[Ccarc] Pirate radio

[Tom Murray]

Saw the post about part 15 radio transmitters. My brother and I, who each later got into broadcasting for real, and my brother still works at a commercial FM station today...as kids we each had an FM wireless microphone which broadcast on the FM band between 88 and 108 MHZ. At first we had one station in our upstairs bedroom of my parents house. We added some wire to the very short antenna that came with the wireless microphone and ran the "longer" antenna out the window to the TV tower. The station had a range of a few blocks. Later, when we were not getting along, I bought another wireless mike and started my own, competing station, to go up against my brother....(you know how brothers can be). Both stations  played top 40 at first, but I spent hours recording the Hit parade format off of WNDU FM in South Bend which was a more laid back version of  Top 40 at the time and was  back announced.  While my brother's  station was "live"  Mine was an automated format recorded on dozens of cassette tapes.  Sounds silly now. A few years later, while working at WROI here in Rochester, Jack Didier,  a contract engineer from Ft. Wayne was working on the WROI transmitter one day when we were off the air, and we talked about our start in radio, he too had a pirate station when he was a teenager in Ft. Wayne. Being the engineering type however, his station got out a lot farther as he was running a few watts of power on the FM band as opposed to my part 15 low power station. He said a lot of people in broadcasting had pirate stations in their younger days. Just thought I would share an funny story. My brothers pirate station was WMRS- which stood for Rochester Middle School. My station's calls were WCRN...which stood for nothing.. I just liked the sound of the call.


Tom Murray

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