Ramsey Electronics has been well known in micro-radio circles for selling small Part 15 transmitter kits that often function as many folks’ first introduction to unlicensed broadcasting. A few years ago Ramsey started selling transmitters that put out much more power, at least 1 watt, which greatly exceed the Part 15 limits for unlicensed operation […]
There has been some grassroots interest and organizing around establishing a low-power AM radio service for a number of years now. The engineering for AM radio is trickier than for FM — the long wavelengths typically mean much bigger antennas and towers. However, some innovative guys like Kyle Drake have come up with some engineering solutions for doing very-low-power 100 milliwatt Part 15 LPAM broadcasting that can be applied to higher-power broadcasts at 100 watts or so.
One of the motivating factors behind the LPAM movement is that some of the original LPFM activists were unhappy that the LPFM service was made exclusively noncommercial. Some parties wanted LPFM to provide an opportunity for new locally owned commercial stations whose existence has been all but stamped out by industry consolidation resulting from the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
John at DIYmedia.net has the lowdown on the new LPAM petition for rulemaking that was just accepted by the FCC. That acceptance means the FCC will now officially investigate the possibility of such a service, and take public comments on it.
John also thinks some aspects of the proposal may not fly. In particular he notes that the LPAM petition asks that new commercial licenses not be auctioned off as currently required by law, and also would like to see competing applications resolved by the FCC reviewing their proposed broadcast content.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting that the FCC actually decided to formally explore the issue, though it’s tough to know what forces or motivations inside the Commission actually pushed the topic to the fore.
Last week CNN.com ran an article on pirate station WSQT broadcasting at 1680 AM in Washington DC and making calls for massive protests against the Bush inauguration in January. The station was apparently discovered by a CNN reporter, who called the FCC for a response to the station. This tipped off the FCC, which didn’t yet know about the station.
As far as I can tell, no other news outlet has reported on the station.
In response to getting dimed out by CNN, the station posted an article to radio.indymedia.org on Sunday stating that they’re moving their signal to FM because the setup is much more mobile:
The FM rig and its antenna set up and break down in seconds. The nature of FM(VHF) signals and their small antennas allows security steps to be taken that are impractical on AM.
Even if the FCC manages to capture one of our rigs, we have a bottomless ability to make more.
Unfortunately, this situation is just another example of why mainstream press coverage is not necessarily a good thing for an unlicensed station.
One thing that I am curious about is what kind of transmitters they’re using, since they both told CNN and posted to radio.indymedia that:
The big AM rigs with their 10 mile reported range(and a suspicious, questionable report of a skip heard in the UK) cost maybe $40 plus some time in the dumpster fetching parts, and the 3 mile range FM rigs maybe $15 for what the dumpster cannot provide.
I’d love to know how they’re making AM transmitters with a 10 mile range for $40. I can only guess, but that would have to be bigger than 100 milliwatt Part 15 transmitter to get that kind of range consistently.
Kirsten Anderberg explores what volunteers with Freak Radio Santa Cruz, Free Radio Olympia and Radio Free Cascadia think about the recent FCC raid on Freak Radio in her new article “One Hunderd New Pirate Radio Stations.” She also gives a good overview of the events that led up to the raid.
I agree that one hundred new stations only makes it harder to shut the movement down. But what about 1000?
Transmitters are cheap. Cheaper than computers, and if you go under 20 watts, they’re cheaper than iPods, for crying out loud.
But you don’t even have to broadcast at multi-watt power if that level of power and risk makes you nervous. Small, low-powered transmitters keep getting cheaper and easier to find, partially thanks to the popularity of iPods and mp3 players.
You can easily mod a $30 Griffin iTrip or Belkin TuneCast to extend it’s range a few more yards. Or if you’re not too afraid of a soldering iron, you can put together a Ramsey FM-10c or just buy an assembled CanaKit UK108 for $18 and you just have to put it in a case like this.
Incidentally, the CanaKit is the same transmitter that the Walker Art Center gave away hundreds of during their Radio ReVolt project. They have also posted a list of places to buy low-power and micropower transmitters.
With any of these ultra-low-power “legal” Part 15 transmitters you can easily cover a dorm, apartment building or city block. If you don’t mind exceeding Part 15 limits you can pretty easily get your signal out a quarter mile or more. Your audience is smaller than a 20 watt station, but so is your risk. But if you and ten friends each get together with a station, then you’ve got a network.
Of course, countless pirate stations are currently on the air with 10s of watts without ever being bothered by the FCC. Many of them don’t run 24/7, don’t do much publicity, or otherwise haven’t managed to get themselves onto the FCC’s enforcement agenda.
It’s important to remember that stations like Freak Radio kept a high profile in their community. The benefit is that it engendered community support, and probably contributed to the station being on the air for nine years before being shut down. The downside, is that it makes you an easy target.
There are many different ways to get on the air, from super-micro-power to low-power, from 24/7 to an hour a week, out in the open, or underground. I say, choose your method and do it.
If you’re so inclined, DIYmedia.net has a nice list of sellers for both ultra-low Part 15 transmitters, and higher watt units.
Andrew points to the RHZ Amateur Radio Network, which
is a participatory experiment aiming to create the possibility of a legal, publicly owned and operated broadcast radio that is built like a peer to peer network.
The idea is to use legal unlicensed low-power AM transmitters operating at Part 15 levels — under 100 milliwatts — to set up a radio network that pulls its content off a central repository.
It’s interesting and seems like it may be a worthwhile project. But for all the project’s rhetoric, it’s not that innovative. Pirate stations have been contributing to and pulling from free program sharing sites like radio4all and radio.indymedia for quite some time.
What’s a little disappointing is that RHZ
Kyle Drake, who I met at Radio Access Democracy, is doing some pioneering engineering work to help make legal low-power AM broadasting simpler and more effective. There is already a community of broadcasters who have been doing low-power AM for a while using a variety of transmitters and antenna designs. They can be found at the Community Radio USA message board.
I get the sense that the guy behind RHZ didn’t really research low-power AM much before diving in with his cheap transmitter. Otherwise, I’d think he would have reached out to the existing community and also have some better tech documentation for people who want to get involved.
If anything, perhaps what the RHZ project adds is an element of coordination between stations, along with the ‘net hipster cred of integrating the peer-to-peer concept and Creative Commons licensing.
I don’t really mean to be so cynical and critical — this may be a project that takes off, though at 6 weeks in that still remains to be seen.
I’ve been studying low-power and unlicensed broadcasting for almost ten years now, and I’ve seen dozens of projects like this get announced and hyped only to see almost all fail. And the reason why I think they fail is because the people behind them often are unaware of similar efforts that came before, or that are going on simultaneously. They miss out on the collective experience and expertise that is there to be shared.
The Radio Re-Volt project I think is an example of one that worked because it tapped the well of legal unlicensed low-power FM knowledge and expertise. It’s goals were different than RHZ’s, but like RHZ it seems like Re-Volt was driven more by artistic and community goals rather than geeky tech ones. Yet Re-Volt succeeded in putting hundereds of transmitters into the hands of average folks because they chose to draw on both the theory and experience of innovators like 2005 workshop schedule, which includes their low-power television session. While this may be the start of a new pirate TV movement in the US, pirate TV has been alive in Italy for several years and was used in Eastern Europe during Soviet times.
Demand Media directed me to a new short documentary on the Italian Telestreet movement. This video, which you can download at archive.org, takes you on a tour of an actual pirate TV studio.
Another longer documentary, called Ethereal Shadow Archipelago, can be watched at freespeech.org. This video puts the pirate TV into the larger context of Italian media consolidation, which is more severe and disturbing than even the US context, given that Prime Minister Berlusconi is also the nation’s biggest media baron. It would be as if Fox owner Rupert Murdoch were the US president.
It’s interesting that contemporary pirate TV seems to have taken root in Italy before the US. Tetsuo Kogawa, the father of mini-FM radio in Japan, which is the inspiration for micropower broadcasting in the US, found his own inspiration with the micro-radio stations used by the Italian Autonomia movement in the 1970s.
The piqueteros movement in Argentina has also been utilizing pirate TV, as seen in the documentary TV Piquetera.
As I mentioned before, the spread of pirate TV in the US may be limited by the dwindling number of people relying on over-the-air broadcast TV, although that population is arguably poorer and more in need of radical information.
Still, I think it’s worth trying. And perhaps something can be learned from the Italian and Argentine experience, both in terms of tech and tactics.
Live pirate broadcast of streaming radio reports from the streets have been very useful in actions from the WTO in 1999 to the RNC protests in New York City this past Aug.
Just imagine if it were possible to have a TV broadcast of live video of riot cops indiscriminately rounding up people on the streets during a major protest action. Or, one might even broadcast a live camera from the top of a tall building, giving an aerial view of protest zones. Then, just as protesters often keep a radio handy to hear reports from micropower stations, they could also arm themselves with mini portable TVs for a visual report.
Sure, we might soon see the ability to stream live video over Wi-Fi to enabled PDAs or cell phones. But can you buy a playback device on eBay for less than $20?
There are still many advantages to broadcast TV that is not tethered to a cable, internet, laptop or a satellite dish.”>Tetsuo Kogawa.