San Francisco radio pirates challenge FCC equipment seizure

[CShine]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- An unlicensed pirate station booted from the airwaves in October challenged the Federal Communications Commission on Friday in federal court, where it sought the return of its seized equipment and the community's underground voice. Mark Vermeulen, a lawyer for San Francisco Liberation Radio, argued before U.S. District Judge Susan Illston that the seizure of the station's equipment in the October raid came without proper notice and violated Constitutional protections of due process and the First Amendment.

"It's a bedrock principle that parties have a right to pre-seizure notice and a right to be heard," Vermeulen said in court.

The FCC had monitored SFLR for years, tracking the station's signal to a laundry room basement in the San Francisco home of James and Charlotte Hatch. The Hatches never made a secret of their operations, and had unsuccessfully sought an FCC license to operate. Charlotte Hatch and her station's lawyers claim the public served by SFLR's flavorful mix of political, talk and music shows has a First Amendment right to listen - a right they say was stripped by the raid and seizure of equipment.

"The public has a very strong interest in this radio station," Vermeulen argued.

http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CA_PIRATE_RADIO_CAOL-?SITE=CADIU&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[htuttle]

1. They changed the law, IIRC...

...they made the minimum size of a licensed transmitter to be 100 watts (the so-called 'low power' license). At that size, it severely limits the number and distribution of possible 'low power' stations. They used to allow 10 watt stations, meaning you could cover just a college campus, for example.

The 'pirate' radio (arr! arr! shiver me timbers!) community in the US is not as active as that in Europe, but has been getting more organized, thanks to the net.

Here's a decent starting point:
http://www.blackcatsystems.com/radio/pirate.html

Dark vision fly by helicopters in the night
Attempt triangulation of our station in the fight

Straight from the bass the deep down low precision
High crime treason we broadcastin’ sedition

Like the wall street mornin’ afternoon edition
Commandeering airwaves from unknown positions 

Live and direct we comin’ never prerecorded
With information that will never be reported
Disregard the mainstream
media distorted
Whoop! Whoop!
We comin' listener supported 

- Michael Franti & Spearhead

[BiggJawn]

2. FCC are thugs on this.

They went to sea and took down a Pirate in INTERNATIONAL WATERS, seized the equipment, AND the ship (which was not us-flagged)

FCC claims "interference" but that's just bull-crap. The real issue is somebody got on the air w/o buying some lawyer a new yacht and a trophy bimbo...The FCC is infested with lawyers now, and they scratch each other's backs. No engineers, which is why we get junk science like BPL and "Levels of acceptable interference" where it used to be ANY interference was considered harmful.

[benburch]

3. New Dimensions in Pirate Radio

I've been giving this some considerable thought and here are a few things that have occurred to me;

1. If you had three identical stations on the same frequency and with synchronized broadcasts set in a triangle, the signal would appear to come from someplace within the triangle to a RDF set. You could feed the stations over WiFi, making the actual operator of the system very hard to trace.

2. You could do a similar thing with a balloon-borne station. If you had a cheap enough transmitter set, that you could afford to lose, you would suspend it from a weather balloon and release it upwind from the urban area you wished to reach. This would work best for special events and etc.

3. Going back to the WiFi idea; If you had lots and lots 100 mW stations attached to the home computer systems of friendly people in your neighborhood, and again fed by WiFi, you could quickly have a few tens of watts of radiated power.

Only the last of these is arguably legal, but I'm the sort who liked to figure out ways to beat the system, even if I don't do anything about it once I have...

[htuttle]

4. I had the same idea, believe it or not

I think the cluster of internet-stream-connected low power transmitters (probably bigger than the legal 100mW, however -- I'd go for 1-10 watts) would be really difficult to triangulate.

In fact, I think that a microradio group already did this in Seattle during the last National Association of Broadcasters convention. They spoke of a pirate radio fleet they had assembled that worked this way.

This group used to be at http://www.microradio.net, but I haven't been able to connect to them recently.

[benburch]

5. I chose 100 mW...

Because each individual station is legal. It is an easier sell to random people if they are not breaking the law.

[htuttle]

6. True

Another thing I've been meaning to investigate is low power video transmission.

Apparently, if you hook a properly constructed antenna to the RF out of a VCR or other video device, it will broadcast a very short distance on whatever channel you have it set to work on (ie., either 3 or 4, usually). You can also apparently hook up an amp between them, and broadcast quite a bit farther than 10 feet that way.

That scene from 'They Live!' always comes to mind when I ponder this...

[benburch]

7. The only thing that keeps me from going Pirate...

is my belief that Internet Radio is likely to be the future. Combine this with open neighborhood WiFi networks, and you have something that the Right Wing cannot easily shut down.

Especially check this out; http://www.chaotica.u-net.com/streamer.htm

Streamer in an embedded Linux system (needs to be ported) with a high-power WiFi Onmi and with one placed every few blocks in an urban setting could cover a whole city pretty easily. Not all nodes would need to be hooked to the wired internet, either. This would make rooftop installations feasible.

[htuttle]

8. I think the trick with rebroadcasting streams with many transmitters...

...is keeping all the signals in synch. If they all hook up to a central icecast server to get their stream, they should stay pretty much in synch as long as they all have reasonably equivalent internet connections and similar buffering characteristics.

Otherwise, if you end up with some of the transmitters behind the others by a second or two, it will create some bizarre 'ghostly reverb' effects (and other, far less listenable distortion) where the signals overlap -- if the signals overlap. The other option would be to keep the transmitters separated enough so there are small dead zones between them.

I think where low power FM broadcasting really shines is during special crowd events of various kinds. People can use portable FM radios to listen, and you can theoretically coordinate a lot of people that way -- kind of like how Enemy Combatant Radio does it during demos in San Francisco (and you can also pick up their internet stream).

[benburch]

9. Custom software...

My concept is this (and I design streaming systems for a living when I can get work) is that we have all nodes synched to the same NTP timeserver. Then we code each audio packet that gets sent out with a delivery time. Audio is queued pending the delivery time. If the nodes are identical, then the time each signal reaches the transmitter should be tolerably the same.

But you only need this if you want to broadcast to one's matrix of legal FM transmitters.

A pure WiFi internet radio system would not have delivery time synchronization as a goal. A user just turns on his WiFi enabled laptop of desktop, hooks it up to the nearest WiFi radio node, which gives him a DHCP address lease, and then runs Streamer. His node then begins to act as a node in the network for as long as he has the software going.

A WiFi card is cheap and getting cheaper, and though it will never be down to the price of an FM radio, it ought to become relatively affordable for the masses.