Open season on 470-790MHz ?

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biggiedan
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Open season on 470-790MHz ?

Post by biggiedan » Sun Apr 21, 2019 7:47 pm

I'm not sure if anyone knows or heard about this but, it appears that OFCOM has deregulated some of the DTT band for unlicensed use for broadband devices. When i say deregulated what they actually mean is the regulation schema has changed to something which can be described as dynamic regulation without licensing. - https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/ ... ace-182949

How it will work is, the said broadband device will connect to the internet and in turn communicate with a white space database WSDB which will return various information relating to where your located for transmission/interference purposes.

With all this said and done is this something that pirates could openly use freely. I don't mean using their broadband devices but just using the spectrum in between the spaces of TV like their proposing for the broadband guys.

What are your thoughts on this fellow necks, opening season or not ?

Albert H
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Re: Open season on 470-790MHz ?

Post by Albert H » Mon Apr 22, 2019 1:48 am

The TV bands have been my preferred frequencies for linking for years. It's reasonably easy to build UHF gear, and aerials are cheaply available. A TV aerial never looks out of place on a rooftop, and it's easy enough to build your link transmitter and link receiver to match 75Ω - you can use high gain Yagi aerials (which are really cheap), low loss TV coax which costs next to nothing, and even Belling-Lee TV connectors if you want! The link receivers can easily be built using TV receiver front end modules which usually have PLL synthesisers built-in for tuning the local oscillator.

Link transmitters only need low power, since the aerials can have such high gain. They're also difficult to track, since the beam width from a high gain Yagi is so narrow!

I've linked 20 miles - over a noisy path - with just 200mW coming out of the link transmitter. I got good, clean stereo over that link, and it was used for months.

Unfortunately, your average "builder" won't have a clue about building at UHF!
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radionortheast
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Re: Open season on 470-790MHz ?

Post by radionortheast » Tue Apr 23, 2019 9:56 am

sounds interesting, didn’t the dutch do something similar at similar frequencies, think they where using tv frequencies to broadcast music, it was on a scanning forum think they called them 70cm pirates, they still do things in meters which is confusing. The aerials would be nice and small, I think even if something like 1w was allowed for music in part of the spectrum, would be good, we could all have a go at hearing each other!, would say fm but they won’t ever allow that. (that could be the future of the fm band along with border blasters :lol: )

I think of getting equipment to recieve other bands, for shortwave to hear pirates as its dead here on fm apart from my own little transmissions and 4 regular pirates.

Albert H
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Re: Open season on 470-790MHz ?

Post by Albert H » Wed Apr 24, 2019 2:23 am

NorthEast - we used to call it the 65cm band! I used to have a little stereo station (one of the first to use stereo) which ran 80 Watts into a vertical colinear. The biggest problem I had with the set-up was getting the PLL to work reliably!
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radium98
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Re: Open season on 470-790MHz ?

Post by radium98 » Wed Apr 24, 2019 7:46 am

Albert why ?

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radionortheast
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Re: Open season on 470-790MHz ?

Post by radionortheast » Wed Apr 24, 2019 9:22 am

https://www.radio-romeo-hotel.nl
its in dutch but if you look in 35cm zender project it shows the stereo encoder/rds, they mostly seem to operate around 871 mhz from the logbook….

the owner talked abit about it on here
http://skywavesdx.org/viewtopic.php?f=2 ... aea5a880e6

actually 35cms, the original page I was reading incase anyone is interested, they where using wide band fm stereo in the tv band, said that large distances could be covered with low power, using what looked like tv aerials
http://www.transmission1.net/viewtopic. ... 9df350ee09

Albert H
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Re: Open season on 470-790MHz ?

Post by Albert H » Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:35 am

Over here in the Netherlands, people often seem to operate on frequencies that nobody can hear....

The 860MHz band is used for cordless headphones and hearing aids, so I don't think that a high power pirate is going to be very popular there!

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, there were TV receivers that were capable of "sound only" reception (turning off the tube) - designed for use on cable networks. These could receive the 65cm pirates, and there were quite a few stations that took advantage of the existence of these domestic receivers. They died out as the TVs were replaced with satellite or wired cable receivers. There are still a few 65cm pirates that pop up from time to time, but they'll have virtually no listeners.
"Why is my rig humming?"
"Because it doesn't know the words!"
;)

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