isn’t this illegal?

Posted at 6:21 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by refujee

OMG FURST!

Anyway, cool as this is, as soon as the FCC auctions off the frequencies, this probably will become very illegal. Still, I believe that this counts as “wicked dope”.

Posted at 6:28 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by St.Jimmy

Drat! Beaten!

Posted at 6:28 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by St.Jimmy

@refujee: I don’t believe it’s illegal as long as it’s within the fcc’s allocated “free” channels, similar to CB-Radio type frequencies. Of course, I could be completely wrong, that’s just a guess.

Posted at 6:31 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by Pilotgeek

@st. jimmy
lol, fail!

anyway, i wondered what would happen to the analog tv range, probably similar to what happened with the first ham/radio broadcasters. no matter ho illegal or not this is, its made of epic win all the way.

Posted at 6:36 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by napalm

Unfortunately, the Part 15 regulations of the FCC don’t allow for any transmissions on broadcast television frequencies.

It is illegal, so don’t do it!

There is a legal option though: Go get your Technician class, amateur radio license, and then experiment with fast-scan television in the amateur radio frequencies. Most people use a television hooked up to a regular antenna, tuned to “cable” channel 59 or 60 to receive these amateur “television” signals!

Posted at 6:50 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by Chris

Since they’re abandoned, I’d assume they aren’t “broadcast frequencies”

Posted at 7:09 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by _matt

well, thank you, captain fucking obvious

this post has a big duh factor…

who cares if it’s illegal or not.

it’s pretty obvious you could do this with some minor effort.

the pdf sucks btw

give me a writeup on the technical details of building a transmitter from the ground up and I might be slightly impressed (probably not, but maybe)

There are far more interesting things going on with this spectrum. Let’s see a hack utilizing it for cheap broadband or something else slightly more useful (or even entertaining). Preferably without twitter.

Posted at 7:49 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by Spadefinger

Yeah, the FCC loves it when people compete with the major companies that dominate the media now, so all you have to do is:

apply for the spectrum and pay $1,000,000 minimum non-refundable application

If you get approved then you have to operate the station for one year on a probation phase without generating any revenue from the station to ‘prove yourself’

comply with the 587,000 pages of regulations, which a violation of a single one will result in several millions of dollars in fines and a ‘demotion’ back to the probation phase

It’s easy, and FUN!

Posted at 9:35 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by xrazorwirex

i heard google was going to buy some channels. something about broadcast internet????

Posted at 9:41 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by googfan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spaces_%28radio%29

This is apparently legal as long as they’re not interfering with licensed users.

Posted at 10:09 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by error404

No, white spaces devices will be required to monitor for interference and have other stringent requirements. This is not “apparently legal.”

Posted at 10:42 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by Leigh

Pirate Radio evolves to Pirate TV – I would love to see someone with the cajones that goes ahead and does this anyways.

Posted at 10:48 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by xrazorwirex

So according to the wikipedia article from above
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spaces_%28radio%29
The FCC is allowing whitespace utilization locally, but you have to actively monitor to make sure there are no legacy transmissions on the same frequency. Every minute!
So with some interesting coding and whitespace frequency monitors you might be able to get away with a low powered signal. You’d want to research to make sure that wikipedia was right on this, but still it’s doable.

The easy way is to get a ham radio license and just do it legally without the monitors required. If you are interested in developing things like live monitoring of the band you can test and learn with that easily on the ham bands too.

Posted at 11:16 pm on Sep 2nd, 2009 by dano

Why bother going analog? How about hooking up an amp to something like this:
http://www.zeevee.com/connected-home/zvbox150

Posted at 12:36 am on Sep 3rd, 2009 by jd

two words:

GNU Radio

Posted at 2:04 am on Sep 3rd, 2009 by a

these broadcast bands have not been “abandoned ” they just switched the modulation format. tv is still uhf and vhf 7-80something. 2-6 is to be repurposed as some other kind of portable something or other, but certainly not abandoned, it will be used.

Posted at 3:32 am on Sep 3rd, 2009 by McNoob

I’m pretty sure this is illegal unless it’s a whitespace approved electronic. Wireless microphones have used tv bands for years (sorta licensed, sorta not licensed).

New whitespace electronics need to be able to detect wireless microphones in the area and disable themselves if they find them.

There are regulations for how often they have to rescan for new systems being powered up (30 seconds or a minute I think) and before the white space device broadcasts it has to make sure it won’t interfere with any wireless microphones.

Also, white space electronic devices must limit themselves to select frequencies (which wireless mics still have the right of way to), other newly “freed” frequencies are being preserved for wireless mic usage only.

Posted at 4:03 am on Sep 3rd, 2009 by sss

Is it just me, or did anyone else spot the hilarious link to this post? ( http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/09/02/howto-set-up-an-anal.html )

Posted at 6:26 am on Sep 3rd, 2009 by Brad

It’s legal if your power is less than 1mW ERP. By the way I’m buying a analog uhf tv channel license for $ 1000,000 if every dude can pay 1 dollar we can get to 1000,000 of people.

Posted at 8:41 am on Sep 3rd, 2009 by kabukicho2001

I’ve got a couple of small black metal boxes from the 80s called “video senders” which can transmit a normal UHV tv signal over a short distance (up to 300 feet line of sight), if you look on eBay you may be able to pick one up – if you can find one in amongst all the current generation 2.4ghz tv extenders.

These small UHV tv transmitters will be useful when the tv stations go digital only because you can use them to send a signal to the “useless” pocket tvs which only have an antenna and no AV input.

Posted at 2:05 pm on Sep 3rd, 2009 by Haku

Yea Hauku I use video senders to watch TV when I have to take a dump, video spliter from the box and to the sender, hook up an ATSC converter and you’ve got HDTV, sort of, on your old analogue sets, so don’t toss out your old tubes yet.

Posted at 6:57 pm on Sep 3rd, 2009 by Hirudinea

Pirate TV is easy, you don’t have to build a TV-transmitter. Just use your VCR. Hook an antenna to the RF-out and voilà, your very own Pirate TV-station. We did this n school, works great. The broadcast range is of course not great, but you could always hook up an signal amplifier to reach more people.

Posted at 11:10 am on Sep 7th, 2009 by Electrician

emege saygi tesekkürler

Posted at 7:22 pm on Sep 13th, 2009 by kurye

Now here would be an application for a wifi to uhf converter, to save all those otherwise useless TVs from the landfill.

Shouldn’t be too hard, you can get wifi usb dongles and USB PICs aren’t expensive, just fake the appropriate responses to get the dongle to initialise and fit it inside the existing TV’s casing. :)

last time i checked, wifi is more than capable of handling a single analogue channel’s worth of data, and causes far less interference than those 2.4G “senders”.

Posted at 10:10 am on Sep 15th, 2009 by conundrum

I will like to make a test one to learn how broadcasting works. I was looking for a instruction on how to do and and this one helped me. I will get a $25 UHF sender and a TV attena to do it. I use cable TV in my home and will not discard it because there is hardly any TV channels in air in my area. I will just unplug the Cable from the TV for Cable TV in the basement, try the station, and then turn it off and put back the Cable TV cable.

Posted at 10:28 am on Oct 21st, 2009 by WhoEver

hello what is the fcc site to check on free open analog channels? the link was not mentioned in article

Posted at 3:20 pm on Nov 22nd, 2009 by hank

hello also has any one looked in to using the cable system fore low power broadcasting? not sure how this could be done but am curious if any one has considdered this metnod as well?

Posted at 3:21 pm on Nov 22nd, 2009 by hank