s. A new, raw, grassroots kind of pirate radio exploded from 1992 onwards. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right, he's no the public face of it. The plot is based loosely on the saga of an actual former pirate station, Radio Caroline, that was founded by an offbeat Irish entrepreneur named Ronan O'Rahilly, the inspiration for the character portrayed by Bill Nighy. Unlicensed radio broadcasters have been around practically since governments started trying to control and regulate the airwaves. The Who actually paid homage to Radio Caroline and other offshore broadcasters by parodying them on their 1967 concept album "The Who Sell Out," as music historian John Atkins has written. An excellent and active pirate radio forum hosted by Chris Smolinski. The FCC argued that we were here to regulate the airwaves. Ive had great results in the past with an old Icom IC-735 and a 40-meter dipole antenna. KQLZ Pirate Radio stormed the Southern California airwaves in 1989, and. Marshal Service actually and that allows us to go in with the U.S. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And we're talking about air traffic control? I asked him why he would still take the risk to go back on air and he said he wanted to reach the homeless, the shut-ins, the elderly who couldn't access the internet.". 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. Back in the 1980s, before the Internet and its online bulletin boards, I thought finding pirates was truly a huntrandom and altogether unpredictable. They have a bill circulating around called the PIRATE Act. So those are some of the challenges that you all have to tackle in taking on this important enforcement function. To prove my point, here are some MP3 recordings of some of my favorite recent pirate radio stations/broadcasts: Though pirates can be located anywhere on the planet, and therefore can broadcast, hypothetically, anywhere on the radio dial, patterns are actually fairly predictable in order to draw a listening audience. Once you get a license it restricts you where you can operate, how much power you can use, what antenna you can use, and how high your antenna is. Pirate radio operators usually have day jobslike most of usthus only transmit while home from work. MR. DOMBROWSKI: You know, that's hard to say. Loggings are in real time and there are very fewif anyoff-topic posts. March 13 2022 . To determine the wavelength of your signal in inches, divide 11811 by your transmitter's frequency in megahertz (MHz). Gimme Radio (for online listeners) Gimme Radio is one of the more modern American rock radio stations available today. 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. You have somebody that puts a station on the air and then what that person does is he leases air time for his station for other DJs and they come in and so he is getting a kickback from the DJs and he is getting advertising revenue. We are not trying to teach you to do something illegal, we are trying to prevent you from doing something illegal, so you can stop your Google search. Give me an address or an intersection in the town that you are picking it up on. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: And then just out of those four offices you then have to dispatch agents to 20 different States, so it's quite a big chunk of the country in terms of population. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Yes, very creative on that, wasn't it? If you are given ten choices make sure the one you actually one is your eighth choice because that's going to be the one that you get. I believe this is why authorities like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) place shortwave pirates comparatively lower on their enforcement priority list. We'd like to contact you. 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. I mean if you are familiar with telecom you know it's an illegal radio station, but what do we mean by pirate radio. MR. DOMBROWSKI: Raise it all the way up 100 feet and our director at the time rode up there and got the antenna down. Total Views 29,573 (Older Stats) ITEMS. We call them Notices of Apparent Liability where we will fine the operator. 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. After the reorganization and modernization of the field I then became the Regional Director and manage several offices now. But the interesting thing about this was that it was operated by a group of people who considered themselves Moors, which are indigenous people of the United States who were here before the United States was colonized. Weve now covered the who, what, where, when, and how of pirate huntingbut what about why? Radio Caroline because so influential that, pretty soon, other ships were broadcasting rock off the coast as well. Ive noticed increased pirate radio activity during the winter months, as well. "He convinced me to not stay on as Bond I'd be in danger of becoming part of the Establishment," Lazenby wrote on in an Instagram tribute after O'Rahilly's death in April 2020, noting that he had no regrets about taking that advice. But please note that we will never create a post and product link explicitly to receive a commission. And that's it, we will catch you next time. Powerful, uncertified transmitters manufactured in foreign countries easily slip through customs at U.S. ports. Want to know why the usually run them out at sea. So how do you escalate the situation, you know, what tools do you have to say, okay, we're not getting cooperation let's take this up a notch? Well media bureau was on there, they are the ones that license FM stations, and I kind of chose that as kind of my eighth choice. They don't know how to reach us? There was a case that I worked back in Philly back in the day --. The most popular frequency used by U.S. and Canadian pirate radio stations is 6925 kHz, transmitting in the AM or upper sideband (USB) modes. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: So there are no doubt some good samaritans listening to this show that want nothing more than to help with the scourge of pirate radio. Stations such as Weekend Rush, Kool FM, Pulse and Innocence wanted to represent the streets and promote local scenes.. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: That's some great local cooperation right there. Click here to view a list of all sponsors. Radio plays such an important role when you talk about hurricanes striking or other natural disasters, people turn to their local broadcast, including radio for information, and to have that be interfered with is a public safety concern let alone the FAA issues which are very serious. Revealing the. 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. These guys aren't blowing off their listeners like the other radio stations. So somebody that hasn't invested a lot of money in equipment and the single processing to make it sound richer you could tell if you have an ear to it, our agents can do that. 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 --. Indeed, since pirates are operating at lower power, they get much more bang-for-the-watt out of SSB. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right. Be specific. That happens a lot. 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. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Is that a point of pride for you from Philadelphia? Has it evolved over the years? 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? MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Right. But if you are buying something off of the dark web or whatever and it's coming into the U.S. you don't know, and when we talked before the show you mentioned that a lot of times with these FAA complaints it's a malfunctioning transmitter. MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Yes, so you have options. One of the first pirate radio operators we know of was Ronan O'Rahilly. Recycling is good. Airchecks from unauthorized broadcast radio stations throughout the years. We have pirate radio there, too, not as bad as we did in New York. Right now it is $10,000 per day per occurrence. ( Disclaimer) Transcript: MR. SWARZTRAUBER: Welcome to "More Than 7 Dirty Words," the official FCC podcast. Meanwhile, the Ross Revenge was repaired and converted into a floating museum for tourists. Has it gotten worse, has it gotten better? But just as the British government's stiff penalties didn't deter Radio Caroline, at least so far, the U.S. government's crackdown doesn't seem to have deterred the pirates. 14 July 2020. Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article: Patrick J. Kiger From unauthorized broadcast radio stations available today run them out in Illinois, even just areas... You all have to tackle in taking on this important enforcement function we get them in... 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