A pirate radio station keeps its studio and its transmitter apart, joined by a link box. Raids seize equipment, yet stations raided time and again have come back on air.
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The transmitter is the part a regulator can find. Pirates hide transmitters on city rooftops, or up in the attic of a friend. The studio sits somewhere else, connected to the transmitter by that link.
Why the studio and the transmitter live apart
Ofcom’s own guidance describes pirates installing “homemade radio transmitters” on tower block roofs, which disturbs residents and can cause thousands of pounds of damage to the building. Birmingham’s People’s Community Radio Link, on air since 1985, was raided time and again. After one raid a vicar gave the station temporary “sanctuary” by letting it broadcast from his church. It soon returned to small, makeshift flat studios, with its transmitters perched on tower blocks.
In New York, radio archivist David Goren has spent years mapping the pirate stations that serve the city’s immigrant communities. He estimates about a hundred run around the clock from rooftops and attics.
The link between them is where the interference happens
Connecting a studio to a rooftop transmitter takes a link, and a badly built one can interfere with other frequencies. Ice Cold FM’s Steve told the BBC that older “Band 1” links “can put out multiples of their frequency.” A link on 50MHz could spill onto 100MHz and other high band frequencies. He said about 90% of pirates no longer use Band 1 links, and that microwave links are “completely interference free.”
Ofcom’s head of investigations, Paul Mercer, said the two services most affected are National Air Traffic Services and the London Fire Brigade. Their frequencies sit close to those the pirates use, so they can struggle to use their radio systems. That is the risk a regulator points to when it justifies a raid.
Raiding the equipment doesn’t end the station
In the year before the BBC’s report, officers raided 43 studios and shut down 838 illegal transmitters. Ofcom believed more than 150 pirate stations were operating across the UK, half of them in London and the South East. In 2004 Ofcom’s special investigations manager, Clive Corrie, said the focus had been on “tracking and confiscating transmitters or raiding studios.” More effort was now going into the people behind the operations.
A pirate operation need not depend on one person. PCRL’s founder, Cecil Morris, was convicted and given a suspended sentence. Asked who was keeping the station going, he said it was not just him or his co-presenter Pilot, and that the community would keep it going.
The law has raised the stakes
In the US, the Pirate Act, signed into law in January 2020, gave the Federal Communications Commission stronger powers to run sweeps in cities with dense pirate activity. Pirate stations now face fines of up to two million dollars. Goren, who catalogues Brooklyn’s stations for his Pirate Radio Sound Map, said the people running those stations do not have that kind of money.
In the UK, the heaviest penalties are an unlimited fine and a two-year prison term. The law reaches beyond the person on air to anyone who lets pirates use their premises or advertises on their station. Ofcom also points broadcasters toward a legal route. More than 200 community radio stations now operate across the UK, including former pirates such as Rinse FM and Kane FM.
The legal route does not always open. Cecil Morris said PCRL applied for a licence and was turned down repeatedly. He put that down to the station challenging the establishment, and to its lack of money to compete with larger operators.
