BRISTOL PIRATE RADIO RECORDINGS

This blog is intended for me to post my pirate radio recordings. Most of the recordings are from Bristol, most will be pirate but there will be some legal stations and stations from other cities or national stations.

IF YOU OR YOUR FRIENDS HAVE ANY TAPE RECORDINGS OF PIRATE RADIO FROM BRISTOL, PLEASE SUBMIT THEM TO THIS BLOG BY RECORDING THEM TO MP3 (CLICK HERE FOR A HELP GUIDE) AND UPLOADING THEM TO http://www.sharebee.com, or a similar site such as Megaupload, Mediafire, ZShare, but not Rapidshare as it's getting a bit hard to use. SEND THE URL IT GIVES YOU TO ME VIA A COMMENT ON MY LATEST POST or BY EMAIL AT bristolpirates at gmail.com (you'll have to correct that with the proper @ symbol, I started getting spam on the address). WE COULD ALSO ARRANGE A PICK-UP OF YOUR TAPES IF YOU LIVE IN BRISTOL AND CAN'T CONVERT TAPES TO MP3. THANKS IN ADVANCE, YOU WILL BE CREDITED.

Friday 28 February 2014

Feb 2014 Update & Shortwave Listenening

Despite there being some activity in Bristol, I can't comment on it. However, there is some outside of Bristol but still in the West I can talk about.

Rage FM tested another transmitter outside of Taunton in the last week. No idea how it went, but it was in a high location and should have covered Chard and areas close to it.

I recently got a report of a signal on 87.5MHz one Saturday afternoon near Junction 18 of the M4, where you can look across Bristol to the Black Mountains. The station was playing classic AOR music, and the listener who reported it could only listen for a few minutes.

Shortwave - So, very little to listen to in Bristol, unless you start listening to Shortwave and Medium Wave pirates. It's not easy to get any results with all the interference indoors. Still, I've recently managed to find the spot in the house that allows the best reception possible on SW for my set up - the bathroom! I don't get great results, but I can at least hear some stations even if they are not listenable for long. The main problem is fading, which on the Tecsun is made worse by it's automatic level control. If the signal drops below a certain level, the Tecsun drops the audio level sharply. You'll hear that in the recordings.

Shortwave pirates come on in droves on the weekends, and it almost spoils the experience. There are pirates from the UK, Europe and America to hear. I can't say I've heard and American one on the Tecsun as yet. The best way to listen if you don't have a SW radio is via the online Twente University SDR tuner at http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/, which has reasonable reception of many pirates. None of them stick to a particular frequency much. Some come on for an hour, some come on all weekend. Most play rock / pop, some Dutch stations play the usual traditional music, there is the odd dance track in there, and there's even a station that just plays Tango music! Lately I've been regularly hearing Bogusman (or Different / Indifferent Radio) quite strong, but very fluttery which on the Tecsun is horrible to listen to, and also Radio Pink Panther weaker but for long periods.

Today I caught quite a few stations, and I thought I'd try out a new toy - a Zoom H2n recorder. It seems to do what every other recorder I try does, generates it's own signals which interfere with FM recording. If I do what I intend to do and go different places to record airchecks, that will be annoying unless I can find a way to cut the amount of interference down. It's much better with an external aerial plugged into the Tecsun, so that could be the answer. It does seem free of this problem on MW and SW though, so I managed to get some decent-ish recordings for SW pirates.

You may wonder why I bother trying - The signals are terrible, I don't like most of the music a great deal (I can listen to it, no problem, it's just not 100% my thing), and I've got to sit in the bathroom to hear any of this at all. I guess it's just that radio thing - you've got to try hard to hear anything out of the ordinary, it's not just there at your fingertips on YouTube, it's a challenge and I get a little buzz from it.

Radio Focus International seems UK based. Not a great signal here, lots of fade, but it's not bad compared to if I try and listen in another part of the house.  38 mins, two clips here....



Here's probably the best SW pirate signal I've ever had on the Tecsun. Radio Bluwe Reiger. They only played a few tracks after I started recording, and then switched off. The station was ID'd by Irish Paul's radioblog


















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