@Shakyamuni 977363 wrote:
yeah I love NPR and ya’ll have something similar in the UK run by BBC
BBC national radio is sometimes OK especially for EDM and specialist music (the youth channel Radio 1) and the news/documentaries (Radio 4) but the local channels cater mostly for the middle aged and seniors.
Commercial radio stations are all owned by one of 3 large media groups and are now equally bad across Europe (5 minutes or more adverts in some countries).
Well into the 1980s the UK still used parts of the VHF broadcast band for emergency and public service radio communications – it got to the point the British authorities got an official bollocking from the CEPT / ITU as it made these frequencies unusable for broadcasting in other nearby countries. adio waves do not stop at national borders and can go very far in coastal areas…
Around 1987-1990 the public services got shifted to elsewhere in the VHF bands (around 150- MHz) like everywhere else in mainland Europe. Their radio equipment is usually constructed so the control unit is fixed in the front of the vehicle and connected by a cable the RF section in the rear; so the engineers just had to replace the RF section with a unit tuned to the new frequencies. So hundreds of surplus RF units with components all ready tuned for VHF Band II and output power of 25-100W were subsequently sold off for scrap value – very convenient for pirate broadcasters 😉
The same mostly middle aged chaps who set up legitimate transmitters for taxicabs and the then new mobile phone networks would replace the control unit with a wideband stereo encoder, add a 230V power supply and discreetly sell these to the pirates for cash. There were so many of these units available if the Communications Ministry traced and seized one they would soon be replaced, although it was (and is) harder to get away with unlicensed broadcasting outside big cities or anywhere near the coast or aerodromes as there is more monitoring to check for interference to the aircraft/maritime comms.
By the 1990s the mobile phone boom and other advances in technology made the electronic components required for building new medium power transmitters far cheaper so even more pirate broadcasters appeared in UK cities (mostly playing EDM of some type)
In the mid 2000s the UK Govt actually did something sensible – they created Ofcom (the only European Communications Ministry that actually oversees both the tech and content side of broadcasting) and licensed low power Community Radio stations on Band II (FM) so a lot of former pirate broadcasters could go legit – I help out the local one with various tech stuff (most of the folk involved who are my age were former pirates).
These stations are only allowed to 25W TX power which doesn’t go very far unless the antenna is as high up as possible (in ideal conditions/locations it can go 20-30km) so use online streaming as well to increase their range (including for overseas listeners). They exist in many other European countries – there more paperwork and rules compared to running a pirate or online station and they can’t play EDM 24/7 (there has to be content like news/documentaries and for all the age groups/ethnic minorities) but those involved don’t have to be paranoid of the authorities and can use decent studio setups rather than a grotty room in a council estate house (housing project).
It is usually on these and the remaining pirate stations where you hear the most interesting content on European radio.
