> The PIRATE Act [2020, HR583] permits the FCC to fine both pirate radio operators and the property owners/landlords who permit pirate radio activity on their property. The risk for property owners is substantial, with maximum fines of $119,555 per day, capped at a statutory maximum of $2,391,097.
Wild. How soon until the standard housing lease boilerplate contains clauses like “you may not transmit any electromagnetic radiation at all under any circumstances whatsoever” as a means of landlords trying to cover their booties?
More seriously, I’d be mighty concerned if I were a landlord and saw someone putting up a ham antenna, regardless of whatever licensing they claimed to have. It’s a bad day for public radio.
General license HAM operator here. The good thing is that HAM licenses are trivially auditable as the FCC provides a direct lookup on anyone licensed so anyone at all can verify their status. HAM bands are typically enforced by fellow operators who will work to triangulate and locate people who shouldn't be on it. There are even organized competitions where they practice locating devices.
I think the habit arises from people assuming ham was also short for something like AM and FM is, or in computers, since PC was an initialism, Mac should get the same treatment too.
"Your honor, I'd like to enter as evidence for the prosecution exhibits A, "Ueber das Gesetz der Energieverteilung im Normalspectrum" by Max Planck; B, a Wi-Fi router; C, this cheap crappy USB charger; and D, their kitchen lamp.
What they don't want is absentee or paid off landlords affording pirates an additional layer of protection. The article even points this out, if the building owners cooperate, and help the FCC end the broadcasts, it's highly unlikely the issue would be perused to that level.
Such a clause would eliminate 99.999%+ of potential tenants: Almost everyone has a cell phone, and also a microwave oven, and all of these things deliberately transmit electromagnetic radiation.
(And then we have the countless unintentional radiators to contend with.)
It also rules out people who use any form of light in their household... including candles.
But I do believe the author was jokingly referencing landlords adding generic catch-all clauses without understanding the issue, and understood it went to such lengths, and found that funny. (I did)
You don't even need a light. The tenant themselves would emit lots of infrared radiation. Not to mention the black body radiation from any other items on the property that are hotter than absolute zero.
these rules aren't there to rule you out, they want you to pay their mortgage after all. the rule is to get rid of you by terminating the contract if you cause more headaches than your rent money is worth.
As someone who has extensive experience broadcasting on "pirate" radio, it is great fun, and typically harms no one. In fact, during some natural disasters, these pirate stations became a great source of up to date crowd sourced information on what was going on, even helping coordinate first responders.
Obviously letting everyone broadcast radio-station strength FM signals willy-nilly is a bad idea, but going after someone in a neighborhood occupying an unused swath of spectrum is not, in my opinion, the best use of anyone's resources.
How would you know? If your equipment was operating improperly or out of specification, how would anyone contact you to let you know?
> these pirate stations became a great source of up to date crowd sourced information
This is a fantastic claim that should come with solid evidence. I know licensed HAM and other operators do practice and work to provide these services, but I've never seen them legitimately attributed to pirate stations anywhere.
> but going after someone in a neighborhood occupying an unused swath of spectrum
It's complaints based. The FCC does not "scout around" looking for pirates. If you step on my signal, I will record it, and I will report it to the FCC. If your station has been found and is being shut down then your actions rose to this level of notice.
> the best use of anyone's resources.
I agree. The airwaves are _everyones_ resources though. It's those who abuse the system that create the waste.
The article specifically states that the FCC is required to do sweeps in large markets. In the past it was complaint based; this is a new and unfortunate change.
This sounds like a lot of pearl clutching from someone with zero experience in this space, but I'll still try and reply in good faith.
> How would you know? If your equipment was operating improperly or out of specification, how would anyone contact you to let you know?
The stations I broadcast on had websites and Facebook pages. Anyone was free to lodge a complaint, but no one ever did.
> This is a fantastic claim that should come with solid evidence. I know licensed HAM and other operators do practice and work to provide these services, but I've never seen them legitimately attributed to pirate stations anywhere.
It's a fair ask, but sorry I'm not going to dox myself to provide you with evidence. Either believe me, or don't.
That said I don’t think the claim is that “fantastic”. What’s hard to believe about people tuning into a hyper local station to get up to date information during an emergency? The fact some of those folks were volunteer fire fighters or search and rescue makes it too hard to swallow?
> It's complaints based. The FCC does not "scout around" looking for pirates. If you step on my signal, I will record it, and I will report it to the FCC. If your station has been found and is being shut down then your actions rose to this level of notice.
Again, we were operating on unused bands of frequency with low power transmitters. I promise you there was no one else's signal being "stepped on".
> I agree. The airwaves are _everyones_ resources though. It's those who abuse the system that create the waste.
If you consider a small, fun, independent, neighborhood radio station to be "abuse", then sure, we're the bad guys. I would counter argue that you shouldn't need to provide the FCC with tens of thousand of dollars to use resources that are going unused, and that no one is going to "miss" anyway. It's not like the spectrum is some finite thing that can never be recouped once used. If someone else started using that part of the spectrum at a commercial level, we can just turn our low powered gear off.
I operated an unattended 87.9 for ten years in two OK towns and one OK city, 30' mast with distinctive circularly polarized FM element. I think the greatest dangers are to shuffle music you like that happens to be popular, pull political talk crap from the web of uncertain content. Talking yourself is fine if you want and try to maintain a reliable weekly schedule. But be aware of curiosity, a human voice increases the chance you might some day have an FCC CE3k (Close Encounter of the 3rd Kind). Never happened to me.
87.9 is great because it is the default freq of a lot of small plug in transmitters, so tiny signals are ubiquitous and it's the low edge of the band. Never sell anything or rebroadcast Internet sources that sell things (exception is Old Time Radio shows with ancient commercials). Find a playlist of older things that aren't 'hits'. Don't let any broadcast FM salesman conclude, "they're taking listeners from our market." Stay away on the band from Public Radio Stations, they are likely complainers and if there's one at 88.1 then bump to a few slots above it. No 'fake' IDs with letters of course, and I'd suggest no jingles or station cute names. Psychologically this gives some busybody an entity in their mind to oppose. Be nothing but a signal.
I did week long marathons of CBS Radio Theater, old Prairie Home Companions from the time before Keilor was savagely MeToo'd, and long form rock like ELP and reggae and classics and whatnot shuffled from a big eclectic list of older everything (but not 'hits'). Once I did a solid week of one long ~40 minute seamless loop of wave after wave of crowd laughter. Nothing but laughter, crowds and individuals with distinctive laughs. As the week progressed I felt the average quality of the FM Band increasing.
I wouldn't be surprised if these fines are payable directly to Clear Channel. Personally I'd say that at this point in the evolution of FM radio, half of its broadcast spectrum should be made available for unlicensed use by individuals operating lowish power transmitters.
Agreed - But if everyone followed this philosophy we would have reason to enforce it. Perhaps the thinking is then, therefore, enforce before it becomes a problem?
I don’t think “everyone” has the interest, know how, equipment, and time to operate a radio station. But I would personally very much like to see what it would look like at “problematic” levels. That amount of independent media would be truly a thing to behold.
I broadcast my Pandora/iTunes via FM to my local devices... presumably there are wattage limitations, under which one is presumed to be operating for personal use (similar to the "car adapters" which "plug in" via FM broadcast)?
OT: Many moons ago, I had one of those cheap Belkin 3.5 mm –> FM car adapters (my car didn't have bluetooth in any form, this was like 2003, but it made it possible to use my iPod instead of the car's cassette player).
Anyway, frequency selection was a manual process, and while the best sound quality was found on frequencies where no radio stations transmitted, it was fully possible to dial in an already occupied frequency. Power output was low, but strong enough to overpower anything in a 10-15 m radius, forcing nearby cars in a traffic jam to listen to my music.
Thanks for giving direction; I went ahead and read snippets of "Part 15" and ultimately it seems my unmodified Amazon-special FM-antenna is probably "too strong," far exceeding the ~200ft broadcast limitation.
> the Notices require each property owner to respond within ten days with evidence that the property owner is no longer permitting pirate radio broadcasting to occur on its property.
So, like, post a sign "no pirate radio broadcasting plz"? Or show how it's in the lease agreement that it's against the rules?
> Importantly, the Act also extended the FCC’s enforcement authority to property owners deemed to be willfully and knowingly permitting pirate radio activity on their property.
Sounds like it. I’ve never broadcast over radio so I’m not sure how easy it would be to hide but that seems to be an important factor. It might come down to surprise inspections but those still usually have minimum 24 hours’ notice, at least where I live.
You pretty much can't hide a transmitter. If you're broadcasting with illegal power levels, it's pretty trivial to walk around with a directional antenna and triangulate the source transmitter. If you're curious, look up "radio foxhunting". Some people do it as a hobby.
Your only hope is to set up an unattended transmitter, connect to it through the internet, and spend your effort obscuring that connection. Creating an untraceable connection through the internet is a lot simpler.
Aside: you could actually obscure the location of your transmitter by building multiple of them and doing some tricks with phase and frequency. Ultimately you're still trying to hide a guy in a crowd screaming into a megaphone. They'll find you eventually, you can only make it harder for them.
A reasonable analogy is to think of the antenna as a lightbulb that either changes color quickly or changes brightness quickly to send a signal.
If you find yourself bathed in, say, green light, it's pretty easy to look around until you see the green lightbulb.
It's very nearly the same here except that radio waves are at a much lower frequency than visible light. If you see a signal at 14.313 MHz, you can swing an antenna around and walk in the strongest direction until you get to the source, modulo reflections and whatnot.
Exactly. Consider the guys with absolutely the most reason to want to hide a radio station: the military. They're not worrying about the FCC, they're worrying about antiradiation missiles. Do they have a way of hiding a transmitter? Only by things designed to make it look like noise and that requires the receiver to know how to recognize the signal in the noise.
The reason you can't hide it is because it's an FM modulated signal on an actual carrier frequency. It's designed to be received by cheap consumer radios in the clear.
Aren't there frequencies that can go through the planet though? I thought even near me there are large antenna farms that broadcast to nuclear submarines. How do you pinpoint those if you're not looking from the air? Just curious. I should probably get my ham
Jamming other radios vs broadcast a pirate radio signal are not exactly the same thing though. Interrupting someone else's signal is definitely going to get people's attention. If this was just an FM radio broadcast, it would fly much further under the radar.
Having been very loosely associated with some pirate FM in San Diego years ago, my experience was that they created no interference for other operating stations.
From wikipedia:
"After the FCC complied with the provisions of the Radio Broadcasting Act of 2000 by commissioning the MITRE Report to test if there was significant interference from LPFM stations on the full-power stations, the study showed that the interference of LPFM is minimal and would not have a significant effect on other stations."
This is all about the FCC acting as guard dog for 99% spam spewing stations.
The power limits and operating conditions for low power FM should be relaxed, to allow the radio spectrum to be utilized by the citizenry.
Someone should put a hidden radio station on one of the properties owned by the FCC, or better yet commissioner of that agency and see if they fine themselves
I'm not in any sense a lawyer. I don't have the time or inclination to read all of title 47.
I wonder how well the FCC will stand up after Chevron. The AM bits I glanced at look really solid, this is a band, this is a channel this is the maximum rate of amplitude change, tidy technical details spelled out by congress.
But like, the PIRATE act is pretty explicit, 100,000 per day 2 mil max. Perhaps there's some other law that allows the FCC to adjust for inflation. but the bill, as I the non-lawyer reads it, doesn't say anything about inflation.
Seems like they could lower the fine a bit, at least.
IANAL either but I doubt Chevron will impact this because it is Legislation. Chevron gives litigants the opportunity to smack back regulations that come through the non-legislative Rule Making process. What we have here is the result of the 2020 PIRATE Act.
They are gone now, but during COVID there were a bunch of relatively cheap, and what seemed to be pretty decent quality, 50-150W FM transmitters on Amazon.com. I thought that was odd. They were there for about 6-8 months. Probably not related to this but who knows. I remember looking them up from time to time thinking about how cool it would be to have a pirate radio station in the secluded area I lived in at the time.
