Radio Survivor

On my recently ended radioshow I tried to reguarly to give updates on unlicensed radio. To me it’s one of the still lively modes of civil disobedience in electronic communications, especially in the internet age.
Although there is low-power FM in the US, and a growing community radio movement world-wide, the urge to broadcast without government sanction is still strong and too hard for some resist. For some it’s because a license still isn’t available, and for others it’s because they don’t think they should need a license. And some pirates just don’t even care about the FCC or other regulators in the first place. As we get 2010 off to a start I’d like to take an opportunity to take look at some of the pirate radio news, at least in North America.

FCC Actions Up, Actual Busts not so Much

At least once a year my pal John Anderson at DIYmedia.net does an overview of FCC action against pirates. He finds that in terms of raw numbers 2009 was a record year, with 429 enforcement actions. That number may sound high to many people since we don’t hear too much news these days about pirate broadcasters who aren’t in a movie. But the record is deceptive, since most of the “actions” aren’t busts, where FCC agents employ law enforcement muscle to charge in and confiscate gear. Rather, most of these actions involve unaccompanied visits to suspected transmitter sites and threatening letters.

In fact, John reports that

the number of actual, painful punishments have dropped: five Forfeiture Orders (compared to 13 in 2008); 6 Notices of Apparent Liability (versus 13 in 2008); raid-arrests and seizures remain constant from year-to-year (5/3 in ‘09, 5/2 in ‘08 – and at least one of the “seizures” last year was voluntary).

Those statistics lead John to conclude that an unlicensed broadcaster has something like an 8 in 10 chance of avoiding any major punishment, aside from a threatening letter delivered via certified mail.
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Radio Free Roscoe

Being both a television and a radio fanatic; I present to you my personal “top 5″ list for TV shows with some sort of radio theme. Some series focus more on radio than others; but in my mind they all showcase the medium and represent a range of radio stations. I was hoping to do a “top 10″ list, but poor radio is often quite absent from the world of television.

Here are my five favorites (in no particular order).

1. Beverly Hills, 90210 (Fox, 1990-2000)

Who can forget DJ David Silver and his lengthy radio career throughout the series? He began as a dorky high school freshman DJ at the West Beverly High radio station. The station’s window overlooked the hallway, so David was often a commentator on the campus scene and gossip. When he graduated and went off to California University he began his career as a college radio DJ, which was famously side-tracked by his descent into drug abuse in order to stay awake following graveyard shifts at the station. After graduation David was often seen doing live remotes from the Peach Pit After Dark; as he hosted a late night show on commercial station KBIB.

2. Radio Free Roscoe (2003-2005 in Canada on The Family Channel)

This series follows in the long-standing tradition of excellent teen TV coming out of Canada. With a diverse cast of characters and more realistic-looking kids, Radio Free Roscoe tells the story of students who run a pirate radio station. Their high school actually has an above-board station (Cougar Radio) that the Radio Free Roscoe kids created their station in response to (like people used to do with underground newspapers). Making things even more interesting is the fact that the DJs all have secret identities and are not known to their classmates. You can still catch re-runs of this classic teen show on Teen Nick. (more…)

Watching Richard Curtis’ new movie Pirate Radio this evening, I was struck by how little one actually has to do to make a crowd pleasing film out of this subject. There’s really not that much to the flick. It’s the historically grounded story of a pop music pirate station broadcasting to the British Isles from international waters in the 1960s. One can’t say there’s a plot. What there is is provided by the weakest character in the movie, a Comstockian British official obsessed with destroying the operation, played by Kennneth Branagh, who lays the buffoon routine on a little too thick.

And yet Pirate Radio is charming. Look for wonderful performances by Bill Nighy, who portrays the operations’ droll general manager, Nick Frost as the station’s corpulent hedonist, and, of course, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the head deejay in charge. Mostly what they do is hang out, fool around, pretend to quarrel, try to get laid, and play a lot of great tunes to their adoring English audience. January Jones of Mad Men is in the film, by the way, the center of an absurdist wedding episode.

All radio lovers should see this movie, if only for the atmospherics and the fairly spectacular ending (which, of course, I won’t give away). Why is it so easy to get great radio in celluloid, and so hard to find it in real life?

Pirate Radio

It’s always fun for me to see how radio gets portrayed in popular culture and I often revel in all of the inaccuracies. David Silver as a high school, college, and commercial radio DJ on the original Beverly Hills, 90210 was always a treat to watch and make fun of.

DJ David Silver would rap on and on about his personal life and bantered with his girlfriend Donna (played by Tori Spelling) over the air while his mouth hovered miles away from the microphone. Behind the scenes, his character helped to cast a sleazy haze over college radio graveyard shifts when he became addicted to speed (given to him by his program director) in order to survive the sleep deprivation.

Well…gear up. Tomorrow the comedy “Pirate Radio” opens in the United States. It’s a fictionalized take on radio pirates in 1960s Britain. Retooled for U.S. audiences, the originally titled “The Boat that Rocked,” explores a cast of characters broadcasting illegally from the seas off Britain.

Rock scholar and critic Simon Frith wrote a great piece about the history of pirate radio in Europe, which is a nice bit of background to have before taking in the film.

I was disappointed but unsurprised to learn about the end of Pirate Cat Radio’s unlicensed FM broadcast resulting from the FCC issuing a notice of apparent liability (NAL) to Pirate Cat’s operator Monkey Man a/k/a Daniel K. Roberts. However, I am surprised at how long Pirate Cat was able to make a go of it operating out in the open. Perhaps appearing on the Travel Channel’s No Reservations made it hard for the Commission to turn a blind eye much longer.

As Jennifer noted in her report, the FCC observed in a footnote to its NAL that, “the frequency used without authority by Roberts and PCR is 87.9 MHz, which is not allocated to the FM broadcast band.” Over email Jennifer asked me if using that frequency might be any sort of contributing factor for the FCC’s attention, especially in light of an unlicensed operator in Florida recently receiving a $2500 fine for broadcasting on the same frequency.

I was actually a little confused by the FCC’s footnote about 87.9 FM because I’d always understood that the frequency is considered part of the FM dial, though typically not assigned except under special circumstances. In fact, at present there are three stations licensed to 87.9 FM: KSFH in Mountain View, CA; K200AA in Sun Valley, NV, a translator in the Calvary Chapel of Twin Falls, ID CSN Network; and WA2XNX in Brazos, TX, an experimental station licensed to Federal Signal Corporation.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations title 47 section 73.501, “87.9 MHz, Channel 200, is available only for use of existing Class D stations required to change frequency.” These Class D stations are low-power 10 watt stations licensed prior to 1978, when the service ceased to exist. That’s the rule under which low-power high school station KSFH is licensed to 87.9 FM.

So, while it’s true that the Commission generally doesn’t license new stations to 87.9 FM, it’s simply not true that the frequency is not part of the FM broadcast spectrum as asserted in the NAL issued to Pirate Cat Radio. As to the question of whether using that frequency contributed to the FCC targeting Pirate Cat or the aforementioned Florida pirate, I think it’s quite unlikely. The NAL against the Florida pirate makes no mention of the frequency not being a legitimate part of the FM dial.

As far as the Commission is concerned any given unlicensed operator is no different than another. Each field office tends to have its own set of priorities about chasing down pirates, and looking at the list of enforcement actions you can definitely see that each office seems to have periodic bursts of action against unlicensed operators. By and large enforcement actions are complaint-based, and operating out in the open is more likely to result in a complaint than being clandestine.

I suspect that action against Pirate Cat, in particular, came about rather slowly, perhaps influenced by the positive publicity it received and the position of relative respect it has in the community. Of course, these factors will not stop the FCC from taking action against an unlicensed broadcaster; failing to take any action would only serve as an encouragement to others. But I do think that these factors complicate the Commission’s job, causing it to tread a little more carefully.

I think operating an unlicensed station on 87.9 FM is no more risky than operating on any other frequency. The fact that there are very few stations licensed to this frequency makes it attractive for pirates looking for a clear channel and to avoid interfering with other stations. The FCC’s recent decision that FM stations no longer need to protect channel 6 audio on the far left end of the dial may lead to erosion of this opportunity in some areas as more licensed stations encroach on 87.9 FM. Until then, the risk of being a pirate on 87.9 FM is due to being a pirate broadcaster, and nothing more.

Pirate Cat Leaving Terrestrial Radio

It was probably only a matter of time before the FCC would catch up with San Francisco’s Pirate Cat Radio.

The unlicensed broadcaster was increasingly putting itself in the public eye by operating a cafe adjacent to its studio, granting interviews with mainstream press, and even appearing on the national television show No Reservations this August.

Since at least April, the FCC has been monitoring Pirate Cat’s operations and eventually levied the station and owner Daniel K. Roberts (aka Monkey) a $10,000 fine on August 31st when it became clear that the station was continuing to broadcast without a license

Pirate Cat issued a press release on Halloween stating that the station would cease their terrestrial broadcast in light of the FCC’s action against the station. According to the statement from Pirate Cat:

“…the FCC asserted that Monkey, the founder of Pirate Cat Radio, ‘willfully and repeatedly violated Section 301 of the Communications Act of 1934′ and proposed to fine him $10,000 for the infraction… the FCC’s order effectively ends Pirate Cat Radio’s thirteen-year run as one of the Bay Area’s most consistent voices of protest against corporate-run media monopolies and monocultural programming.”

According to the “Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture” document prepared by the FCC, not only was Pirate Cat Radio found to be broadcasting over FM without a license, but the frequency being used, 87.9, is also “not allocated to the FM broadcast band.” (more…)

Those of us who call ourselves radio fans are increasingly a small and devoted lot and the same can be said of radio scholars. It’s for that reason that I was super excited to find out about the international radio conference known simply as The Radio Conference.

This year’s event, The Radio Conference 2009: A Transnational Forum, was held in Toronto, Canada in July and featured academics from all over the globe talking about a wide range of topics including radio history, commercial radio in Canada, pirate radio in 1960s’ New Zealand, African-American CB Radio Culture, liberal implications of This American Life, and the impact of the British invasion on college radio in the 1980s.

I wasn’t able to make it to the event, but radio scholar and college radio DJ Nick Rubin wrote an excellent summary, which is posted on my Spinning Indie blog.

I am belatedly reading Sue Carpenter’s wonderful memoir 40 Watts From Nowhere and chuckling at her evolution from a disgruntled DJ wannabe to a radio station manager. The book is sine qua non for anyone who aspires to run any kind of community-style radio station, as far as I’m concerned, because it shows how different said signal looks from the bottom up (a volunteer) and the top down (a manager).

40 Watts chronicles Carpenter’s experiences founding and running two pirates: KPBJ in San Francisco and the far more successful KBLT in Los Angeles through the 1990s. But it’s also about the college/community/pirate scene in both those cities, including her experiences at Bay Area college station KUSF as a volunteer.

From the get go, I was doomed. First, there weren’t that many DJ slots available. Second, the people who had them had been on the air for years and weren’t about to give them up. And third, wannabe DJs outnumbered them twenty to one. With such dismal odds, I should’ve split after the first meeting, but I didn’t. I signed up with the publicity department, thinking I could win them over through hard work. No such luck. In six months, I saw the inside of the studio only once, so I quit. I had no idea ‘community’ radio would be so uncommunitylike.

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If foie gras and tripe can stand in for quaaludes and mescaline, then Anthony Bourdain is the Hunter S. Thompson of food television. As a so-called “anti-celebrity” chef Bourdain is the host of the Travel Channel’s No Reservations, traveling to both familiar and exotic places in order to explore their culture via food, often with a focus on everyday dining, street food and traditional cuisine.

On this week’s episode Bourdain explored San Francisco, but started off the episode with a surprise, especially for a radio geek like myself. In an homage to the film Bullitt Bourdain races through the streets of the city in a black Mustang, then turns on the radio only to hear none other than San Francisco’s most well-known unlicensed radio station, Pirate Cat Radio.

As you can see in the clip below, Bourdain appears on air with Pirate Cat founder Monkey, then retires to the station’s namesake cafe to try a, well… porcine latte.

If Pirate Cat wasn’t already the most well known currently operating pirate station in the US, I’ll venture to guess that it is now. Monkey has been at the pirate radio game a long time and has never shied away from publicity or talking to the press. While that certainly increases the risk of running an unlicensed station, so far the FCC doesn’t seem to have seen fit to escalate enforcement with police action like it has with past Bay Area stations like San Francisco Liberation Radio.

I wish Monkey, Pirate Cat Radio and their cafe the best of luck in bringing community-style radio to a corner of the Mission. I just wish they’d stop justifying their right to broadcast using the tired “emergency authorization” clause of Title 47. I think a better case lies with declaring civil disobedience and pointing to the provision of better public service broadcasting than most other stations in a crowded radio market closed off to low-power FM or any other new community-focused broadcasters.

There are all sorts of pirates, everywhere.

There’s another pirate radio station on the loose: FCC Free Radio in San Francisco. Jennifer Waits wrote a nice piece about it here on Thursday. I’ve been streaming the outlet for the last few days and it’s a fun signal with a big sense of humor.

But I’m getting a little tired of these unlicensed stations that fall back on the argument that an obscure corner of the United States Code gives them the right to transmit over the public airwaves, FCC Free Radio the latest. “We believe that Title 47 Section 73.3542 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations currently allows FCCFREE RADIO 107.1FM to legally broadcast with out a formal license from the FCC,” the signal’s information statement declares. The aforementioned clause says that the government will grant temporary broadcasting authority in “extraordinary circumstances”—life threatening situations, a national emergency declared by the President or Congress, or during time of war.

I consider myself a big supporter of the expansion of Low Power FM, but this argument, first served up by Pirate Cat radio, is kind of dodgy and even a little sleazy. “Thanks to George Bush for declaring the ‘War Against Terrorism’,'” Pirate Cat’s page declares, “and U.S. Code of Federal Regulations title 47 section 73.3542, it is now technically legal to operate a radio transmitter with out a formal license.”

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