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10th anniversary of the raid on Tantrum 95.7
- Thread starter NoWayNoCC
- Start date
NoWayNoCC said:
They were pirates.
They were either interfering with usable signal from WQMF- Louisville or from WDPT in Piqua. More likely Piqua. And despite what the disgruntled author of that web page said, the FCC has always been in the business of shutting down unlicensed radio stations, long before corporate radio.
If that format was so great they ought to put it on a signal of more than 1 watt and let it's ratings speak for itself.
Uhhh....what?
Hey NoWayNoCC, are you off of your meds again? Or did you just receive your monthly "Coast To Coast AM" newsletterr and get way too excited about "government"? Pirate Radio is not just a funny movie about British radio, it's a CRIME despite your goofy assertions. I hope you get a cell next to Charles Manson, that ought to REALLY get your brain in an uproar! 
Apparently you've never worked anywhere where a pirate station or a "real" station with staff too stupid to observe pattern change regulations interferes with YOUR signal. There is very seldom a pirate that doesn't interfere with another signal that's legitimate. The F.C.C.'s real job is to keep idiots from just hopping on the air whenever and wherever they want, screwing up businesses that sell advertising and pay employees to do real work. These people, the advertisiers, and the station engineers who have to spend countless hours tracking these morons and reporting them to the F.C.C. are just some of the victims. Many times listeners also suffer. Your assertion that this particular pirate did not interfere with anyone else is ludicrlus unless you were actually out measuring signals and charting interference. I'm guessing you weren't.
NoWayNoCC:
I do not know about your particular speaker set up, but unless you live within a couple of miles of a transmitter site, there are a couple of likely sources of splatter. #1Check your radio. Does this splatter happen on one radio or all of your radios? Sometimes even "good" radios go bad. Do you have cable? Check the cable connections and if there is an amplifier that several cables run into check this out. Are there and pirates or part 15s in your neighborhood? Check your wiring on your computer speakers. If you live near an antenna farm or tower call (or Email) the offending station and ask to speak with the engineer. Most will send you a set of the little filters that will fit on your speaker wires.
If this does not work, then file a complaint with the FCC.
BTW Just a side note RF can have interesting side effect. At WLAC Nashville, in the early 1970's one of the florescent lights at the transmitter site stayed "on" even when turned off. There are many stories of people picking up WLW on just about any appliance back they had to cut back to 50KW
I do not know about your particular speaker set up, but unless you live within a couple of miles of a transmitter site, there are a couple of likely sources of splatter. #1Check your radio. Does this splatter happen on one radio or all of your radios? Sometimes even "good" radios go bad. Do you have cable? Check the cable connections and if there is an amplifier that several cables run into check this out. Are there and pirates or part 15s in your neighborhood? Check your wiring on your computer speakers. If you live near an antenna farm or tower call (or Email) the offending station and ask to speak with the engineer. Most will send you a set of the little filters that will fit on your speaker wires.
If this does not work, then file a complaint with the FCC.
BTW Just a side note RF can have interesting side effect. At WLAC Nashville, in the early 1970's one of the florescent lights at the transmitter site stayed "on" even when turned off. There are many stories of people picking up WLW on just about any appliance back they had to cut back to 50KW
NoWayNoCC said:
Your computer speakers are not a radio. There is NOTHING that can go wrong with a radio transmitter, licensed or otherwise, intentional or inadvertent, that will cause it to come through computer speakers.
If you're hearing a radio station, licensed or otherwise, coming through your computer speakers, your speakers are lacking necessary filtering and shielding.
(this is hardly unusual, I've never seen a set that *was* properly shielded & filtered)
I'm not in Cincinnati & can't 100% guarantee there aren't any stations there splattering up & down the dial. I can say I'm 52 years old and have been a broadcast engineer for 30 years, have visited over 2,100 counties in 48 states and 9 provinces of Canada, and travel *through* Cincinnati at least twice a year. I have heard a station splatter outside its assigned bandwidth precisely *once*. (it lasted for a few hours and covered about 2MHz of the FM band) I've never heard it happen in Cincinnati.
"Splatter up and down the dial" is again almost certainly a shortcoming of your receiver. It's cheaper to make a radio that handles a limited amount of received signal. If you happen to be one of the few who lives near a transmitter... well, that money you saved on a cheap radio is going to be repaid in poor reception.
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There are FCC regulations that require stations to address problems resulting from extremely strong signals.
AM: 73.88 requires stations to "...satisfy all reasonable complaints of blanketing interference within the 1V/m contour.". 1V/m is a pretty strong signal! -- I defer to those with AM experience (I'm a TV guy) but I think you can reasonably assume if you live within the Cincinnati city limits, WLW does NOT deliver 1V/m.
FM: 73.318 requires stations to "...satisfy all complaints of blanketing interference..." received during the first year of operation from complainants near the tower. (if a station makes technical changes that require FCC permission, the 1-year clock is reset when those changes go on the air) "near the tower" means the 115dbu contour - more accurately, a radius of 0.245*sqrt(P) miles, where P is the power in kilowatts. For the most powerful FM station in Cincinnati (WAKW 93.3), this distance is 1.7 miles. I don't see any sign WAKW has made any technical changes in the last year though. 73.318 does require stations to provide "technical information and assistance" after the 1-year period.
As "secondchoice" suggests, contacting the station is probably more likely to deliver results than complaining to the FCC.
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TANKSBACK said:
I would suggest "seldom" is an exaggeration -- a significant majority of the pirates I'm familiar with have selected technical parameters with an aim of not causing any interference. Many of them use parameters that could be licensed as translators.
Unfortunately, a significant minority aren't so careful. There seems to be a new trend in NYC and Miami to use first-adjacents to licensed stations, which is utterly unacceptable.
Any transmitter causes interference over a wider area than that over which it provides service. Just because one can't hear anything on a given frequency, doesn't mean you can operate a transmitter there without interfering with anybody.
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IIRC there's now a Jack-in-the-Box fast-food place in the corner of the WLAC lot. (in the major lobe of the array) I have to wonder how much effort it took to get the order speakers working?!
NoWayNoCC said:
The federal government as we know it today was "duly constituted" in 1787 and fully ratified by the then-existing states by 1790. I'm quite sure that Tantrum 95.7 was not "truly a pirate" in 1790, unless they were attacking merchant ships and enslaving their crews in that era. ;D
Drive next to the antenna farm and you are going to get blanketing. Fact of life unless you can repeal the laws of nature.
For those of you not in the know, NoWayNoCC was the pirate operating Tantrum.
KeithE4 said:
Man I wish I knew that last year, my dorm room was really close to the tower for WSTB out of Streetsboro. I would turn on my speakers and I would pick up WSTB on the subwoofer! Luckily my new place doesn't have that problem.
w9wi said:
But the "result" NoWayNoCC has in mind is silencing these horrible commercial stations...not just on his poorly designed computer speakers.
And he's the guy who ran "Tantrum"? Wow, what a shock. He even pats himself on the back in the first message. "What a cool station Tantrum became"? What, NoWayNoCC, your pirate station initially was lame?
Is there a drive-thru at the Culver's in Mason, in the shadow of the WLW stick?
Culver's of Mason, OH
5742 Tylersville Road
Mason, OH 45040
So close to WLW that you can barely see the top of the tower from your seat by the window.
5742 Tylersville Road
Mason, OH 45040
So close to WLW that you can barely see the top of the tower from your seat by the window.
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