Comments by "Bond25" (@Bond2025) on "How To Set Up A Pirate Radio Station Without Getting Caught" video.

  1. That wouldn't have taken much power. If you think about a room of people shouting to each other, if you have someone next to you, you will hear them louder than others further away. That's how transmitters work. 50KW 10 miles away can easily be blocked by 10 Watts for a mile radius from the transmitter. It doesn't mean he had more power, it's just that he was closer.
    3
  2. In the mid 1980s, Radio Julie in Merseyside used a very clever solution. Andy the engineer used those Tandy mains intercoms to link the studio to the transmitter. Then he found that he could send audio down old Rediffusion cables between flats and this helped on one raid. The DTI man run in to the flat and followed the lead from the TX to a plate on the wall ! One of them even had a heart attack running up the stairs int he flats. Sadly, Andy is no longer with us. He would have approved of 10GHz links and what people got up to in later years like DIMENSION FM 92.2 in Telford. When they put their TX on The Wrekin TV mast and linked to the caravan studio in a barn, we could hear them clearly in the North West and often as far as Southport and Chester.
    2
  3. When I was about 14 I started messing about with building TXs using a PCB kit from Tandy. I bought a Pantec Hobbykit, which was a push-pull oscillator on 106MHz using 2x 2n3055, later replaced on my own bigger printed circuit board with 4 x 2n3866, fed in to a dipole. It was HORRIFIC, no RF filtering, never knew about that then, plus loud splattering audio. I managed to block a whole streets TVs and used to talk to friends on a Multimode 2 CB, which also could be heard over everything. The problem was, two CBers lived within 300ft, one with a Sigma 4 and another with Sirio type aerial, so they were getting watched. What I didn't know at the time was the Radio Amateur 4 houses away was going to get a very unexpected call one Saturday night as I was playing music. A Rover 3500 police car and transit van turned up and the people kicked his door in. He was a bank manager! I had to hide the board between the lagging jacket on the tank and pull the dipole in from a back window. I later went on to get a Class A licence, qualifications in RF & electronics engineering and realise how bad all those kits were.
    2
  4. There was a Merseyside MW station that saw DTI people and dropped an old fridge off the balcony of the flats! One station found that the door intercom on the block they were in was playing the station audio as the TX was around 100Watts on Medium Wave.
    1
  5. I had a QSL from Radio Fax on 6205KHz i think.
    1
  6. SCR? As in Storeton Community Radio on 1026KHz? Anyone from the North West will remember that station from around 1982 onwards, then NCR North Coast Radio 1350KHz and Radio Merseywaves 1242KHz. All had fairly good coverage from different blocks of flats. One of the best was Mersey Heights in Tranmere, Wirral. That had outstanding views for miles. It was possible to see the Winter Hill TX, also down the East Lancs Road and across to Southport and Wales. I remember the panic when an electric company thought people were stealing electric by running wires from the roof on the flats down to lamp posts, they had no idea it was a medium wave aerial and were up on the roof touching it. In the North West everyone remembers Radio Julie 104.8 stereo and Slag Off International 105.3 who blocked the gas board in 1985 by using 106.2MHz. This was in the Liverpool Echo. A lot of the people involved in Pirate Stations in the North West have died. Famous people like Andy Davies who inspired a lot of people - then the larger than life Dave Collins, who ended up on Internet Radio Stations. Many stations were raided each year.
    1
  7. I always wanted to run on Medium Wave, but lost interest. I did have a 1 watt oscillator and got a few miles on a long wire, but no way of amplifying the RF. Years later I realise I could have used low cost Audio MOSFETs. I even tried a 6L6G in to two 807 valves, but that was a disaster too.
    1
  8. I was about to say that we bounced a 10GHz off the cooling towers at Fiddlers Ferry power station and used both PMR sites and Commercial Radio/TV sites we had keys to through various radio jobs. Seemed a shame to have a spare port on a circulator going up to broadcast antennas.
    1