Skinner presents his FCC petition for rulemaking that would create affordable low-power FM licenses, allowing individuals of limited financial means to own radio stations for less than the price of a new car. He proposes dropping outdated second and third adjacent channel restrictions and establishing a secondary-class license structure that balances accessibility with interference protection. The two debate whether full broadcasting anarchy is feasible or whether some regulation remains essential.
Open lines bring callers from Hawaii to New Jersey sharing their own pirate broadcasting stories. A micro-broadcaster in Hawaii questions whether court precedents protect him. A caller near New York City describes the impossibility of finding open FM frequencies. Art declares his support for local low-power broadcasting while acknowledging the political realities of commercial opposition.
Key Moments
Tampa Party Pirate raided by U.S. Marshals SWAT team: Pat Murphy describes the FCC's SWAT-team raid on Tampa's Party Pirate, a 100-watt unlicensed FM rock station. Murphy notes 15 FCC busts since October 24th and characterizes the U.S. Marshals' use as overkill against a station he says caused no interference.
Murphy's KMED Amarillo pirate station shut down after appearing in Arbitron: Pat Murphy tells how, as an Air Force airman, he and friends ran KMED ('K-Medical Squadron') 24/7 on 1610 AM from Amarillo Air Force Base for a full year - until the pirate station turned up in the Amarillo Arbitron ratings, every local broadcaster called the base general, and they were shut down within minutes.
Art Bell admits to running pirate Channel 7 TV in Las Vegas: Art Bell confesses that 13 years earlier, while building the Las Vegas Times Mirror cable system, he and a friend used a single-channel modulator and a cable line amplifier driven into a 25-foot dipole to broadcast pirate Channel 7 video - playing movies on viewer request, with their phone number generated by a Commodore 64 - until the Las Vegas Review Journal called wanting to do a story.
Pirates on 6955 kHz heard in Germany and South Africa with 10 watts: Murphy details the specific shortwave pirate frequency - 6955 kHz, AM and sideband - where palm-sized 10-watt transmitters built by hobbyists are being heard in Germany and South Africa, with a single first-skip bounce of about 300 miles and worldwide propagation as the sunspot cycle improves.
Skinner's LPFM-2 proposal: 1-50 watts, 150 ft, 3.6-mile coverage: Roger Skinner lays out his FCC rulemaking petition RM-9242: three classes of low-power FM, with the LPFM-2 'micro-broadcaster' class running 1 to 50 watts at up to 150 feet HAAT, yielding a 3.6-mile 1-millivolt contour, plus a 50-mile local-ownership rule and resale restriction so consolidation can't capture the new service.