yes, pirate radio.... anyone? you can also tune in between radio channels for a great white noise generator.
I get them on my cell phone. I never thought of folks with cable or satellite TV watching HBO and being oblivious to the impending tornado.
Alerts? Don’t need no radio alerts. We live next to an Arsenal and they have 5 very loud and different alerts of which I am only familiar with 3. I do imagine that the 2 that I am not familiar with are connected with the act of sticking one’s head between the legs and kissing one’s own rear goodbye.
I keep telling hubby to drag out the old short wave radio in case internet goes out. But how many people still even have one.
My mother was a WW2 war bride. When we moved to Virginia in the early 60s she became friends with a British couple. The husband (Bill) was a ham radio operator. My mother would go over to their house on a Saturday morning and Bill would call another operator in England who would patch his rig into a land line and phone my mother's siblings so they could talk as long as they wanted for free. As we all know, back then long distance calls were expensive. I have no idea what the rate on international calls would have been. I bought a couple of handsets that work through a series of towers...they are not direct radio-to-radio. I was all set to attend the classes to get my FCC license when COVID hit.
My old Ham rig is in a storage room. I could get it out and on battery in a flash. An antenna is another thing, however.
if that is the baofeng uv-5r, or a similar model, it can be programmed to scan and interact with pretty much all of the critical frequencies... heheheh (or so i'm told.)
Very, very seldom do we listen to radio broadcasts, either at home or in the car. We both prefer to watch live concert footage either on DVD or YouTube for music.
I had to look up what Pirate Radio is. Interesting that an unlicensed broadcaster can be in a jurisdiction/country where such transmission is legal, and be received in a jurisdiction/country where what he's doing is illegal. I commented about my British mother's WW2-era experiences, and see that one manifestation of Pirate Radio is when our ships sat offshore back then and transmitted popular music to fill in the gaps of the BBC's offering.
You have a good eye for radios! Yeh, that's the model. I believe it's 8W, so I'm not gonna use it to conspire with someone in Los Angeles (or even across the county) without the aid of repeater towers.
Get an antenna tuner and then you could string up a random single-wire antenna in a hurry. Are you still licensed?
Yep, still licensed. I do have a tuner and I can string a wire. Got the license when I lived in the bush and we could communicate where the phones weren't reliable. Don't use HF anymore, but use an HT to listen in on the ambulances and fire people. The cops are trunked and coded in some manner, so no scanner stuff there.
In an emergency, license be damned. But I could listen for news and what is going on without gov't oversight, right?