> 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.
basil-rash 25 days ago [-]
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.
csunbird 21 days ago [-]
Most of the contracts should already mention “No illegal activities”, which should cover this, right?
qwertox 21 days ago [-]
"How could I know this is illegal, if it was sold on Amazon and had great reviews?"
imchillyb 21 days ago [-]
The same way you would know that flying a drone, today, without a license is illegal in the USA.
We are required, in our society, to keep ourselves informed. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking laws in the US.
21 days ago [-]
nkrisc 21 days ago [-]
If that’s your defense in court, good luck.
techjamie 25 days ago [-]
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.
buescher 21 days ago [-]
if you really want to get them riled, spell it H.A.M.
ProllyInfamous 20 days ago [-]
—7.3—
grendelt 25 days ago [-]
(Just ham not HAM)
fortran77 21 days ago [-]
Us real hams (20 wpm extra since 1977) know how to spell it. I'm always amazed how "ham" became "HAM"
evilduck 21 days ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 21 days ago [-]
"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.
JumpCrisscross 21 days ago [-]
And as Exhibit E, their housecat.
akira2501 21 days ago [-]
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.
ssl-3 21 days ago [-]
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.)
ldoughty 21 days ago [-]
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)
wongarsu 21 days ago [-]
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.
giantg2 21 days ago [-]
Or people themselves (IR).
exe34 21 days ago [-]
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.
Carrok 21 days ago [-]
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.
akira2501 21 days ago [-]
> and typically harms no one
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.
kaikai 21 days ago [-]
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.
akira2501 20 days ago [-]
> FCC is required to do sweeps in large markets
In markets that have historically had the largest number of pirate complaints. The article is clear about this nuance.
Carrok 21 days ago [-]
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.
HocusLocus 21 days ago [-]
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.
21 days ago [-]
mindslight 20 days ago [-]
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.
byteknight 21 days ago [-]
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?
Carrok 21 days ago [-]
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.
ProllyInfamous 25 days ago [-]
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)?
grendelt 25 days ago [-]
Right. Those are covered under "Part 15" as unlicensed devices. They cannot interfere with other services and must accept any interference.
grvbck 21 days ago [-]
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.
ProllyInfamous 21 days ago [-]
My FM is is detectable up to 500ft away, but I operate with ±0.5 MHz badgaps, so not overriding any nearby licensed frequencies.
ProllyInfamous 23 days ago [-]
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.
We'll see if anybody directionfinds me =D
—73
autoexecbat 21 days ago [-]
> and must accept any interference.
What does it mean to not accept interference?
ooterness 21 days ago [-]
If you're the licensed user of a given radio band, you can sue people who cause interference.
If you're an unlicensed user, you just have to live with it.
TheRealPomax 21 days ago [-]
Usually dynamic signal boosting to drown out interference when it's detected. Big no-no.
tingletech 21 days ago [-]
complain to the FCC
grendelt 25 days ago [-]
> 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?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 25 days ago [-]
> 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.
mystified5016 24 days ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 21 days ago [-]
This is all exactly right.
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.
LorenPechtel 21 days ago [-]
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.
If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
akira2501 21 days ago [-]
> Do they have a way of hiding a transmitter?
Spread spectrum and/or frequency hopping.
> If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
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.
LorenPechtel 20 days ago [-]
As I said, making it look like noise.
hypercube33 21 days ago [-]
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
LorenPechtel 20 days ago [-]
The nations capable of fielding SSBNs know where each other's antennas are--they're simply too big to hide.
dylan604 21 days ago [-]
To hide your pirate radio, you load it up into a jeep and only transmit while on the move. talk hard!
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.
Enginerrrd 21 days ago [-]
>you could actually obscure the location of your transmitter by building multiple of them and doing some tricks with phase and frequency.
...Can you elaborate on this? I'm quite curious.
fortran77 21 days ago [-]
Just another line that will be added to standard leases!
johnea 21 days ago [-]
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.
6d6b73 21 days ago [-]
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
21 days ago [-]
jfoutz 21 days ago [-]
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.
CodeWriter23 21 days ago [-]
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.
jfoutz 21 days ago [-]
I'd think the inflation adjustment is regulation. but perhaps the law exists somewhere.
themagician 21 days ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 03:29:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
We are required, in our society, to keep ourselves informed. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking laws in the US.
(And then we have the countless unintentional radiators to contend with.)
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)
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.
In markets that have historically had the largest number of pirate complaints. The article is clear about this nuance.
> 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.
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.
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.
We'll see if anybody directionfinds me =D —73
What does it mean to not accept interference?
If you're an unlicensed user, you just have to live with it.
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?
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.
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.
If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
Spread spectrum and/or frequency hopping.
> If they can't hide it, you can't, either.
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.
...Can you elaborate on this? I'm quite curious.
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.
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.