I'm about to start broadcasting & have heard from an old school broadcaster presently working in the TV industry that if a pirate interferes with their short range camera transmission systems they can get OFCOM to shut them down within 20 minutes.

How does it all work?

Are they more active in different parts of the country, days of the week, times of day?

Do they leave you a lone if no one complains?

Thanks.

Put on something low-powered running off a battery from somewhere remote and find out. It only has to last 21 minutes!

They are complaints-driven but I suspect that they have to be seen to be pro-active. You are much better off if nobody complains, obviously. Ultimately, you are going to get taken off and lose equipment.

The question is, though, why are you so concerned about interfering with something so far out of band? If you aren't confident that your equipment won't interfere with anything - don't put it on.

TWP is 100% right. The idea is that you put on clean equipment which won't interfere with anybody.

Even though this is a pirate radio forum I don't thing you'll find anyone here advising you on how to try and get away with putting on a dirty transmitter.

To answer your question though, Ofcom are complaints driven but in their current state I doubt they could take anything off in 20 minutes. I would guess that it would take a couple of hours at the least depending on how far the nearest ofcom office was with people sitting in it with nothing to do waiting for such a call to come in.

And no, they don't leave you alone if there are no complaints. You're broadcasting without a licence so it's only a matter of time before you're taken off.

Thanks for your replies.

I live in an area where a pirate has been running 24/7 for a long time.

Does a dirty transmitter broadcast on other frequencies?

I can't here it anywhere else on 88-108....

Post up some pictures of your transmitter and we could advise if it is likely to cause a problem

This is an example of a dirty transmitter, bad batch of mpsh10 transistors in the freq doubler section of a pro4 we built. This could even be worse depending on what's wrong with given transmitter. It doesn't stop there, unwanted emissions can also be generated in a bad antenna system, and intermods can occur if you're co locating with other transmitters (not just fm, but other types too) If your transmission is clean you'll probably be on the air without incident for quite some time.

Are you aware of "Riglol"?

You might find it quite interesting.

thewisepranker wrote:Are you aware of "Riglol"?

You might find it quite interesting.

Link pls TWP.

Very nice. I've always wanted a Rigol or Tektronix.


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Eh? Rigol are a cheap but decent Chinese brand, Tektronix are in another league. I've got a DS1054Z, which is now a 100 MHz 4-channel oscilloscope. It was about £350 brand new - cheap as chips. The same in Tek would cost about £1500.

thewisepranker wrote:

Thanks for that. I did actually google Riglol and that link came up first. I was too scared to open it as it looked dodgy.
I've also got a 70MHz Rigol scope, I think it's a 1074 or something like that, about 2yrs old. I don't actually use it that much unless I want to capture something, I find the analogue one a lot quicker to use for most stuff.

I've also kept hold of my analogue oscilloscope (4-ch, 100 MHz) for the same reason.

Doing it gives you access to the full capture memory (it's software limited) and all of the advanced triggers and decoding options. It's worth doing - it only takes a minute to type the code in. The code is "DSFR" which goes in the "Options" box on that website.

thewisepranker wrote:

I've also kept hold of my analogue oscilloscope (4-ch, 100 MHz) for the same reason.

Doing it gives you access to the full capture memory (it's software limited) and all of the advanced triggers and decoding options. It's worth doing - it only takes a minute to type the code in. The code is "DSFR" which goes in the "Options" box on that website.

Actually I've got a DS2072A. Updated the firmware to 03.04 and applied keys from Riglol but it doesn't work, says licence unavailable. Maybe their latest firmware got around the hack.

...would have wicked to have a 300MHz scope though, I could have posted waveforms of the rigs I don't ever make to Ebay to make my auctions look more impressive.

It should still work. I bought mine last month with the latest firmware and I had no problem whatsoever.

There seems to be older versions of the firmware here: http://gotroot.ca/rigol/

thewisepranker wrote:Eh? Rigol are a cheap but decent Chinese brand, Tektronix are in another league. I've got a DS1054Z, which is now a 100 MHz 4-channel oscilloscope. It was about £350 brand new - cheap as chips. The same in Tek would cost about £1500.

Good point. I've seen so many Rigols being used on YouTube make them appear to be pretty decent. But Tektronix are definitely in another league ad have seen many people using them.


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Some of us old-timers still use HP Spectrum and Network Analysers, bought when they were pensioned off by the government! I got a whole suite of RF test gear - a radio test set, SINAD meter, deviation meter, AM mod meter, dummy loads, attenuators with taps, signal generators, two spectrum analysers, a network analyser, three oscilloscopes and much more for about £2500 from John's Radio, delivered to my house, with a whole set of calibration certificates. It's all still in perfect working order, and I can work on pretty much anything from ELF to 56GHz.

Some of the gear is away at a calibration house at the moment, but £180 later, I've got gear easily good enough to satisfy the OFCOM clowns when they want frequency accuracy, harmonic content, power output, conducted RF spill and all the rest.

Albert H wrote:Some of us old-timers still use HP Spectrum and Network Analysers, bought when they were pensioned off by the government! I got a whole suite of RF test gear - a radio test set, SINAD meter, deviation meter, AM mod meter, dummy loads, attenuators with taps, signal generators, two spectrum analysers, a network analyser, three oscilloscopes and much more for about £2500 from John's Radio, delivered to my house, with a whole set of calibration certificates. It's all still in perfect working order, and I can work on pretty much anything from ELF to 56GHz.

Some of the gear is away at a calibration house at the moment, but £180 later, I've got gear easily good enough to satisfy the OFCOM clowns when they want frequency accuracy, harmonic content, power output, conducted RF spill and all the rest.

I have a bit of test equipment addiction and it can get very expensive.

Would you mind letting me know the details of the calibration firm you use, Albert?

With regards to frequency accuracy, I've toyed with the idea of using a GPS-based frequency standard which is then buffered and split to drive a few instruments. A lot have an external 10MHz reference input at the back so they could all be driven from the same high-accuracy source. The only reason I haven't got round to it yet is that most of the stuff I use every day has a OCXO in it and 3-4 pieces of equipment all agree to within 1-2Hz after warming up.

thewisepranker wrote:It should still work. I bought mine last month with the latest firmware and I had no problem whatsoever.

There seems to be older versions of the firmware here: http://gotroot.ca/rigol/

Can't work out what I'm doing wrong then. Updated the firmware to 03.04, no problems. Generated the key, entered it on scope, said licence unavailable. Tried a few different options, still nothing.
One thing I did notice is that all the demo options that came with the scope still have 73 days left to run. Not sure if that would make a difference but wouldn't have thought so.

I thought about rolling back the firmware but slightly hesitant because I read it wasn't possible on some models and I don't want to brick a £700 machine.

would of thought this would be unlikely, unless your transmitter next door to a tv studio, well you could problaly find the frequencies of wireless microphones, you problaly won't hear naff all thought suppose in the event of interference they'd change the channel anyway