@Smiley1 540611 wrote:
As everyones switched over onto the digital signal for there tv does this mean that the analog frequency spectrum is free for pirate broadcast?
Unfortunately this is not as simple as it seems.
Digital and analogue TV were roughly in the same frequency areas but what has happened is digital has been introduced (and stuff like wireless microphones shifted along the frequencies) to free up space in Bands IV and V (the UHF frequencies). This has been or is being sold to mobile phone operators and wireless broadband providers.
What exactly they are going to do with the frequencies is not yet clear but if you transmit an analogue signal unless you have loads of power it is going to be swamped by a shit ton of interference and if you start overpowering services that big commercial organisations have paid thousands to Ofcom to secure, both their engineers and Ofcom will be on your case very quickly.
its also way more complex to set up transmitters for UHF than VHF.
That said I have been looking at the white space devices plans and I can’t see what would stop a clever hacker re-engineering one of these to output a DVB-T stream (i.e a pirate digital TV channel) but it would only go a very short distance anyway… also as youtube etc currently remain free to use and relatively uncensored (less so than a normal broadcaster) and modern tellies can play back youtube it seems like a lot of effort for little return. Don’t underestimate the power of stuff like youtube a while back I put up a video of me climbing into a roofspace to test a telephone line using one of them blue handsets which wouldn’t have been of any great interest to anyone other than telecoms / IT engineers and folk as far away as Malaysia and Bahrain seemed to be viewing it, presumably they have to do the same job as me (at least I only see evidence of the odd rat or two, they have deadly snakes and spiders to content with).
