Any pirate analog TV stations?

[wa2ise]

In the New York City area, FM pirate stations keep popping up like weeds in the inner city regions of the metro area. Now that the big boy analog stations have shut down on 2, 4, 5, 9 someone might think that an opportunity to serve their community with a pirate analog TV station has arrived.

Back in around 1978 in Syracuse NY, someone put a pirate TV station on channel 7 during a weekend. There was a short article in the New York Times about it. Rumor had it that someone modified a guitar amp to build the transmitter. Not as crazy as it first sounds, the audio output vacuum tube could easily operate on VHF. You'd remove the audio output transformer, and the old driver circuits could be rebuilt to run at VHF. Building a reasonable video modulator circuit would take some work, but a week or two of solder slinging should be sufficient. Audio is just an FM radio station modulator at 4.5MHz and then add it to the video, then feed that to the video modulator.