here are some previous threads. I am not sure if the Northern dude mentioned in the posts is still active though – as mentioned there Ofcom are also targeting suppliers of TX equipment.

The technology involved is far from trivial, if you are not an electronics engineer then find one (shouldn’t be too difficult in Cambridgeshire though :laugh_at:) – whether its a short term legal license or a pirate you will need to ensure there is absolutely no interference to other services.

if you are talking about a pirate station bear in mind also that people connected to at least one large commercial dance music station monitor are active on forums like this and theres nothing stopping them tipping off Ofcom…

also another peculiarity of cambridgeshire is there are lots of radio anoraks who were or are engineers for marconi, pye/phillips/simoco/sepura and they obviously tend to side with government and blue light services…

http://www.partyvibe.com/forums/community/30494-fm-transmitter.html

http://www.partyvibe.com/forums/community/23013-pirate-radio.html

no chance in setting up a legal one … i tried but offcom said that all of the frequencys in the uk are taken up allready for years … dunno if they were just being c*nts (as they have a reputation for this) or it’s actualy true … GL said some thing about them keeping the rest of the fm dial for emergancy use iirc.

best to phone them and ask them b4 you start spending cash on equipment or you could waste alot of cash 😉

A mate of mine was looking into doing this year or so back.

I don’t know what kind of station you’re thinking of starting, but the community radio route might be an idea. From what I remember, Ofcom seemed quite keen on community stations when I enquired before, the license is a lot cheaper, and as long as there isn’t a community station already in your area you should be OK.

I guess you’d have to prove to Ofcom that your station will benefit the community somehow, and you’d probably have to go through all the motions of setting up a business before they’d grant you a license. TBH I didn’t really look into it much, so I might be talking rubbish. It explains all about it here Community Radio | Ofcom

As for buying equipment, this site offer equipment, including some budget broadcast studio packages that look reasonably priced (all the necessary audio and TX hardware for a project (or pirate) radio station, starting from £1500) http://www.radioactive.org.uk and also offers loads of advice to anyone wanting to start their own station

ah there was a reason why i said talk to ofcom first as i thought it might not be the whole of england and just london as my memory isn’t too shit hot … sounds like it might be worth a go

I wouldn’t worry about it now as both Ofcoms own officers and people from legal stations scan sites like this anyway, and it seems to be about 10 minutes before Google indexes any thread on here (before it was a few days)…

but don’t do things like post links directly to Police force websites or Revenue and Customs as thats just asking for trouble… there’s a Chinese proverb which goes “the mouse that gnaws a cat’s tail invites destruction”. (at the very least its giving them the satisfaction of seeing how much they are controlling us!)

I used to work in public sector IT and Departments definitely do keep an eye on who is linking to Crown content (not as sinister as you may think as its also done to stop things like logos being used in scams…)

That said, last time I spoke to a chap from Ofcom (who had to be called to my work due to a bizzare incident where a rogue radio signal had locked all the staff out of their cars!) we were both joking about radio scanners and pirates, and some of the things I used to get up to a few years back…. These days they want to come across like they are not the “feds”, but engineers trying to keep the radio airwaves in good shape just as we should look after the rest of the environment. There are lots of important radio signals either side of the FM band (Fire Brigade and Aircraft navigation)…

if anyone wants to set up a community station they are quite approachable. They may not say what you “want to hear” (there is plenty of money and bureaucracy involved) but they are at least giving people an opportunity which wasn’t around 10-20 years ago outside London.