How many listeners max on for pirates these days

[famefm]

Intresting so you only 4 times as many listen when the Station is still on FM?

[helpMUCHappreciated]

Looks like I'm 20 years too late, although I listen to a pirate in the car.

I read an article about a guy who set up DAB for a few hundred pounds, may be that's the way to go.

[Sparki]

Was sat in the studio of one the other week for a few hours, phone barely buzzed whereas years ago Im sure phones would be going mental for reloads and shouts. The net side of it also seems to be a damp squib barely no one locks. Gathering from other pirates I know of and some of the DJ's on them they say now days the phone is never off the hook like it used to be which is a shame. I think DJ's should stop playing the same tired old shit! how many times can you hear them all anthem bashing or playing the same new tunes every week. Needs something different, get some DJ's who actively hunt for tunes each week so that no week is the same something like how Slimzee used to do it on Rinse with all them dubplates. Nowdays its easier to scour the net and find new talent, burn said tunes to disc or USB and voila!. Like I said in another post I'd love to see more trance and happy hardcore, the former for classics and new stuff and the latter for good old nostalgia just not Heart Of Gold or Steam Train all the time lol.

[thewisepranker]

There are still shows on various pirates where the DJs pride themselves on playing obscure yet decent music that has taken ages and probably a lot of money to find, and not just for the sake of it being obscure. Some of the DJs on Vision, Harv on PB...

[Sparki]

There are still shows on various pirates where the DJs pride themselves on playing obscure yet decent music that has taken ages and probably a lot of money to find, and not just for the sake of it being obscure. Some of the DJs on Vision, Harv on PB...

Should be more obscure shows. I do an unsigned podcast every month, used to do a weekly show Wednesday nights on LPR (a net station) and every week the tunes I played were different. It barely costs a thing! most artists that send their stuff to me send links to their free tunes on Soundcloud. Some send pay links and I buy them and when seeking out other artists I also pay too but seriously not that much to fork out. Takes a few hours a night to compile but once you put the work in the rewards come back Ive been doing this for 4 years now promoting them obscure artists that have really decent tunes up on the net but only have maybe 10 followers and a few plays. Digging deep is what its all about. I start slow on breaks through to hardcore breaks, bit of trance, uk hardcore, jungle, drum n bass even breakcore.

[thewisepranker]

It does cost a lot when the tunes aren't available on any digital format.



There's about that much again that I haven't had the chance to go through yet.

[RSPB]

On one of the top 3 pirates on a good day 120 shoucast +fm

[helpMUCHappreciated]

Thanks very much for your replies

One thought did come to mind if this is true 'Probably between 10 and 20 - the DJ's Mum, Girlfriend, and his mates from school....'

Why is this forum still going?

I think at home radio use is pretty low but I think as far as cars go FM still has quite a high number of listeners and there are a lot of cars without DAB.

I'm going to continue with my FM project anyway.....until I can afford a digital UHF transmitter! I know for sure people still watch TV

Hope everyone is well.

[Albert H]

TV isn't trivial to do! There was only ever one really effective TV pirate in London, back in 1983, Thameside TV. It was broadcast from Crystal Palace (so everyone's TV aerials were pointing in the right direction) and was quite a technical feat for the time.

There have been other attempts, but they've all been doomed to failure - either by use of stupid sites well away from the major broadcasters, low power (analogue TV required huge amounts of power), or simple technical ineptitude. Some stations did successfully add themselves to cable TV networks (I ran a TV station like that for a few years in the Netherlands), but this isn't a mass-market option!

Digital TV (which is what you'd have to broadcast today) also requires high power (which is expensive at UHF frequencies) and you'd have to have some way of persuading your potential viewers to re-tune their TVs to receive you. Bearing in mind that the average British numpty finds tying shoelaces difficult, the intricacies of tweaking a digital TV to discover a lower powered additional signal will be beyond most people.....

[4therecord]

Cracked up when I read Albert's post above.... mainly as it's so true !

[LOL The Rig Got Wet]

The good thing about radio is you never know who is out there, there is no way of ever having any kind of idea of how many people are listening - you just have to guess, which is all people have been doing all these years LOL.

[Albert H]

The good thing about radio is you never know who is out there, there is no way of ever having any kind of idea of how many people are listening - you just have to guess, which is all people have been doing all these years LOL.

That's not quite true - back in the 80s, many of the bigger stations made it into the RAJAR ratings (much to the disgust of the commercial broadcasters and the BBC!). Thameside used to have around ½m listeners on a Sunday evening at their peak, and Invicta got close to that, too.

[LOL The Rig Got Wet]

Yep that is very true and I've heard about that LOL, all I'm saying is those bunch of geeks trolling around a couple of shopping centres one afternoon asking a few people what station they listen to only gives them a rough idea so they have to make it up. I expect back in the 1980s so many people were stopping the surveyor saying "no I don't listen to any of them, I listen to..." and the name of their pirate, so they had to add them because so many people kept saying alternatives. But they have to make up the rest of it because obviously there's no way of surveying everyone in London.

I reckon over 99% of people don't wanna text in these days so it's very hard to tell going by a few texts coming in but so many people assume that's all what's listening if they just got three texts there's only three people listening LOL! You never know who's out there or who is listening!

[Westman]

I read an article about a guy who set up DAB for a few hundred pounds, may be that's the way to go.

What to broadcast on DAB ? Thought it with DAB that you can't get on DAB at all without paying someone for space on the spectrum?

[shuffy]

you can't get on DAB at all without paying someone for space on the spectrum?

If you know what you're doing, you can put up an entire multiplex for about £300.

https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/
http://wiki.opendigitalradio.org/Introd ... DAB/DAB%2B

That's not the whole story though. The hard part is the linear amplifier and filtering required to transmit it any distance. And by the time you've publicised it well enough to make people go and look for you (the days of people stumbling on pirates by accident are almost gone) you'll have been raided.

[thewisepranker]

I love the way that they make it sound so cheap and easy - simply connect an Internet stream (from the Pi) to the HackRF and it generates a full DAB multiplex, completely autonomously. All for £300 - nothing more!

[teckniqs]

Looks like I'm 20 years too late, although I listen to a pirate in the car.

I read an article about a guy who set up DAB for a few hundred pounds, may be that's the way to go.

Would this article happen to be about the new DAB stations in Brighton?

[shuffy]

Nope. It was my lazy way of saying you can modulate DAB using a suitable SDR like the Hackrf, and something like gnu radio. But that's only a small part of the story. As TWP pointed out, there's probably stuff that's been glossed over which may trip up linux numpties. As for the RF side I've been thinking for a while about cost-effective ways of getting enough welly going and keeping the spectrum tidy, but the bottom line is, no-one's going to discover you by accident like they would on FM and the minute you publicise it, you're off. So, why would anyone bother?

[Albert H]

Shuffy - you're exactly right.

I have my own DAB "bouquet" here - it's (effectively) a sixth London bouquet. I'm using eight Raspberry Pis to do the MP2 coding from the audio feeds, and an old desktop computer as the multiplexer to feed the Hack RF One. The output from the Hack board has to go through a very tight bandpass filter to prevent interference to the lower adjacent bouquet.

I built it to learn about the principles and to allow me to contribute to the Open Source DAB project that's being run by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I've supplied some of the code for DAB-MUX (one of the crucial components of the software).

If anyone wants a go at this, they're going to have to learn Linux. There's no avoiding it. Windoze just can't do useful stuff like this!

Microsoft are finally realising that their products are largely irrelevant, and they're getting on board with the Linux project! Looks like it's going to be Game Over for Windoze!