Mountains and moors pirates ?

[FMEnjoyer]

Plenty of 250-500m moors and high hills up north, has anyone done some pirating from them. There was a video of a northern pirate who came back on for a final go putting their 5/8 wave up DJing from their car running direct at sunset playing rave tunes. Cannot remember the station name. You would just need a 15 Watts to go very far at 500m. I guess some station at some point might have had a go. Trouble being power would be car batteries which is quite limiting.

[FMEnjoyer]

has challenges, need to GoOutdoors and buy some waterproofs and good boots and not break you leg in a mole hill or small rock.

[reverend]

We did lash a mast to a trig point that is 306m (nigh-on 1000 ft) a.s.l. once. The difficulty was getting the antenna above the trees next to it but with about 15 Watts (which is easy for a battery to power) we got out very well over a surprisingly large area.

One problem was finding a frequency as from that height, you're going to interfere with so many other stations that there's not much space left in the FM band. We decided to use a directional antenna pointed to the area we wanted to cover and by doing that we could use a frequency close to one 'off the back of the beam' which was shielded from reception in the area below the trig point by the hill on which it was situated. Also with a few extra dB of gain, the signal was that much stronger for no more battery consumption.

[teckniqs]

Came on from Winter Hill (456m ASL) near Bolton parked up right next to the mast as the gates were open about 15 years ago from a car using a 70w rig into a modified taxi antenna with 1.0 SWR and had a text from Whitchurch Shropshire, but signal weak into Manchester much closer!

Around 2008 I stuck a 25w rig on an 14.8v long life laptop battery with dipole just ontop of a small fence shoulder height from Werneth Low (279m) near Stockport and was heard crystal clear in Liverpool locking everywhere in Manchester and beyond

....Also down in the south I came on from Walbury Hill (297m ASL) near Hungerford the highest hill in the South East of England with the same 70w car set up and was heard clear in Harefield near Watford.

And lastly just thought I'd add, I put a 3w rig on a water tower just to see if I could link to it in Pill Heath village (180m ASL) near Andover and was crystal clear with RDS in Lyndhurst Dorset with the dipole upside down by mistake. Yes you read right three watts.

[FMEnjoyer]

Knew someone would have had a go. 30miles on 3w is not bad going, just goes to show. An untapped resource, has its challenges though. Do not get disoriented in the fog.

[jvok]

100w from 450m up in the pennines. Got heard 60 miles away in north wales

There are *ahem* ways of getting mains power up in the hills

[radionortheast]

maybe they’ll have to play to song baby i love your way by big mountain if their coming from a mountain, on repeat until they found out how far the signal is going

I think some were remote you’d need something like a camper van, think club fm from glasgow did that, its easy for them to errect an antenna on a pole outside, they have power from the camper van, strap on aerial joke.

if you went up llkley moor, you’d want to get a signal east, would have problem with frequencies, kind of suspect over the obvious 87.5, 90.4, would likely get a signal all the way down the m62 coridor.

maybe an advantage to be some were lower down, some were flat maybe far away from other radio stations were line of sight is maybe a few miles you’ll have a choice of frequencies, the signal less likely to interfere with other stations, when your playing baby i love your way. You’ll also get a lower signal to noise ration on your radio, maybe pick up more things under tropo, were up high signal to noise ration will be high likely other stations there, there are pros cons to both.

[radionortheast]

didn’t know weather to post about this, may open up a can of worms, I suspect the power was higher than 1w, through a directional aerial the erp would of been higher even if it was just that, 4000w can not be compared to 1w, could the transmitter of been stable in 1982, no details about it. It does seem to take away from my own results with 1w, from a hill I could get a very good signal 4 miles away on another hill, on a pocket radio I could get a signal in places 6 miles away.
Anyway Andromeda transmitted from the hills, they used a cassette deck for programming, seems to be often the thing they’d do, leave it going, just up from 2 cups attached via a string.

[FMEnjoyer]

1982, what a refreshing change of pace, everything is so falsely hyped and over the top in 2025. Sweet, soothing video, and I know part is age related but what a relaxing smooth mellow tone of that first cassette player shot 02:17 onwards. Not .....yeh bruv, I see you, big up big up, dis one going out to da cru, you da bad man, get me, yes this one is gunna mash ya speakers up bruv, yeh, aaaiiiiiiight

Hardly the voice of a hardened criminal at 5:29 is it ?

The guy is not that old with sunglasses on but I think a lot of people are very turned off by a load of aggressive shouty language on the radio.It wears thin pretty quick, of all times people need a rest and take it easy not blah blah blah rabbiting on in your lug hole. I would like to hear normal speaking on pirate radio, just for a change.

Collecting and piling up rocks to put your mast up, knees in a country pancake
I also love an accent foreign or UK regional. Love it.
Good video north east, very relaxing.

[FMEnjoyer]

Horizontal polarization was an interesting choice for the 'Fog on the Barrow-downs' set up. could be a number of reasons, less noise for receivers, less obvious and big looking come sunrise time, maybe a conductive mount pole unbalanced the dipole element and messes pattern up vertical ?

Liked how he bothered to unscrew the rig top knowing full well those screws would be lost forever if they fell off into the damp moss or a rocky crevice. 1 Watt, that's superb.

[FMEnjoyer]

R. Andromeda recording and good quality as well, seems to have been transmitted from side of big moor/mountain. Harrop edge. though it seems to run a quite a few miles north to south - Diggle to Mottram on the east side of Manchester. 2 place Harrop Edge Road in South and Harrop edge lane in North. I wonder where the site might have been, what a clever place to do it from. 300-400m high ridge.

[teckniqs]

Horizontal polarization was an interesting choice for the 'Fog on the Barrow-downs' set up. could be a number of reasons

I think it's probably because most FM roof antennas back then were horizontal and a lot of FM stations back then even only broadcast in H without V polarisation, so maybe they were just doing the same.

....Obviously these days it makes no sense to just use H without it also transmitting in V, but back then H probably worked better to pull the listeners locked in at home with FM roof antenna much more commonly used back then.

[shuffy]

You are spot on Teckniqs that's exactly what it was. Things were starting to change by 82 but Andromeda's roots were in stations dating back to the early 70s when you'd only find FM on domestic hifi kit, and the BBC nationals were horizontal - you just wouldn't consider vertical. ILR (Piccadilly) used circular from the mid 70s and the Beeb changed over to mixed from around 79, IIRC. It's also worth noting that there were acres of free space in Band II and the noise floor across the whole band was way lower than it is now.

[FMEnjoyer]

Thanks for clearing that up teckniqs.

When you consider any vertical balanced dipole antenna the mounting pole, if conductive, must be absolutely messing the pattern up in some way, given it is behind only the lower element in 99pct of single dipole installs. Be it unbalancing the poles somewhat, changing the pattern / radiation angle in some directions, or producing some directional/reflective effect. I would be money that any conducting mount pole becomes part of the antenna system for good or bad. This could potentially add a little weight to the argument that a end fed is better in many scenarios. It is not balanced for starters and it sits above any conductive mount poles. And again most poles are going to be conductive aluminium poles in most installs.