Frequencies available any?

[mgb]

Hi, Radionecks we just want to ask if there are any Frequencies on FM available for the London area.
It's basicly for station return that will be playing Classic Rock from the 60's, 70's 80's in early 2018.

[famefm]

Ask ofcom I don't think you will get a striat answer here ,or you could always check for your self

[mgb]

Ask ofcom? think we will be staying well clear of them, had a few run ins with Peter and Eric.

[famefm]

Old enough for Eric? You must be old school then?

[mgb]

Oh Yes We thinking of firing up the old Medium Wave TX as a few of local BBC services and absolute radio are ending AM transmissions in 2018

[famefm]

Really absolute is only fm in London so will it be dab only in the rest of the UK?

[mgb]

There AM License expires 30th April

[famefm]

What a shame

[mgb]

These BBC services are leaving AM
774 kHz: BBC Radio Kent
1161 kHz: BBC Sussex
1332 kHz: BBC Radio Wiltshire
1368 kHz: BBC Surrey
1368 kHz: BBC Radio Linclolnshire
1368 kHz: BBC Radio Wiltshire
1458 kHz: BBC Radio Devon
1485 kHz: BBC Sussex
1485 kHz: BBC Radio Humberside
1530 kHz: BBC Essex Rayleigh
1557 kHz: BBC Radio Lancashire
1584 kHz: BBC Radio Nottingham
1602 kHz: BBC Radio Kent
All good for the old pirate anoraks

[Ironman]

Bring it on guys,we need a decent rock pirate. That scumbag Peter Gooding was responsible for busting the last rock pirate on FM which was Rock 106. I still have that live on air bust with Nigel Grant on tape somewhere. Hilarious when Steve...... links back in and plays The Floyd. RFL, RFM, Alice's, Angus, London FM. Bring em' all back.

[Ironman]

I meant Argus. Thinking of AC/DC. We salute you.

[Undercover Neckz]

87.5
89.6
90.4
95.3
96.3
96.6
96.7
97.6
99.7

[OldskoolPirate]

But the only reason those services are ending is because no ones listening to MW anymore. It would be totally pointless. Even if you manage to cover the whole country and more you might get the odd radio enthusiast tuning in but that’s it.

[Albert H]

Weirdly, the Dutch pirates are returning to MW as the authorities don't seem to bother to chase them. There are some running as much as a couple of kilowatts, FM is really difficult these days as the boys always turn up in an hour or two!

[nrgkits.nz]

Here in NZ someone once gave "the boys" something to chase. A transmitter was placed up in the bush which was setup to trigger a comms repeater nearby, the transmitter switched on automatically when it was dark, raining, and cold!

[Albert H]

We used to have fun and games with the amateur 2m (145MHz) repeaters in London. One of the best was the "South London Repeater Repeater". It listened for the "T" tone from GB3SL and then put the last four or five seconds of the repeater's output back on to the input, using one of those "audio recorder" ICs that would do a few seconds - they were invented for toys. This drove the amateurs into a frenzy.

The Repeater Repeater was built using a broken (smashed case) Icom IC2E hand-held with a little rubber helical aerial, a big motorcycle battery and a bit of Veroboard with the logic and the audio recorder IC. The whole effort was inside a resealable 1 litre ice cream carton, and hung up a tree in the park near the repeater. It would work for about a week on a charge, and was up there intermittently for about a year!

The funniest thing about it was that the playback would sometimes come out a bit faster (which always sounded comical), and the tone detector would sometimes miss the "T" so it didn't operate every time. This really frustrated the amateurs trying to track it down. As I remember, it's still under a friend's work bench!

[FMEnjoyer]

Is the hour or 2 anything specific to the scene these days ? Or has it always been the case. Seems like a very
short time to locate a station.

[Albert H]

Actually locating an FM station takes minutes if you know what you're doing and have the right gear. In the UK, some stations take physical measures to prevent removal of their equipment, so the authorities (sometimes) take longer to remove the equipment. Over here in the Benelux, locating high power FM stations is really easy, because they usually erect a huge mast that can be seen for miles! Some of the Dutch pirates run as much as 25kW on Band II, using commercial gear. Normally, they'll get away with it for a day or so, then the baldy boys will turn up and tell them to turn it off. A repeat offender will have the equipment removed.

There are some quirks with the laws over here, and some stations have invoked the "Right To Free Speech" in the European Convention on Human Rights. Some of the pirates got licences. It's a bit of a (legal) mess. Across the border in Belgium and Germany, the laws are clearer, but the authorities don't usually come out chasing you unless you cause interference. That said, they won't let you get away with it for long....

In the Netherlands (and now the UK too) it seems that the authorities will turn a "blind eye" to illicit medium wave operation - again assuming you don't cause interference. In the old days, the most frequent way a MW pirate would get an interference complaint was from people hearing the station on their telephones. These days, that's less of a problem, since most people use their mobiles....

It's quite interesting that I've been asked to build lots of MW stuff and very little Band II gear. I've just redesigned a fairly simple two-band audio limiter and filter for medium wave use. It's the usual boxful of op-amps, and includes a BBD delay line to eliminate the limiter attack time. It's relatively simple but sounds a whole lot better than that Caroline effort on 648kHz whilst conforming to the bandwidth specifications!

[Deano321]

is it me or is the caroline sound quality awful,, I no mw is shite anyway but they sound really muffled

[Albert H]

is it me or is the Caroline sound quality awful? I know MW is shite anyway but they sound really muffled

It's a REALLY bad advertisement for the Broadcast Warehouse processor they're using! It hasn't got any bass, and the treble end just isn't there - it sounds like it's coming down a bad telephone line!

I think that it's deliberate - they're trying to push their listeners (both of them, Sid and Doris) to DAB or on-line.

If you want to hear quality AM, try KBC on 1602kHz or United on 1224kHz - both big signals on http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/