88.2MHz

[shuffy]

I hope those aren't China cups!

[Analyser]

they have the most powerful link in the world!

A piece of wire?

Maybe.

[Albert H]

There's a lot of that going on again. I saw an install in a city away from London, with the rig in the tank room at the top of the block (with a dummy link receiver) and a coax mod lead (actually TV coax) going down to the studio four floors below. They'd run the mod lead down a services duct and it was buried into another bunch of cables - and dirtied to prevent it standing out. The main rig was an old one of mine, with a half-frequency exciter, 1057 PLL, and a 300W PA with a big SMPSU. The sinking on the PA means that it'll run at about 300W without a blower (nearly 500W with a lot of blown cooling, re-biasing and more drive). The gear is quite well concealed, and blower noise would draw attention to it!

At the studio end, they had an old laptop running Mixx, two domestic CD players, a couple of USB MP3 players, a nice Shure microphone with the biggest pop shield I've ever seen, a microphone compressor / limiter, a stereo limiter (one of mine, I'm pleased to say) a stereo coder, and a composite amplifier to get the MPX up the coax to the rig. The studio soundproofing was some thick curtains, and there's NO loudspeaker monitoring there - it's all headphones.

They have CCTV watching the entrances to the block at ground level, the corridor to the studio flat, outside the studio front door and a view of the tank room . They bought a cheap multi-channel CCTV set-up from China, and it does the business!

They only run at weekends and haven't been raided in about a year - the last time was on a nearby block using a 50 mW Band I link straight out of the studio they're using now. They still have a stock of rigs - mostly in the 300W class - and they've got a reasonably smart technical kid (a student at the nearby Uni) who can install and adjust the gear correctly. He even owns a deviation meter!