FM pirates are incredibly easy to direction find due to the carrier being up constantly. ACMA would probably already know about them if they were in Williamstown or Port Melbourne. Any delays in shutting them down would likely be legal such as getting warrants etc
Why would you bother with FM piracy?
Thereās a thing called the internet, been around for 20 years
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This was more an observation then a question, wondering if anyone else noticed this at the time as a trend. I never really thought of it myself until my friends and I were discussing it the other night, and merely noticed that ACMA were clamming down on pirates more militantly after abbott and turnbull came into office, well, thatās what I can recall anyway.
Pirate radio aside, as for webradio, itās rather crowded, this became a note of discussion on internet radio station boards, when the small web broadcasters act was abolished toward the end of the Obama administration. Most of the discussion took place around the fact that internet radio, pure play services like spotify and Tidal, and Youtube were blurring the lines of what actual radio was. Is it someone operating their own radio station? Someone making a playlist on Deezer? Someone making a mix on Youtube, mixcloud, or etc? Consensus was the purity of the experience between the discjocky and the listener is no longer as engaging and as exposed as it would be with standard terrestrial radio.
As an analogy, part of the discussions noted, itās the difference between being one of four free to air TV stations in a city, verses being 1 of 100 stations on a pay TV service, one has much less competition on a given media. for further reference, check out the Max Headroom incident from 1986, it got major coverage, donāt think theyād be as much hoo haa if this happened to an internet television station.
Personally though, would I go pirate? No, not really, waste of time and resources.
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Some people do, everyone has a radio in their car, usually people like to listen to it as they drive aroundā¦ their choice what medium they wish to consume it 
.
Radio may have changed shaped and definition over the technological era we faceā¦ but fundamental principles still remain the same.
Power to the pirates 
Radio is free and we are all going broke?
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Whittlesea is northern Melbourne not northern Victoriaā¦
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Why anyone would pirate using one of these TX puzzles me, they cause that much shit across the bandās they may aswell out a neon light above their transmission spot cause they are so easy to spot on a Spec Ann or a FM Modulation monitor.
They spew crap everywhere you can easily see on a Spec ann and on a FM Mod Monitor the 19khz pilot is always crazy high
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they probally just typed in FM transmitter in ebay and brought the first bit of kit that came up
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Unfortunately these little transmitters are used by many licensed LPONās across the country as wellā¦
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Was that Whiz FM?
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Not sure but i havent heard 99.9 in a while. I was told the transmitter lives inside a caravan that gets towed around from place to place so it might of been that one if it was towed up to Whittlesea.
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Good on em, give ACMA the middle finger job. 
Like to see those rats try and triangulate a moving target.
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Dead easy for ACMA to find the van: they have kit called a Doppler DF in their cars. It uses a roof mount antenna with 4 small whips which connects back to the Doppler DF and an Icom Rx. The Dopplerās RF switch creates a rotating Rx pattern with the whips and there is a dash mounted display that gives the bearing relative to the vehicle. The pattern rotates at 2Khz and gives Doppler shift as it sweeps past the source - the dash display holds the bearing so even if itās someone making a nuisance of themselves with a UHF CB in a vehicle you donāt have to drive around much to find them. Anything transmitting continuously you can pretty much drive straight to it.
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Tooo many, I have seen some pretty decent built transmitters tho used by LPON licensees thoā¦ bounceFM out west NSW had a nice rig when he was going 
Any member of the public equipped with the right knowledge can kindly let them know they do not wish to contract with them and that they have no authority therefor after to do anything and that they will be individually held accountable for any constitutional violations therefor afterā¦ they can drive around with their antennas until the cows come home
ACMA closed down in regional centres a decade ago and then in Perth and Adelaide too for good measure - fat chance of getting caught outside a capital city like Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane nowadays. I agree that broadcasting spectrum in AUS is way under utilised mostly to protect the incumbents. Some of those operators would have been driven out of business years ago if there was competition, meanwhile the locals have to put up with their stingy programming
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Wasnāt sure whether to post here or in the DX forums but in the Perth CBD (or more specifically the eastern part of the CBD) scanning around this morning Iāve come across what sounds like a low power broadcast on 88.7 FM. Sounds like some sort of podcast/talk about feminism but with way too much swearing to be legit/official for Australian airwaves (also most of the voices are American).
Also way too close to 88.5 Swan Valley community radio (which gets into the CBD quite well) so either itās temporary or someone with an ongoing FM transmitter (I almost thought maybe it was a feed of a conference going on around here but again the occasional swearing makes me question this).
Havenāt been able to hear any identifying remarks as yet - any ideas? Radcomm hasnāt come up with anything immediately around here.
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The pirate on 89.3 MHz around Newcastle is still on air, mostly playing hip hop. Patchy reception around Raymond Terrace to Beresfield and it finally fades short of the Newcastle interchange on the F3.
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99.9 FM Melbourne still going. Recently stumbled across the signal. They could do with learning about audio processing, but probably had one too many bongs to care.
Their transmitter is a wee bit off, at 99.8985MHz. 19kHz pilot tone, as previously pointed out, is often higher than it should be, as is also the case here, and their location was discovered with not too much effort.
Unless their antenna is badly tuned, wattage used would have to be very low, in the single digits, although the signal can still be heard well over 15km away, albeit very weak.
Any complaints at this stage would likely come from mothers with kids in the car scanning the FM band and hearing words she wouldnāt want them to hear.
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