Episode: 6
Title: HPR0006: Part 15 Broadcasting
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0006/hpr0006.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:14:14

---

.
You are turned into 16 to 80 AM, the Ocho.
The North County's latest Mark 15 radio station.
The Ocho is technology 24 hours a day fully automated.
The Ocho is music.
Music that you've never heard that you would like to hear.
The Ocho is an information.
Information news, whether gas report, the Ocho is fired.
It is fine.
Hello!
Hello!
This is Dawson Man.
And Zach.
And we're the Packest Nifers.
And you're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
So, yeah, I guess this is our first edition of Hacker Public Radio we're putting on.
I think we're going to talk about part 15 broadcasting.
Non-licensed broadcasting, basically.
Licensed free.
Yes.
Sticked by the power rules and get all the equipment you need and then pump up the volume.
Yes.
So, okay.
So, I guess the first thing question is what is part 15?
And if you're ever seeing pump up the volume, that's not really has anything to do with part 15.
Yeah, there's nothing to do with it.
I just wanted to make the reference because it's not as glamorous or as exciting.
But it's still just as fun as Christians later.
Happy Harry Hardon.
No.
So, yeah.
So, part 15 is the part of the US federal code that governs our radio wave power and emissions and such that allows you to,
part 15 is what allows you to use a wireless device without a license, like say cordless phone or things like that.
You know, your little FM transmitter from your iPod, your car stereo, that's part 15.
Also, governs the RF output on your VCR.
Yes.
Yes, things of that nature.
Or your DVD player, rather.
Yes.
Jump into the current decade.
So, yeah, yeah.
So, anything that uses electricity creates some RF noise, but it has to be contained in a certain way and has to meet certain guidelines.
Only certain things are allowed to actually emit the RF and enough for other people to pick up.
And there's some special guidelines here for part 15 AM broadcasting, which basically lets you get a half mile to a mile away, basically.
We've had some experience this summer.
We set up our own station for about nine months or so.
Yeah.
It was definitely a good project to see exactly how far you could get, how advanced you could get using the bare minimum, basically as much as you could possibly do on the AM frequency without needing a license or any other special permits or FCC tracking.
There's also guidelines as to what kind of antenna you can use there.
And we'll get into that in a little bit.
Because you can do a lot with your antenna to make your signal get further, but they severely limit that to make sure that you're not getting across the counting with your part 15 unlicensed rig.
Because you don't want to be dominating a channel that the FCC could be making tens of thousands of dollars on to another bigger company.
So I guess the first thing we're going to, well the second thing I guess we'll dive into is why would you want to get into this?
I don't know, a couple of different reasons is like, you know, for support of your community?
Yeah, I've seen high schools and I've seen churches use these local, basically campus-only radio stations that are for the immediate area.
Or some kind of small, maybe a trailer community, I've seen them used to promote community awareness and current events and things like that.
Yeah, and another place that's popular, the road signs that you see on the side of the highway or the interstate that tell you to tune into such and such, you know, 5 30 AM for news and traffic updates.
Sometimes local municipalities will run those.
And that's actually that falls under a slightly different section of the rules because they can run a little bit higher power with those.
Still pretty local, you're only talking, you know, 5 miles range or something with something like that.
Another area in which you can use part 15 broadcasts, especially mainly radios, like for specific events, like I've seen special races, stuff like that.
They could be doing commentary or stuff over a low frequency, maybe something that's having like a row of speakers or maybe a band, they could be re-broadcasting out for the parking lot or something over a low power frequency.
Yeah, yeah.
So specific events, stuff for your community, you know, traffic updates.
And then also that the main reason that most people get into it is just for fun, I think.
That's definitely why we got into it.
But there's other aspects of playing to that.
We wanted to, you know, provide some type of community service, you know.
And there's not really no variety or profit unless you're going to be saying things you're not allowed to say and you're going to be blackmailing people over it.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can really get away with it that long and under part 15 rules, you know, you wouldn't have that large of an audience.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, a lot of times I guess we'll move into transmitters and stuff, you know.
There's a couple different transmitters and your transmitter and your tenor set up governs how much range you have.
And they'll advertise you can get two to four miles.
Yeah, right.
If you've got a lot of antenna experience, you might be able to cram, you know, two miles.
And you live on a mountain?
Yes.
So the transmitter we went with was you get these things as kits.
Well, you don't have to.
The one we got comes as a kit.
It's AMD 3000 by SS Tran.
100 bucks, you put it together yourself, you know, two hours one evening, four hours, depending on your soldering skills.
And it was, I found it to be a super easy kit to assemble.
The directions are top notch.
So if you're kind of not so sure, you can do some kit electronic assembly soldering.
But you're not sure if you want to do like an actual radio versus like a little dice game or something that you've done in the past.
This is a very excellent kit to assemble.
The directions are top notch.
You know, the guy is easy to work with if you have trouble.
The guy that runs the company that sells these.
Other transmitters out there.
There's of course the Ramsey kits, Ramsey electronic sells some AM transmitter kits.
If you have one, you can play with it.
But from one, everything I've read, the AMD 3000 is a much better kit for the same price.
It has a built-in compression, modulation and gain.
You might not know what those things are immediately, but you can play with them.
And you'll understand why those things are important.
The other, the top of the line radio for AM, part 15 AM broadcasting is called the Range Master.
However, I'm not really sure where the market for this is.
They try to sell it as, you know, it's a pre-assembled kit.
It's FCC certified and all this stuff.
I'm sure it's a wonderful transmitter.
But for 800 to $1,000 for 100 milliwatt transmitter,
I just, you've got to have a lot of money to be able to throw away at your hobby if you can afford one of those.
If you're able to actually turn your part 15 station into a profit, you know,
a for-profit company or something and you're selling advertisements and stuff,
yeah, you might be able to justify one of those, but most hobby enthusiasts, you know,
don't really have an interest in something like that.
So I think we would heavily recommend the AMD 3000.
So the next next step, the transmitters goes antennas.
And if you're actually going to try to get some range with your transmitter kit,
what you're going to want to do, you set up a mast in your backyard and you do what's called a whip and mast setup.
You're going to build yourself a base loaded coil.
It's basically a piece of PVC with wire wrapped around it.
There's going to be directions on like a lot of different sites.
The site that sells AMD 3000 has some really good directions on how to build the base loaded antenna.
Your transmitter has to be attached to the base of the antenna.
So you've got to actually have your transmitter in a weather proof enclosure mounted on the pole.
And that's because you're limited to an antenna length of three meters for part 15 AM broadcasting.
And as well as a hundred milliwatt output into your final stage.
Now, the thing that's going to be, you've seen a socket and a steel legal star, you know,
the antenna we've ever advertised doing, it's going to take a little work.
It's not an exact science.
The AMT, the S-Train website, has pre-users and directions on how to drill some holes
and wires coming through and to seal it up really good.
40 bucks on hard disk and hard disk and PVC.
And then you just run your coax and your power openings.
Your power for the plants.
And I'll say that it will take a little bit of work if you have a friend that's a AM radio operator
or someone else that has some experience with antennas and electronics.
It'd be very good to help out with if you're good and you don't mind messing around with electronics at all.
And it's really not a whole lot of electronics that involve, per se, to set up the antenna and get it tuned.
But it will test your patience.
And you know, just give it some time.
Come back to it when you're ready to mess with it a second time, you know, whatever.
I don't know. I'd probably spend maybe the course of like two months getting ours tuned
where it would actually get, you know, a quarter mile.
So, you know, fine.
I think we got what a half mile from the transmitter.
So a mile distance coverage.
About a half.
Yeah. So, well, a half mile in one inch direction.
Oh, yeah.
So, a mile total, maybe.
Yeah. So, you know, it'll take some work and you need a good grounding rod.
I'll get you, you know, self an eight foot grounding rod.
All the directions are on the side and there's a lot of different help.
And we'll have some links on the HPR site for...
I will tell you that it is hard getting that grounding rod in.
But it's even worse getting the grounding rod out.
We tried to use a floor jack to pull it out because our station, Zach, Zach is moving
and we had to take down the antenna here.
So, we never did actually get it out of the canal.
I think that's going to be under ownership of the new tenets.
Hopefully they pay mind to it when they move the yard.
A chopper stopper.
Yeah, an eight foot grounding rod sticking three inches above the surface of the ground for the mowers.
The mower loses.
So, okay, so that's enough about antennas and stuff.
So, the next stage, once you get the hardware down, that's when the real fun begins.
And that's your station automation and the content.
The first thing we use for automating the station, sure you can set up wind amp and with a playlist,
but that's not really dynamic enough.
If you want like weather and news and stuff to happen at specific times during the day,
probably what you're going to end up with is a software package for when it was called Zera Radio.
It's free, it's not open source, but it's free.
It's a very, very dynamic piece of software.
And we did a number of different things with it.
What kind of music did we use?
Oh, we used a whole mix of stuff.
We used CID remixes.
We used various techno.
Other free licensed songs.
What I enjoyed and had fun with is a great deal of original Esperanto music.
And that's found various places on the internet.
Because usually from unsigned people that have no problem with you putting their music online
or on the air and to share with everybody else because as they figure it, it's free advertisement.
Yep, yep.
So, you know, I'm definitely a big fan of the CID remixes.
And I think that there's a place called RKO or remix.quad.org.
And we used most of their archives.
We had about six months of music without repeats.
The other good place to look online is her for clocked remixes.
They've got some good songs also.
And a lot of NES songs and game remixes for many of us.
And I do urge people unless it's stated.
Don't play the guessing game.
Actually, email the artists of the song.
The little extra work really pays off because they'll more than likely be.
Sure, yeah, use my song here some more.
And they'll give you a lot more music than you could have ever asked for.
And another thing that I had a lot of fun with as far as content.
There's a little site out on the internet called gasbuddy.com.
And the gist of it is you go to the website.
And as you drive on your way to work, on your way home from work.
You see the gas prices, all the gas stations as you pass.
So you write them down.
You log onto the website with a free account.
And you update the site with the gas prices from around your town.
And everybody does this.
So you end up with a pretty reasonable listing of gas prices around town on this website.
So I've got a script that I wrote that downloads all this information.
And then performs a text to speech on it.
Now, of course, they post the data as image files.
You have to do a little OCR there to get it into text and then you can read it.
So I had a pretty, pretty robust script that would read.
And it would mix in different comments and stuff.
So it wasn't just a static, same exact thing said every day.
And the next thing, of course, is reading RSS feeds for slash dot,
AP news, Russia today, and whatever you want like that.
So you have your morning ADM news for people.
You get your tech news.
You've got some more less tech-centric news with the AP world news and stuff.
I also would also do the current events calendar for our city website.
They had a eGov package and they would put news and stuff.
So it would just pull their page and read the current news for that week,
the events on the town calendar.
Gosh, I think I even had some more stuff.
I would do weather updates.
I was reading weather.com's news, although I'd rather switch to weather.gov
and get the data in a more static, better format.
The last thing that I was working on, I didn't have time to finish this before we took the station down,
was I found someone on an IBM site had a couple of purl scripts that would read
weather.gov radar image maps.
It would actually be a couple of purl scripts that would read for a set of coordinates.
You could tell if there was rain over a specific set of coordinates.
So I was going to use this as a...
His scripts were set up to email you when weather was bad,
weather was approaching your location and when it was directly over and stuff.
So I was going to turn this into an automated weatherman and have it reading
a current weather situation for our one-mile radius.
It is now raining in this one-mile area, although I think our users would have seen it at that moment.
Yeah, but it was a cool feature nonetheless.
So someday when we get the Ocho back up on the air, we will have weather updates as well.
And the last thing I was trying to do was tie it in to the emergency alert system.
And there are a couple of different ways to do that.
I wanted to tie in actually a weather radio and have it be able to switch the audio feed over when storm,
when there is emergency situation for our locality.
It may end up probably it would be easier to get the information off the Internet
and I started trying to find that.
But anyway, so if there is a tornado, people would still find out about that
even though they are listening to your little AM station rather than a big commercial outlet.
So a lot of the fun that we had was on the station automation instead.
There are other things that you can do such as bumpers and tags for your show
that you can really spend a lot of time and have a lot of fun with.
I know that is what I had the most fun with was getting a firing up cool edit pro
and making just a whole slew of commercial station identification tags
show promotional bumpers and just other weird things that could be played on there.
It really gives a personal touch to your station.
And you can have a pretty professional persona with a pretty unprofessional setup.
And I will also go in of course it is a lot more fun I think to actually make your own bumpers
and jingles and stuff.
However, you can actually go and all the stuff that you hear on your local radio station.
All those voice actors can have websites and you can go and for 30 or 40 bucks
you can buy your own tag and they will do all the soundscaping and everything
and make it sound just like a professional station if you want.
If you want to buy two or three of those commercials at 30 or 40 bucks a pop
but it is a lot more fun I think to make your own if you can be creative.
I guess the next last thing I guess is some of the lore of you versus the man,
the man being the FCC.
This is the point where you get your inverter, your AM transmitter
and your computer and you ride around in your Jeep and run away from the box trucks
all at 200mW.
If you are going to be running from the MIA you will be running over power.
Yes, about 200mW.
100mW is the legal limit for a part 15 but yeah.
Once you hit that 2 mile mark all hell breaks loose and you have little yellow tracks after you.
So realistically the only time that the FCC is going to care about your rig is if someone complains.
The FCC only responds to complaints.
How do you get a complaint against you?
Well that is by either a running or stomping on another channel,
another frequency that someone's already got a station on which is a bad idea anyway
because that's going to kill your range.
You want a station that a pre-selected frequency where there are no stations that you can pick up
or at least the frequency with the fewest stations that you can hear because there is pretty much no
completely empty frequencies anymore.
Even though they are outside your range, you can still hear that Spanish station in the background or something.
We have had experiences with that although we had set up and were enjoying our frequency immensely
and then come to find out what Chicago or somewhere we had a radio Disney that sprouted up.
And so we were constantly doing battle with Mickey Mouse and his crew of thugs.
But I think that will subside now with the move and finding a new place for the radio station.
Oh what was the other thing I was going to bring up?
Well Zach thinks about that interference at sucks, your range is going to change day to day.
And another way that you get complaints is just having generally offensive stuff on your station.
You got to remember even though you're underneath, you know, you're under the requirements for a permit for the FCC,
you are not above the FCC guidelines in their code of decency and things like that.
So you need to be sure that you pre-select and that you pre-list into stuff that you're just putting out of the air
because you don't need any soccer moms coming and finding their kids listening to something
they're a little AM radio that they didn't want them to hear.
And it's like if you've got a station that's dedicated to overthrowing the government,
that will get you more attention than you want.
If you're doing that, you don't even care about being part 15 legal anyway.
So we'll get a better transmitter.
Again, more other things to get you noticed.
If you set your rig up on a station that's already, a frequency that's already got a main station there,
well the other thing is if you do that unintentionally and that's where harmonics come into play.
Harmonic is a multiple of your existing frequencies.
So what you're going to want to do is have a scanner available.
And let's say you set up on, you know, like our channel was 1680 AM, that's 1.68 megahertz
and you want to multiply that times 2, I don't know what that is off hand,
but then you want to tune your scanner into that frequency and see can I pick up my station there.
And then multiply your base frequency times 3.
And then tune your scanner into that channel and listen there.
Can you hear your station on that frequency?
And that's why that's where pirates really get themselves into trouble
because they don't really understand or they don't know about what they're stomping on people outside
of their, you know, the broadcast band.
Like if you're doing a FM station and let's say you're, you know, you're 100 megahertz
and you've got a harmonic at 200 megahertz, well that's into the air band.
That's actually above the air band, but that's not a frequency that you want to be messing with.
Especially if you get into the, you start bumping up against ham operators
and you're getting into a ham band, they will track you down quickly and with high prejudice.
You know, the only thing that makes angry old men even angrier is not when all the food's gone at the buffet.
It's when you're stomping all over their ham frequencies.
Don't do it.
Yeah, so, you know, harmonics that's something to watch for, get yourself a scanner,
multiply your frequency by 2, by 3, by 4, by 5, check up to the fifth harmonic, you know.
Also, just tune around your existing channel like, you know, 1680 to down to 1670, 1650
and see how much splatter you're getting around the existing, your main frequency.
And see how far away you're getting that splatter.
If you're getting a little bit of splatter right next to the antenna, you know,
where you can pick up your station up on, you know, several kilohertz down from where you're broadcasting.
Yeah, it's not too bad.
As long as you can't pick it up very far away, you know, with a regular receiver, hopefully you'll be okay.
And if it's a regular kit, you shouldn't have, you know, too much trouble if you've got a proper operating transmitter kit.
Also, another thing to get into is state, state and a few bumpers here and there that you are a part 15 radio station.
Maybe don't go and need not to be doing this every five minutes or something.
Maybe one or two times in the middle of the night and early in the morning.
You know, state that you're a part 15 radio station.
Maybe even quote the section of the law that allows you to be there.
Don't give people any reason to think that you are a pirate if you're just doing part 15 stuff.
And I'll pretty much leave you alone.
You know, the sound, like, professionality in the sound of your station also plays a key role.
Because if Joe blow down the road that just likes to call the feds just because, you know, here's you on there.
And, you know, he thinks that there is just a couple of kids making noise and this, that and the other.
Then he could call and he could have somebody harass you.
But if it actually sounds like a legitimate station and that really has this stuff together, it'll deeter him from saying anything because it's probably not a fight that he wants to pick.
Yeah, yeah, you know, and remember, you know, you're having fun, but it's cool to be a positive contributor to your community also.
I know I really wanted to run a lot of bin rev and other podcasts and stuff, but quite frankly, that wasn't going to be possible.
You know, a lot of f-bombs dropped and stuff and that's fine.
That's the time to censor it for part 15, yes.
Shame on you dirty birds.
So, you know, that's that's some a lot of the considerations trying to be legitimate and being a good station, you know, and all that.
So again, you know, the FCC, they're only going to come after you if either some type of complaint against you and that means either a you've got content that is somehow offensive to someone or be your, you're on a frequency that you're not supposed to be on or, or the extra options, you know, if you're actually even accidentally running an antenna.
That's too too efficient, which is a basically either it's too high or it's too long or you're running too much output power, but we're assuming you're trying to be compliant with part 15 here.
So, as long as you're within all those things, you really shouldn't have any problems as far as legal repercussions.
Again, the FCC, they're really, if they do come knocking on your door, it all depends on your demeanor how they're going to react.
If you're trying to be legitimate, they'll recognize that technically they can claim your transmitter and everything it's attached to, which is your house and they can be real heavy handed.
However, generally reading a lot of the enforcement and stuff, as long as you're trying to be legitimate and you immediately reply to their letters and stuff, you're probably, you're not going to have any serious fines or repercussions, you know.
You're attempting to be legitimate, you're attempting to fall within the guidelines.
If they tell you to turn your system off, you don't have a lot of choice with that at that point, but you can comply with that and then try to come up with another way to be compliant with the rig and still go and be on the air.
Again, as long as you're trying to work with them, trying to be a positive influence, they'll definitely recognize that I think and play a part in how they respond if there are complaints.
I think that pretty much is the gist of part 15 broadcast and what you can do with the technology and the laws at hand.
I don't know, we might come up with some more to talk about next time.
There are other types of low power broadcasting. The reason why we went with part 15 AM is because that's really the only way to be legitimate and get enough distance to get more than just your house covered.
Part 15 FM, basically the little iPod transmitter to your car radio is the most powerful as you can get.
And that's just the way the law is broken out and that's because they don't want a lot of people being able to reach lots of other people without some type of licensing.
Without some kind of governmental monitoring, they don't want you talking to anybody else.
The other thing, television, that's the next frontier. Technically, if you're a ham radio operator, you can transmit a slow scan, which is basically a single frame pictures, back and forth over some higher UHF frequencies that your TV can pick up.
However, that is again, that's a ham radio transmission that has to be part of a two-way conversation between two operators. It's not intended for broadcast.
So in other words, you have to be responding to someone's goatsy with your tub girl.
And obviously, technically, there's really no way to actually do low power TV broadcasting the way you would think of like a regular TV station.
It's interesting that it's really not that hard. It looks like to get on the air with a transmitter, just surfing eBay TV transmitters, broadcast transmitters and stuff.
If you've got a little bit of cash to splash around.
The other alternative, if you really want to try to dance around part 15 rules and stuff, they do have UHF transmitters for, let's say, sharing a video source from one satellite box to another TV in your home.
That would be a good place to start. It's basically just a little transmitter with a couple click buttons in the front to choose your station.
You could possibly crack the top open and see what could be done with the antenna setup, things like that for them that's deviating from the part 15 design of it.
But it's still keeping it at that power.
And again, like 2.4 gigahertz, that's why Wi-Fi lands, wireless and 2.4 gigahertz cordless phones.
That's another band that's allowed to transmit at a little bit higher power than other frequencies without a license.
And so that's why they've got the little Zach's talking about the little AV transmitters. You can send audio and video with those on reach your local community with those.
They have to have a special receiver unit. Just the next 10 receiver, you know, to receive that.
Yeah, I think we've nailed about everything on that we can think of a talk about.
Yeah, I think that's about it. You'll have to look for more episodes, maybe if we decide to venture a little into video transmission.
We'll definitely have more episodes in regards to that.
Yep, yep. All right. Do you have any words for the wires go to?
Don't let your means fan.
So, all right. I guess I'm Dossman.
I'm Zach.
And we're the packets niffers. And this is our first edition of Hacker Public Radio.
And I guess we're signing off.
Yes, have a good day, good night, and God bless. Don't get arrested.
We'll leave you with some of our bumpers for our station, the Ocho.
Every day, 8 a.m. and 12 noon, the Ocho presents the latest slashed-out headlines. World National News from the Associated Press.
News from Russia Day. And upcoming events for the City of Bloomington, only on 16 a.m.
The Espranto Music Out.
In the mornings, only on 16 a.m. the Ocho.
You're listening to the 16 music remix, only on 16 a.m. the Ocho.
The people have spoken and they want their means.
16 a.m. presents news brought to you by Russian Today.com.
You're listening to the 16 a.m. Ocho.
16 a.m. the Ocho.
News and War Station.
Hello and welcome to the Glass Republic for Sunday, January 6, 2008, generated at 8 p.m., only on 16 a.m. the Ocho.
Is it that land, the room is standing still, but you are still spinning? Let's get spotted.
Glass prices are subject to change, and are not guaranteed for accuracy.
At Speedway located at 3585, West Stable 46 and North Smith, like the prices, $3.09.
At Speedway located at 3000 and 21 East St, and Kingston Drive south the prices, $3.12.
At Speedway located at 2700 North Walnut Street, near suburban lane the prices, $3.12.
At Speedway located at 503, South College Mall Road, and East Second Street, the prices, $3.12.
At Speedway located at 3,939 West St, and South Curry Pike the prices, $3.17.
At Shell located at 2650 East St, and South College Mall Road the prices, $3.18.
At BP located at 7,314 North Walnut Road, and Stable 37 the prices, $3.19.
That is the Gas Repo, for Sunday, January 6th, 2000 and 8th.
Tune of the hour and hour, for the latest gas prices, from around town only in 1680 A.M., virtue.
I would like to send shout outs, to Indiana Gas Prices.com, my homeboy lamestore roads, for my OS, image magic and go see L, for my character recognition, and festival for my lovely voice.
Please, silly gas body, or see others for kids.
Thank you for listening to Hector Public Radio.
This is Joe, sponsored by Garrow.net, so head on over to C, A, R, O, dot, N, E, T, for all your hopes and needs.
Thank you.
Thank you.
