> 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.
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.