automation software for terrestrial radio station

They ran great community radio stations in defiance of the wealth-based structure of our broadcast system. They set up pirate radio stations as an act of civil disobedience because they believed that the broadcast regulations of this country are fundamentally unfair. The Prometheus Radio Project was born out of the microradio movement in the late 1990s and some of the founders of our organization were radio pirates before we began advocating for the FCC to allow legal low power broadcasting. Sometimes a 1 watt station goes unnoticed by local licensed broadcasters, so a complaint is never filed and the FCC never finds out about it. If you choose to operate an FM transmitter outside these Part 15 parameters, you would be considered a “pirate” in the eyes of the FCC, and you can face penalties for violating the law. Because many garage door openers and computers accidentally exceed these limits, through poor design or breakdown of some sort, the fact is that FCC field agents actually spend very little of their time looking for illegal radio operators, but instead, are spending their days tracking down malfunctioning pieces of equipment like this that are inadvertently fouling up the electromagnetic spectrum.

For this reason, legal microbroadcasting is often simply referred to as 'Part 15 broadcasting.' This rule does allow for some radiotransmission (like the microtransmitters you may use to hook up an mp3 player to a car radio), but it is largely used to regulate and allow wireless microphones and similar remote devices.

The section of the Federal Code of Regulations that regulates legal, unlicensed FM transmissions is Title 47, Part 15. The way the FCC checks for compliance with the law is whether you exceed a measurement of 250 microvolts/meter at 3 meters on a field strength meter, which is a tool that is specifically designed to measure the strength of electromagnetic fields. It is actually not the power but the field strength that the FCC measures. Reception at 30 feet happens, and rarely at 100 feet. The only exception is that you are allowed to broadcast on FM without a license if your transmitter produces so little power, that at 10 feet away the signal is already weaker than the FCC considers necessary for decent reception. That is why the FCC has been trying to institute LPFM – to provide a legitimate license to very low power operations. It doesn’t matter if you are less than 100 watts or less than 1 watt. Regardless of popular misconceptions, it is not legal to broadcast on FM at low power, or at any power, without a license from the FCC.

Automation software for terrestrial radio station