Spain Planning a Pirate Radio Crackdown

It may be hard to believe that Spain only this year passed a law that gives a new Spanish central radio authority the ability to pursue and shut down unlicensed radio broadcasters. Back in January the Spanish radio industry group AERC complained that 3000 pirate stations are operating in the country and need to be shut down.

For its part the government recently claimed to have opened 109 cases against pirate operators since 2007. With the recently passed law the secretary of the Media of the Generalitat says the job will become easier.

I know relatively little about radio broadcasting in Spain, although I have often heard that the radio dial is more chaotic than in other European countries. For instance, apparently 504 of the unlicensed stations are operated by municipalities. (Just imagine if your local city or town government ran its own pirate radio station!) Additionally, some 124 ostensibly licensed stations operate on a frequency other than the one they were assigned.

Given these kinds of stats I seriously doubt that the Spanish government is likely to make much of a dent in the country’s number of unlicensed stations. The FCC has been around for seventy-six years and I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t at least 3000 pirate stations operating in the US right now. At best the Commission does a pretty good job of keeping unlicensed operators more underground and less organized by playing a good game of cat and mouse. I reckon Spain has quite a way to go before it can even hope to have that level of success.

from Radio Survivor

Ron McMullen & His Morse Key Collection

Ron McMullen is an avid collector of all things to do with Morse code. He learned Morse code as a nine year old from his postmaster father. This led to a lifelong love and fascination with the subject. His work as a qualified Morse operator took him to post offices all around Australia, and then to the PMG training school teaching the code and all aspects of telegraphy. His work became his passion. He reckons that once Morse gets into your blood, you never get rid of it; that it’s like music is to a musician.

The collecting bug bit when he heard of a reunion of ‘Morsecodians’ (enthusiasts who still enjoy communicating by Morse) and he decided to go along to see what it was about. He now collects anything to do with the code and telegraphy and lovingly restores the objects to working order. Ron believes his collection is the largest and most diverse in Australia. The quality of his pieces is testament to a lifetime of working, learning, teaching and now collecting and restoring telegraphic equipment.

Ron shows us a typical Morse code setup that you would find in a country post office. He types his transcribed message on a typewriter and shows how it is then delivered to the addressee as a telegraph. The rhythmical sound as Ron demonstrates the dots and dashes on the key and ‘talks’ to his friend Leo certainly does have a musical quality.

We see a message received from Ron’s Morse code buddy that reads, ‘Say hello to the Collectors from me’!

From ABC's Collectors
Also Ron McMullen's Telegraph Collection

New Sunspots Herald a More Active Sun

After a sustained lull of very little solar activity, the sun is finally coming back to life.

In mid-December, solar physicists observed a large group of sunspots that had manifested itself on the solar surface — the largest group of sunspots to emerge for several years.

Scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) are studying the sunspots and how this flare-up compares to previous levels of solar activity.

"This last minimum was much deeper and longer than anybody predicted," said Bernhard Fleck, ESA's project scientist for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), in a statement. "We were beginning to joke that we had entered another Maunder minimum."

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Q&A WITH THE GODFATHER OF PIRATE RADIO

Vice Magazine spoke to Matt Mason, London’s pirate radio god-daddy and the host of Vice/Palladium’s new documentary about that daredevil, building-scaling underground music culture.

Getting into jungle, drum n’ bass, garage and grime music growing up in London during the hardcore acid house era, Matt Mason became a pirate DJ running record labels and club nights. He then started writing about it in magazines like Vice [Grimewatch] and founded UK’s largest urban music magazine RWD. Today he’s leading the discussion on piracy with his critically acclaimed book The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, proving the point that, in this new Darwinist market economy, creativity is by far our most important currency. To him, piracy is just part of a new business model that can be used to improve and add value—like when Bathing Ape appropriated Nike’s Air Dunks to their own devices, which eventually led to Nike themselves ripping off BAPE.

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Mystery of the Soviet spy radio found in a Welsh field

THEIR trade was treachery but Cold War spies became box office gold in thrillers like The Ipcress File.

But not even Len Deighton, the novelist who dreamed up the plot, would have placed Aberystwyth at the heart of Soviet era espionage.

Now, after the ultra-secret Government Communications Headquarters opened its doors for the first time, it has been revealed that a Soviet encrypted radio transmitter was found near the coastal town in 1960.

And a further web of intrigue and political scandal has emerged.

The sophisticated transmitter is contained in an in-house museum at GCHQ in Cheltenham.

It was used to send messages to Moscow in the shadowy 1960s Cold War spy era in which bodyguards were known as babysitters, M16 was “the circus”, after nearby Cambridge Circus, and inconspicuous surveillance officers were known as pavement artists.

“This is a simple but robust radio transmitter discovered early in the 1960s in a field near Aberystwyth by a farmer who was ploughing his land,” said GCHQ’s official historian, referred to only as Tony.

“It had obviously been cached there by someone who was working for the Soviets.

“Nobody has a clue who this belonged to, who it was serving, or even which bit of the GRU [Soviet foreign intelligence network] he was working for.”

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