Wouldn't it make more sense if the owners of radio stations were the ones making the complaints, rather than a few random listeners? If I owned a multi-million dollar station I wouldn't want potential listeners being blocked out from listening to my station because of some pirate.
The station owners certainly have the most to lose, but they have to be aware of the interference before they can do anything about it.
Stations like WBGO and WFUV on the non-profit side of the band have had the FCC pursue pirates that were costing them listeners. Both stations also have pages on their websites asking listeners to report pirates to the FCC.
From a practical point of view, listeners are much more likely to know when and where these pirates are transmitting and therefore are better able to pass the details to the FCC and possibly the local police.
One poster on this thread mentioned a pirate in Ft. Lee on 104.7 that blocks a licensed station in the Hudson Valley. How would a radio station miles away in another state know that a pirate was blocking its local listeners in Ft. Lee? Yet if the listener has a PPM meter, and is in the right demo, this one blocked listener could be costing that station real money in terms of advertising revenue based on ratings.
Some real big losers have to be the licensed Spanish stations even if their signals aren't threatened.
Example: WPAT-FM in Paterson. The owners paid more than $100-million just for the license, and now they have a dozen or more unlicensed Spanish language competitors near Paterson taking away their potential listeners. Again, one PPM meter gone and the ratings and station income drops and WPAT's ratings have been less than stellar recently.
These station owners have a right to expect the FCC to police the band and protect the value of the license. The reason the government issued licenses in the first place was to prevent the chaos that these pirates are now causing.
The FCC just hasn't be proactive enough to stop these criminals (in NJ they are now criminals). The FCC has been long aware that there are pirates in places like Newark, the Oranges, Paterson, Passaic, Elizabeth and on the Jersey side of the Hudson. They also have long known there are pirates in Brooklyn and the Bronx. They even have caught some of these guys a couple of times before. The FCC needs to go out to these areas periodically and do a band scan. And in NJ they need to bring the local police in to make the felony arrests so they don't have to keep going back after the same guys again and again wasting taxpayer money.
As far as to whether stations or listeners should report the pirates to the FCC. In NJ, pirates are committing a felony. Citizens who are aware of a crime in progress have civic duty to alert the authorities.
That said, some people just don't want to get involved. So possibly, the stations should let listeners report the pirates to them anonymously, and then check out the situation themselves and bring both the FCC and the local police in to stop the interference.
At the stations, the GM, program director, and chief engineer are the ones who should be alerted to the interference, not just the receptionist.
