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by lostlogin 1758 days ago
Keeping them moving would be cheap and trivial - mount them on a bus or truck or something.
2 comments

This made me think of the movie, “Pump up the Volume,” where Christian Slater has a pirate radio station and at one point he moves all his gear into a moving van to avoid detection.
The Netherlands had pirate radio stations located at sea : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Veronica
The UK had loads of these at one point, but the really enduring one is Radio Caroline. They were broadcasting from international waters right up until the early '90s when the British government gave itself extraterritorial powers over foreign-flagged ships in international waters (!) in order to forcibly close down offshore broadcasters.

Radio Caroline are still around though, they've actually done pretty well recently with fundraisers. Their old pirate ship is still used for broadcasting but these days instead of using the old valve transmitters aboard they use 4G to relay their signal to (ironically enough) an old BBC World Service site which is then broadcast on 648 kHz with a much more modern unit. They've just been licensed to turn up the power considerably too so they'll be receivable in much more of the UK and northern Europe than they are currently soon.

It's kind of interesting to see new AM stations popping up in what's otherwise a dying band. I've always thought it's a bit short-sighted to get rid of AM because in a real national "shit hits the fan" scenario where power and networking are heavily affected it's an efficient way to reach lots of people. You can even build an AM demodulator out of a razor blade and a pencil if you're in proper trouble! I expect by the end of the decade the only things left on AM will be enthusiasts like Radio Caroline and hobbyist pirates (there's quite a few of these in the Netherlands and Greece).

New Zealand had a Radio Hauraki, also pirates at sea.

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/radio-hauraki-rules-waves%3A-...

I enjoyed this one on the same subject:

https://www.metacritic.com/movie/pirate-radio

Great soundtrack BTW.

there was a story a while back about someone being caught with a signal jammer in his van, because he was sick of people being on the phone while driving
Surely this would cause things to be worse as everyone in proximity to this van would start looking down at their phones to figure out why they stopped working
yeah this was pointed out when this was first posted as well. I thought it was on here, but maybe it was reddit.

I think this is the story: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/man-put-cell-phone-jamme...

And when that van is in an accident, people can't call 911 or other emergency numbers anymore.
I hope the van driver received a prize. He certainly has my admiration.