I miss radio that involves live human beings and the audience. I liked the excitement that many of the older stations exuded. Radio now is so incredibly terribly bland. I don’t understand how it pays for the electricity to run the transmitters.

When KJR, KING, and KOL were all “top-40” in Seattle, I could also hear CKLG and CFUN in Vancouver BC, which were also top-40 as well as KTAC in Tacoma.

I liked the people on KJR in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. I enjoyed all the crazy stuff they came up with.

I remember some crazy ass thing Lan Roberts did where he was going to try to talk to space aliens or some such with the stations transmitter. Something about getting special permission from the F.C.C. to turn it off momentarily to listen for a reply. (never mind the fact that AM signals are absorbed by the ionosphere in the day and refracted back to the surface by the ionosphere at night thus never making it out into space).

And.. Mr. Science Mr. Science It’s Me! Jimmieeeeeee!

I was unaware until now that Lan Roberts had passed away from cancer in 2005. I knew he had been diagnosed with cancer way back when he was in Texas and I remember him saying in a post way back that he was thankful because he’d beat it, it had been six years or something like that and there were no signs.

They used to have that woman in the morning that screamed “Wake Up!” at the top of her lungs.

CFUN in Vancouver BC Canada, I took a liking to when KJR started to die. CFUN was high energy. Dead air didn’t happen, not even for a millisecond, music never stopped. If music wasn’t playing a musical station jingle was, commercials were done to music, cues were perfect, air personalities were excellent at talk overs right up to but never stomping on the lyrics.

I also liked CFUN’s audio processing, it was much like XERB and XEPRC when Wolfman Jack was on, they used heavy fast compression combined with reverb so the audio density was high, but it wasn’t flat bland, it was high energy exciting. It also wasn’t grossly clipped or distorted which was a problem with AM stations here in the Seattle area.

An engineering firm here in Seattle, allowed me to accompany them once when they did some maintenance work at KISW several decades ago. The transmitter site for KISW used to be on 92nd and Roosevelt, a couple of blocks from where I lived at the time. I’m not going to name the firm because of what I am about to describe.

I cringed when I saw how they adjusted the limiters / clippers at KISW. They had regular programming feeding, turned the clipper off and adjusted the limiter so limiting heavily, maybe 20db gain reduction, the output would drive the transmitter to about 120% modulation, then they turned on the clippers and clamped it down to 100% with the clippers. Thus the audio was essentially continuously clipped.

Now in fairness to them, many stations wanted to sound “loud” at the time and that was a way to achieve that (though I think there were much less audibly destructive methods of achieving loud high density sound). This particular firm was top-notch otherwise doing many complex tasks that others would not or could not take on.

That method of setting up audio processing, all I can say is Ick! Other stations took a different approach, using multi-band compressor / limiters like the Orban Optimod units which could achieve a quite loud and high audio density, especially if you added a small amount of reverb up front.

Arguably any of these methods would make an audiophile gag, but I particularly disliked the heavy use of clipping because of the intermodulation distortion and high order harmonics that it would introduce. In my view given AM radios limited S/N ratio, heavy processing was justified, but not so FM.

KING used to do a lot of promotions, a lot of music give-a-way’s. I got real good at manual speed dialing (this was back when you could only have AT&T Bell telephones) and they had no rule regarding the same person winning more than once, so they contributed to my album collection.

I met Bill Wolfenbarger, the chief engineer at KOL AM 1300, after contacting many radio stations in the area looking for used broadcast equipment we could use in our pirate station. Bill used to allow us to use a production studio to record things. I ruined that by exploding a tape reel in the studio.

They used to have these great big reel-to-reel floor standing tape recorders. I had recorded a reel of tape and was going to rewind. Now these machines had a fast-forward and fast-fast-forward, they also had a rewind and fast-rewind. The “fast” versions had red lettering that said, “Do not use with plastic reels”. Being the stupid teenager I was then, (as opposed to the stupid adult I am now), I had to know why so I hit the fast-rewind. The machine spun up and then Boosh! There were pieces of tape reel embedded in the wall, my shirt and T-shirt were sliced, but somehow I and others with me all escaped injury. However, that did, understandably, ruin my welcome in the production studio.

I was working on getting into radio legitimately and working towards my 1st class radio telephone operators license (which I did get in my junior year of high school) and Bill was one of the engineers willing to let me pick his brain and see a real station.

I saw quite a few actually, but KOL was uniquely impressive and Bill was uniquely willing to talk about radio and share his knowledge. It wasn’t new and sterile, but it was a class act. It was real organic radio with real human beings at the helm. The station was saturated with life energy. I was so sad to see it go when it was bought out and became KMPS country.

If you have any old photos of KOL, especially with the lighted call letters, and would be willing to allow me to share them here on the blog I’d really appreciate it.

I would describe the Adrianne Curry Show as like a female version of the Howard Stern show on the Internet. It’s definitely not for children or conservative adults. It’s more like a wild on-air party than a traditional radio show.

She prefers to describe her show as like MySpace on crack. The show is connected to a web-based chat so users can drop in and participate that way.

If you like Howard Stern you might like this show. If you dislike Howard Stern because of the sexual content, then you probably won’t like this show.

Sirius and XM to merge according to an article in CNN MoneyWatch. Both companies are disappointed in their stock value and believe there will be value in a merger.

Here is my prediction for the future of satellite radio. Satellite radio has a limited future. I believe there is money to be made in it during the next five to ten years. I believe it will grow for the next five to ten years and then begin a decline.

What I believe will be it’s replacement is a new form of terrestrial radio which will be the result of IP radio combined with WiMax wireless broadband. The reason for this is one of simple economics. Broadcasting via satellite is tremendously expensive, terrestrial radio is dirt cheap. Conventional terrestrial radio lacks variety, particularly recently with a handful of giant corporations owing the majority of broadcast stations. Conventional terrestrial radio also lacks broad coverage and high quality audio for the most part.

The marriage of WiMAX and IP radio will address both these issues. It will become possible to listen to any IP radio station anywhere there is WiMAX coverage which I predict will eventually be essentially everywhere.

Presently there is a technical issue preventing this from being a reality and that is that presently IP radio is sent using UDP which has no delivery guarantee mechanism and the protocols used to send it themselves lack delivery guarantee and retransmission capability.

WiMax, presently is much like WiFi with longer range, will eventually be adapted to something resembling IP cellular service. This may be a completely de-facto adaptation with receivers adapting a strategy of seeking multiple connections and using the best at any given location.

The switch-over though will always involve interruption however momentary with packet loss, and a resulting interruption in audio. But as more people start using it that way, someone will adapt or create a protocol that includes error detection and retransmission for IP radio, and as soon as that happens commercial receivers incorporating WiMAX and IP radio in a user friendly box will emerge.

As soon as that happens, any incentive to switch to satellite radio will be largely lost owing to the much larger variety of programming material an lack of fees that WiMAX / IP radio will provide.

I expect this will occur within five years, but because people with investments in existing hardware or who enjoy programming on satellite radio that they’ve become accustomed to will continue listening, I don’t expect the satellite market to die for at least another five years after that but I do expect it will be on the decline.

PropNet asks,

“If the band is open and nobody is transmitting, can anybody here it?”

Amateur radio operators have been exploring radio propagation for decades. They have come to utilize reflection from the ionosphere, tropospheric ducting, tropospheric scatter, reflection off the moon, and various other modes in which radio waves are transmitted beyond line of site to achieve communications.

Some DX hobbyists like myself enjoy receiving distant stations beyond the distances normal conditions and methods allow. This can involve optimizing equipment, developing techniques for detecting weak signals buried in noise, knowledge of various propagation modes and when they are likely to occur, and just plain patience and luck.

Amateur radio operators have come up with a new way to exploit digital technology and the Internet to allow mapping of radio propagation at various wavelengths in real time. The technology consists simply of beacons that broadcast digitally encoded messages on fixed frequencies at regular frequent intervals and receiver stations that listen for these beacons and when they receive one report back to a central internet server that then records that reception and maps that propagation path in real time making it possible to develop maps, updated in real time, of radio propagation at various frequencies.

Propnet.org is a the result. Presently the mapping is pretty sparse, however, as more people become aware of this project and join it will become more complete. You need an amateur radio license to participate as a transmitting beacon but anyone with the proper receiver equipment can participate as a receiving station.

In addition to this mapping project there are also links to five day tropospheric ducting forecasts and radio and television DX’ing.

The majority of the equipment we used in our pirate radio station was tube equipment. I think about the only thing solid state was a couple of Radio Shack phono pre-amplifiers that amplified the output of the magnetic cartridges on the turn tables enough to drive the input of the all-tube Gates Yard mixing board that we used.

One of the tube pieces of equipment we used was a Langevin compressor / limiter which did a fairly decent job of crunching the audio down, at least as far as a single band compressor limiter can. We modified it somewhat so that the time constants were as short as possible without severe intermodulation by bass, and we modified the limiting stage so that it only limited on negative peaks and allowed the positive peaks to go as high as they will.

I did a Google search curious to see if any of these old beasts were still around and I ran across, Robert Van Dyke Vintage Audio. He sells all sorts of old tube equipment.

The Langevin compressor / limiter wasn’t among the stuff he currently has in stock but there is still a lot of cool stuff on his list. The equipment he offers for sale is serviceable and might just have a place in your radio station so I’ve added a link to the sidebar.

For those not familiar with tube equipment, there are desirable and undesirable aspects to tube verses solid state.

The desirable aspects is that tubes are very linear compared to their solid state equivalents, and so much less negative feedback is required, and as a result the phenomena common to solid state equipment known as transient intermodulation distortion is almost non-existent in tube equipment. Tubes clip “soft” instead of saturating hard like transistors. As a consequence distortion produced by clipping tends to be lower order harmonics which are audibly much less objectionable than higher order harmonics. In power amplifier applications, tubes amplifiers tend to have lower damping factors and some people (myself included) find this desirable, others who are more concerned with technical perfection prefer an amplifier with a high damping factor to make speakers behave. Tube amplifiers and other devices are less susceptible to radio frequency interference than solid state equipment and they handle overloads better.

The disadvantages to tubes are hiss, hum, poorer frequency response, higher harmonic distortion figures, and they are high maintenance requiring tube replacement, hum balance adjustment, and bias adjustments, among other things. Tubes are less efficient and generate more heat as well as producing less output power for the amount of electricity they consume. Tube equipment tends to be heavy and bulky.

If you’re like me and something that sounds aesthetically pleasing is more important than something with good technical specifications, then you might want to consider vintage tube equipment. I’ve given it up simply because I can’t afford it.

REC Networks started as a record-a-call telephone entertainment company. They have since become involved in low power broadcasting and offer free services helpful to the unlicensed low power broadcaster such as free engineering information and channel searches.

I find their history interesting as exploring the telephone network was also something I found to be of interest as a teenager when operating our bootleg radio station.

We discovered something called “loops” back then. These were test numbers used by telephone technicians for trunk (trunks are the circuits that connect telephone central offices to each other) testing but we found them useful as way to allow listeners of our pirate radio station to call us without the number given being traceable to us.

Loops have two telephone numbers associated with them, back in the days they almost always used -0018 and -0019 for the loop in a given central office. If you had a trunks in a trunk group you needed to test, first you would call the -0018 side of the loop from a test panel on one of the trunks to be tested. It would send a 1 Khz tone from the far in at 0 dbm (dbm means decibels referenced to a 1 milliwatt signal level). You would receive the tone on your test panel at say -3dbm, meaning their was 3db loss in the trunk in the receive direction (from the distant central office to you). Then on another trunk circuit you would call the 0019 side of the loop. The loop would connect both trunk circuits together so now if you sent a tone at 0db on the second trunk and you received it back at -6db on the first you would know that the transmit loss on the second trunk was 3db (6db total loss -3db known receive loss of the first circuit). Then you would repeat the procedure for both circuits in the reverse order to determine the transmit loss for the first circuit and the receive loss for the second.

The important thing to know here is that if you called say 555-0018 you would hear a 1 Khz tone, and then if someone else called 555-0019 you would be connected together and could talk.

So there we were operating a pirate radio station and we wanted to take callers online or take requests but we didn’t want to give out our telephone number thus identifying ourselves to the FCC. So instead we’d call 555-0018, and give out 555-0019 over the air and wait for the tone to stop.

If you are thinking ah it was tough back then, today we’d just use a cell phone! Be aware that cell phones have GPS receivers built into them now and will give law enforcement your location within about six feet. Call forwarding is also trivial to trace.

That’s ok though I think the pirate stations that are operating in defiance of FCC orders to shut down on the grounds that it is their first amendment rights are doing the right thing. Surely if the framers of the constitution had anticipated broadcast, it would have been included, and logically should be included as part of “the press”.

Freak Radio Santa Cruz is an unlicensed radio station operating on 101.1 Mhz FM in Santa Cruz, California. There is no indication of their operating power given on their website. They also have live streaming on the web so you can listen to them wherever you are by simply going to their website.

Radio Free Olympia is a 100 watt unlicensed (pirate) FM radio station operating on 98.5 Mhz since March of 2001.

Their website is interesting in as much as they have gone out of their way to honor requests from legitimate broadcasters to avoid interference. They started operation on 91.3 Mhz in the spring of 2001, until threatened by FCC in May of 2002.

They came back on the air for five days in September of 2002 after joining forces with some elements of Free Radio Cascadia in a protest against the NAB in Seattle.

Radio Free Olympia reformed in Olympia on 91.3 in May of 2003. On October 29, 2004, in response to a request from KBCS in Bellevue, a student run station at Bellevue Community College, they changed frequencies to 101.9 Mhz to avoid interfering with them.

On March 1, 2005, they again changed frequencies to 98.5 Mhz at the request of KSWW in Gray’s Harbor which operated on 102.1 Mhz to avoid adjacent channel interference.

I think they’ve set an excellent example in this regard, taking the necessary steps to remedy any interference. I think it’s important than pirate radio station operators do this because if they voluntarily address interference issues it undermines the one legitimate claim that regulators have against unlicensed radio stations, that is causing interference to legitimate operations.

Pirate Radio USA is a documentary on the subject of pirate radio. I just got through watching the trailer and it sounds like it casts everyone operating a pirate radio station as revolutionary underground anarchists.

I’m sure there are those, and they probably have the most legitimate right to operate. When we operated our pirate stations back in the 70’s we were just kids having fun. When we blew things up back then we were just kids having fun, now everyone with a firecracker is a terrorist.

Free Radio Network, another group dedicated to returning the airwaves to the public. These folks seem to write more from a pirate radio DXer’s perspective than a pirate radio station operators perspective. The website contains information on low power FM, shortwave, and other pirate radio station operations as well as some things happening on the legal front. It does not contain much in the way of do-it-yourself information.