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.

[JimJ[VT]]

You'd need a lot of power compared to a simple FM audio signal - and even a 200KHz FM signal isn't the easiest to get out there, unless you live on top of a building and have a great LOS.

Couple interesting mentions here though...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_...Known_stations

[MRX37]

None here that I've seen yet, but there are still several Canadian stations, and a couple LPTV stations broadcasting.

[wilkes85]

Well Canada isn't switching till 2011, so those will be on for a few years still.

But that would be awesome to see all kinds of pirate stations! I wonder what kind of things they'll broadcast?
DVDs of old TV shows? home videos? youtube videos? but whatever they broadcast, that would be something interesting to see.

I doubt anyone will do that around where I live though. The city isn't really big enough. And even with rabbit ears, I have trouble picking up the real TV stations, let alone pirate ones, which probabally would be much lower powered.

[MRX37]

Yes, I know Canada's keeping Analog until 2011. Luckily I can get channel 9, 16, 32, 42 on a good day with a strong antenna, and 54, which is French, so fat lot of good it does me.

I wonder if I'll be able to at least get Channel 9 and 32 after they go all digital? I might need one hell of an antenna...

[wilkes85]

Originally Posted by MRX37

Yes, I know Canada's keeping Analog until 2011. Luckily I can get channel 9, 16, 32, 42 on a good day with a strong antenna, and 54, which is French, so fat lot of good it does me.

I wonder if I'll be able to at least get Channel 9 and 32 after they go all digital? I might need one hell of an antenna...

You get all those channels? Where do you live?

Here in central SK, there's 4, 8, 11, and 13, which is french.
even with a big ass areal on the roof.


I imagine you're gonna have to get a really huge UHF antenna to pull in the digital stations.

[MRX37]

Detroit, near Windsor Canada. All kinds of Canadian TV and FM stations, with a good enough antenna.

[Adam]

I did a complete check of what I could receive this morning using the antenna on the roof and the rotator. To my disappointment, no pirate tv. I checked all the channels 1-83.

[MRX37]

I'd think a pirate wouldn't aim for anything above Channel 69, because that band is now crowded with radio and cell phone transmissions, and a pirate signal would be easily noticed due to the interference.

Realistically, if I were to set up a pirate station, I'd aim for VHF, because the signal would go farther. I'd also use an unoccupied channel, since one of the reasons for the switchover is that the digital stations will now be using the same 6 mhz bandwidth per channel formerly assigned to the analog stations.

[Adam]

I figured I would check every channel just in case, I wasn't expecting anything on channel 1 either. I'm not sure about this, but I thought they weren't using ch 2-6 anymore? If so, maybe that would probably be the most likely place to find them?

[wilkes85]

Originally Posted by MRX37

I'd think a pirate wouldn't aim for anything above Channel 69, because that band is now crowded with radio and cell phone transmissions, and a pirate signal would be easily noticed due to the interference.

Realistically, if I were to set up a pirate station, I'd aim for VHF, because the signal would go farther. I'd also use an unoccupied channel, since one of the reasons for the switchover is that the digital stations will now be using the same 6 mhz bandwidth per channel formerly assigned to the analog stations.

Is there a way to pick up any of these cell phone conversations on the upper UHF area? I just hooked the rooftop areal to the UHF screws, and got nothing, except for what I think is an extremely distant station only strong enough to make the snow in that part of the dial look and sound different.

I do remember being able to pick up people talking occasionally around channel 83 though. Ah them's the days lol... well im interested in SW radio and all that shit, so it would be interesting to get cell phone conversations and other such awesome stuff in the upper UHF range.

[JimJ[VT]]

edit

[qboneus]

I found our 4 analog still running this am when i tried them out
tal

[Ed in Tx]

Originally Posted by wilkes85

Is there a way to pick up any of these cell phone conversations on the upper UHF area? .

They are all digital now. So, no you can't pick up cell phone conversations. 5-10 years ago when there were still FM analog cellular systems, yes, you could receive those between 800 and 900 mHz.

[MRX37]

Far as I know, they ARE still using the lower VHF band for digital TV transmissions, which I guess is why they scrapped Analog entirely.

That would explain why before the transition, none of the physical channel numbers matched their analog counterparts...