Ofcom have become a lot more harsh about people pissing around with radio equipment on Band II FM, as the kit is way eaiser to get and despite budget cuts they are quite good at taking down stations outside London.

There are loads of interlinked reasons for this, but the main one is that if this stuff is done wrongly it fucks up aviation comms (which you probably know), also even the bandplans where the studio to TX links are are actually being used by stuff like digital wireless LAN’s between business sites and if a business is fucked up by these they will have to calll Ofcom on the station as its their livelihood.

The same tech what gets you your smartphone, bluetooth, wireless laptop means that every bit of airwaves is being used for something and big companies with power have paid big money for those licenses – and some of the stuff is safety or business critical. Remember that in just 10-15 years there has been so many advances in technology….

Where I work we have just deployed a lot of RF-based kit for a healthcare environment, peoples lives depend on it.

Yes, I used to play around with illegal radio kit nyself a few years ago but times change. If I encountered a stray Band II signal causing trouble where I work, whilst I might be more inclined to DF it myself, find out who was responsible (I’d probably know them or their mates 😉 ) and have a friendly chat with them but if they didn’t immediately sort out that interference I’d have to reluctantly tell them “if you don’t sort it out, I will have to make a formal report to Ofcom”.

to make things worse, a lot of city-based stations aren’t interested in all the “nerdy” stuff, the engineers who were can make more cash with less hassle doing legit work, so there are a lot of muppets in cities causing interference.

then add to that the “gangster” element which pirate stations in cities are attracted to – they are often a way of laundering drugs money as its a high risk but high reward “investment”, so Ofcom work with local cops and eve SOCA (or SCDEA in your country) to track pirates..

The fact you’re in Scotland makes a very big difference indeed. Scotland is much less densely populated these days, in fact its one of the only countries in the UK to have a population decline. The amount of pet cats in the UK outnumber the entire human population of Scotland by 2 million..

also where I live is approach for every civillian and military airport in the region including London so the airwaves are busy and we can’t afford to have any beacon/VFR signals disrupted.

So although Ofcom have UK-wide jurisidiction, the attitude is of course different. As you say its a novelty thing in Scotland (I’ve never heard of that many Scots pirates in recent times, although there were political ones way before either of us were born).

In England since the 1980s many the kind of folk doing pirate radio stations in cities have been funding them by drugs money and even fraud – and this has been proven in Court (not just Daily Mail rumours) so feds are interested in them for other reasons. This creates much more of a backlash than radio alone, consider that where the region I live in now was for many years the home for offshore radio as well as land based dance music pirates so folk were quite sympathetic until recently. and if they think the station is popular/making money they will confiscate as many assets as possible equivalent to what they think the stations profit is.

You come across like you clearly know your stuff – but a lot more people don’t, they are only interested in music, so they just put TX’s on air without bothering with the tech bits and there are interference problems. Also there’s a difference between just complaining for the sake of it and making a stand when people are stupidly causing harmful interference and affecting others safety or businesses.

As I said, I’d only use Ofcom as a very last resort if pirates caused genuine interference to equipment used at my work, and refused to sort out their rig after a friendly chat. A lot of folk would just call Ofcom or the cops anyway and if these pirates picked the rural area there are others who would be a lot more hostile, as warring pirate stations have caused problems here already, one lot trespassing on land to put up a rig, another coming up from London to steal it..

I’d only reluctantly use the authorities because of the safety-critical nature of the equipment involved, and my employers would expect me do to so as my duty as an IT/telecoms manager. My company is responsible to our clients, their families, and the NHS and Social Services first rather than a flawed concept of freedom.

But I’d be much more likely to try and find out who the pirates were informally, suggest how they could stop interference and which areas they should avoid to stop problems…

Another important factor is that it seems mobile data tarrifs have dropped enough that people can afford to listen to online stations where 3G is available or maybe even GPRS, as reasonable quality audio could be sent via ISDN bandwidths even in the 1990s.

[YT]hE2-eNlUAz0[/YT]

@DaftFader 428339 wrote:

[YT]hE2-eNlUAz0[/YT]

either flogging molly or drop kick murphy’s can’t think which, i’m leaning towards flogging molly

@nn-Gazatryptamine 428346 wrote:

either flogging molly or drop kick murphy’s can’t think which, i’m leaning towards flogging molly

the vocalist doesn’t sound like the drop kick murphies as far as I can remeber … I’ve not heard alot of there stuff though. music sounds very similer tho … I’d lean towards flogging molly tooo even tho I’ve not heard them just because the singer doesn’t sound like I remeber the drop kick’s sounding.

@nn-Gazatryptamine 428363 wrote:

true that, tis not DKM’s.

i once listened to pirate radio (no, really, i did) got fed up with it, all they would go on about was pirate stuff like whenches, gold deblun, sea monsters and goin arrrrrg alot

I was trying to make a similer joke earlyer but gave up on it cos i was stupidly searching for “pirate music” on google … all that came up was pirate music as in illigal downloads lol … so had to settle with the pirate jig ting lol

Out of curiosity, why do pirate radio instead of an internet stream?

@SPAC3D1NVAD3R 428333 wrote:

used to be loadsa dance pirate stations here in the 90,s and 00,s but comreg have cracked down on them big time due to independant licenced stations kicking up a fuss the few that exist now play mostly commercial shite and only cover the dublin area

FREEDOM FM underground pirate radio station straight out of a squat in Brighton. 88.3FM in the Brighton area or stream via FREEDOM – 88.3 FM and at http://has.dj/ everything from crust-punk to acid tekno.

@DaftFader 428340 wrote:

Good london ones that I can think of are kool fm 94.6, erruption fm 101.3 (alltho it’s down atm as they having some probs :cry:), and another one that’s not as good is 95.1 i think … it’s a little crapper then the other two what are normaly shit hot.

you can stream kool fm online too … just search “kool london” or “kool fm” in google

Would that be Kool FM that’s referenced in ‘Topcat – Pirate Radio’ ? :crazy::crazy:

@madscientist 461034 wrote:

Would that be Kool FM that’s referenced in ‘Topcat – Pirate Radio’ ? :crazy::crazy:

Yeah I googled “Topcat – Pirate Radio kool” and it comes up with some hits with kool London and topcat so i guess it is yeah.

I was involved in shortwave pirate radio in my late teens-early twenties, running a shortwave radio pirate called The Crystal Ship. In my forties, I was rebit by the pirate radio bug.

I first looked into resurrecting the station as an internet stream. I still had a lot of the original taped material from the station. However, the streaming services I reviewed were pretty overloaded with rules about what you could or could not broadcast (several of our best station promos, for instance, would have been shot down because of the Pink Floyd background tracks used under the voice-overs), among other things– and I figured that what I wanted to do just wasn’t going to be allowed on the streaming services I was looking into at the time. So I decided to do it all again ‘the hard way’.

But, in 2004 it was actually much easier to get started, thanks to the internet. All kinds of information out there on starting a pirate radio station (not that I needed a lot of that), and the deeper topics of transmitting equipment modification and repair, and sources for equipment like eBay that didn’t exist the first time I set up the station. It made everything fairly quick and easy to get going again.

And, there is something magical about transmitting a siganl through the airwaves, to be tuned in on shortwave radio by listeners many hundreds or even a thousand or two thousand miles away, that net-streaming just cannot match. Almost everybody can set up a netsream nowadays, but not everybody can set up a genuine broadcasting pirate radio station, without doing a lot of research and learning. And of course, we were free to transmit whatever we wanted, within reason, without worrying about copyrights or royalties or any of the other stuff that can get in the way. All we had to worry about was the FCC.

(In retrospect, I should have worried a little more about the FCC…)

it depends a lot on terrain – Wales is a challenging environment even for licensed broadcasters like Arqiva (they do the towers for all BBC and commercial broadcasting and also much of the blue light services comms). Similarly the more mountainous countries of Northern Europe in comparison to the Netherlands…

There are obvious reasons why most UK radio innovation happened in Essex and Cambridge rather than the West and Wales (although some Welsh companies rise to the challenge and make RF-based surveillance kit which is that good the Chinese buy it from us!)

Even in the nationalised days a lot of innovations with landline telephony and telegraphy (which led to broadband) were tried out in Wales, I know some old boys who installed a lot of it for the Post Office.

Ofcom / FCC / Agentschap Telecom aren’t going to bother online broadcasters as there is no regulation on them other than common sense rules regarding decency etc (though its not even possible to enforce a watershed due to the international nature) of them. However its easier to be traced and approached by copyright feds.