Are pirate FM radio stations relevant today?

When I was still in school, class at 7, I had a cheap Chinese FM radio. It had a display and only 2 buttons, rewind the station forward and reset it to the initial frequency of 88 MHz. I was happy, went and constantly listened to music from the radio. MP3 players then only began to appear and were very expensive. Once, on a cool autumn evening, before going to bed, flipping through the radio stations in the hope of falling asleep, I came across some kind of, as I first thought, telephone conversation. I began to listen, to understand, and after a few hours of listening, I realized that this was not a telephone conversation at all.

As it turned out, a young guy, a little older than me, gathered an FM radio transmitter at home, put the antenna on the roof, stretched the cable to his apartment and began broadcasting his radio at night. The broadcast of his radio station was very different from the usual to us, the air of commercial radio stations. He connected his home phone to the line and anyone could get on the air and chat on some interesting topic. A limit of 3 minutes was given for 1 call, and non-annoying music played against the background. I was quickly interested in this whole topic, and as the Internet and PCs began to spread actively, I moved to study this issue through PTN via Dial-UP. As it turned out at that time, about 20 such non-commercial, free, pirated radio stations were broadcasting in our city. I certainly wanted to have my own. This was the beginning of my study of radio electronics, now I am an electronic programmer.

After a couple of years of skipping school and learning how to build radio transmitters, a new non-commercial radio station “RadioActivitY 96.9 FM” was born in my hands. At the same time, leased Internet lines, over twisted pair, began to actively develop. With difficulty persuading parents, I became the proud owner of a dedicated Internet at a speed of 1 megabit per second. This gave me the opportunity to quickly download and broadcast music on my barrel organ. Having connected my home phone, in the evenings I began to conduct live broadcasts, receive phone calls and put music to order. As time passed, knowledge in electronics was replenished, the power of the radio transmitter increased, and with it the number of radio listeners grew. We began to arrange radio bridges with neighboring radio stations, organize radio meetings and just have fun. On the radio meetings, by the way, a large number of listeners gathered, once even more than 100 people came. The state bodies did not particularly touch us, for 5 years of broadcasting 1 time only a peasant called the home phone and asked not to turn on the radio transmitter for the time of the G8 summit. The transmitter's coverage area at that time was about 40% of St. Petersburg at a power of about 50-70 watts. There were, of course, also interruptions in broadcasting, because it was also necessary to study. The mountain of burned Soviet transistors KT 904, KT 907, KT 920-922 and others, is still in my memory. At some point, broadcasting turned from night to round-the-clock, and foreign Internet radio stations were broadcast on the air. Appeared Stereo and RDS. The sound quality is not far behind the commercial stations.
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After a while, the Internet and social networks began to pick up radio listeners, and there were fewer and fewer calls on the air. And at one moment everyone just disappeared. Nobody really wanted to broadcast into the void, and this was probably the very point, the point of no return. This seemed to be the end of the era of pirate FM broadcasting. I watched while from the range of 88-108 fm, one by one, the radio transmitters of free, non-commercial radio stations were turned off. Some FM radio stations moved to the Internet, some broadcast by inertia for several years. In the end, this topic was buried.

Nowadays, the main number of people listening to FM radio stations are, of course, motorists going to work or something else. Hoping to somehow find my radio listeners, I moved my equipment to the country, the benefit of the large gardening array. I tried to interest the Gardeners-gardeners in appropriate music. At some point in the summer holidays, I even gathered a small handful of local listeners, drunks, but all this was already not that. I had to forget about radio piracy. The topic of radio communication has always been interesting to me, and even now 10 years later, listening to the talks of air traffic controllers, police and other interesting departments, in my free time, I often have a desire to revive all this. And then I ask myself a question, is it possible?

(c) Denis. 30 years old. St. Petersburg.