Without the proper knowledge or measurement equipment, I observed that the audio would fade out after a 30 cm distance. Combined with running it for mere seconds to test and record a demo, I assumed to be in the clear with the spirit of the regulations. Appreciate the reminder to be responsible with RF.
If you're interested in this I definitely recommend you look into amateur radio licensing. I took mine a few years ago simply out of interest, and I learned so much from the advanced course.
VHF and UFH are so deeply embedded in technology we almost forget it's there. It's fun to sweep for other peoples environmental sensors in your neighbourhood, even more fun to track and listen to satellites as they pass overhead.
I don’t know what the regulations are in your country (looks like you are maybe in Canada?), but in many countries it is straightforward to get an amateur radio license, and then you can have all sorts of fun (under the rules).
Transmitting on AM broadcast frequencies is generally prohibited unless it meets an extremely low-power exemption , even if you have amateur license(I have a Japanese amateur radio license). A practical way to reduce risk is to put a large resistor before the antenna so the radiated power stays within that exemption. You could start with 100 MΩ; if the receiver cannot pick it up, try 10 MΩ, and so on.
There's still one example of a working offshore radio ship, the Ross Revenge in southern England which you can go and visit. She's one of the former Radio Caroline ships, the studios are still fired up every month for a weekend of broadcasting and they run tours. Radio Caroline themselves are still alive and kicking as a legal station broadcasting 24/7 online and on 648 AM; ironically the latter transmission comes from a former BBC World Service site. She wasn't really a 'pirate radio' ship as she was a Panamanian-flagged vessel in international waters so not subject to the Wireless Telegraphy Act in theory, but British citizens specifically would have committed an offence working on her in her free radio days. What really did Radio Caroline in as an offshore broadcaster was the Anglo-Dutch action against the clandestine organisation which supplied the ship, that and the move from a 3-mile to a 12-mile limit which forced her into more exposed waters.
Other than the RNI ship she was probably the best-equipped radio ship that ever put to sea, and certainly the strongest. She was a long-range trawler built for Arctic conditions, and the engineering which went into the radio station was really impressive; Peter Chicago her engineer by all rights should be up there with the greats in hacker lore. Most radio ships were clapped-out old vessels at the end of their lives, they were essentially slapped with transmitters and sent to sea to die since you can never take a radio ship back into port once it's broadcast. The Ross Revenge on the other hand was a very strong ship who was left purposeless midway through her life due to the Cod Wars. The generating and transmitting facilities were really sophisticated for radio pirates, there were plenty of redundancies and the ship could radiate multiple medium and short wave services.
The broadcast studios and accommodation are still active but most of the machinery spaces and the hull itself aren't in good condition. They've raised half a million pounds for repairs, but that's not actually all that much in the maritime conservation game. Hopefully it will be enough to stabilise the immediate problems with the hull and open a door to lottery funding though. If you're in the area I'd go and see her while you've definitely got the chance!
The PWM-based modulation is interesting, but as an amateur, I couldn't fully understand it or trust that the radio receiver reliably picks up the duty cycle as amplitude.
That has been the bargain since WWII though. Pax Americana meant the US owned and enforced a global order, in return international trade and finance ran on its platform. Most Americans can't fathom how bad the alternative is to not being the world police.
The US have a good share of responsibility for what's going on in Iran, first by overthrowing the democratic government of Mossadegh, then by imposing crippling sanctions (reneging on a previous agreement) that brought the population to this level of desperation.
The US doesn't make foreign policy decisions altruistically. If we are involved somewhere, it's solely because it's to our benefit. The idea that we enforce order is childish; we do nothing that doesn't enforce our own international supremacy.
I'm surprised and impressed that this works. I would've guessed phones have enough RF shielding and low-pass filters in the audio path to prevent this.
The financial gains from starting a startup have a wildly varied distribution. The analysis won't be very practical if we assume any meaningful exit at any age. Not sure how a "weak exit" is considered the most common outcome.
A good exit used to seem boring: we already know the family will be financially very well off. That said, it would be interesting to move away from deterministic modeling and build a stochastic version, where we explicitly account for probabilities of success as a function of age, integrate RSU appreciation, and incorporate target net worth.
I suspect there’s a net worth threshold at which, probabilistically, pursuing a startup becomes more likely to get you there than staying in big tech.
The signs of techno-feudalism have always been around in fragments (platform/cloud landlords, rent-seeking, gig work, ...), but the promise of hitting gold, the idea of democratized innovation, and the reliance on mass tech labour fueled the techno-optimism. Now, the heavily power-centralizing nature of AI and the shrinking reliance on tech labour have diminished the optimism.
It’s absolutely insightful for adults as well. Especially when paired with the other horsemen of the attention apocalypse “Dopamine Nation”, “Irresistible”, and “The Shallows”.
Returned my treatment of the internet from “the thing” to just another tool.
Without the proper knowledge or measurement equipment, I observed that the audio would fade out after a 30 cm distance. Combined with running it for mere seconds to test and record a demo, I assumed to be in the clear with the spirit of the regulations. Appreciate the reminder to be responsible with RF.
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