The only AM pirates I've heard of late are Energy 1395 from Dublin, and Radio Star Country 981 and Radio North 846 both from the north. Can't tell the difference between the formats on the 2 northern ones really. Both country and gospel! Radio Star Country has been going since the mid 80's or so and was, apart from Radio Dublin, the only pirate that had been broadcasting before the raids who came back on afterwords.

The two northern stations make it to north Wales. There was a Medium Wave station over in County Mayo near to Castle Bar which used to have good coverage, but I haven't heard it in the last five or six years.

There's so much room on Medium Wave, and it's so easy to build clean, powerful rigs using cheap power FETs, that it's the way to go if you want big coverage. Back in the 80s, our little 8 Watt carrier / 35 Watt peak rigs used to give amazing daytime coverage when connected to a "tower block sloper" aerial.

I guess the issue there is you'll get coverage but, in the case of Ireland, it's not likely you'll get many people listening. Ireland has only one licensed station on AM (which only broadcasts on AM to fulfil its license conditions and doesn't cover the nation as it's meant to), and our last LW service is due to close in May. Yes a pirate would have good coverage, but there is not a significant number listening on AM over here now, unless of course someone in Ireland was to open a pirate targeting Ireland and Britain, for example.

lw252 is now closing in 2019 instead.

thanks for the memories of Energy 106.6, you could hear it across the Entire North of England, even yorkshire - with fading though.
this was before smooth/saga 106.6 in the east midlands spoiled everyones fun

Tim, have a look here:

That's the way to do it! It was a spectacularly big erection, and was probably the only pirate ever to achieve an ERP of over a Megawatt! Miles J (an old mate of mine) really went to town on that one!

The most expensive part of the whole installation was getting the mains up to the site!

Klub FM was received in Poland twice (via Sporadic E, an ionospheric propagation):

In 2015 (with almost 30 min of reception!)

and in 2016:



BTW: is Power87 a heir of Klub? Cause it was recently logged, with the same RDS PI code:

Nice catch, all i've had is Albanian, Finnish, Italian, Hungarian, Russian on 87.5.
....But nothing interesting.

Oh and I did manage to hear Live FM who haven't been live since at least 2011 and haven't been worth going live since they ever began on the FM radio, so yeah, again nothing interesting.

Emel_PL wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2020 9:11 pmBTW: is Power87 a heir of Klub? Cause it was recently logged, with the same RDS PI code:

I think same equipment but different owners, but am unable to confirm for definite.

Yep, far as I've been told, same equipment different owners. Again can't confirm for absolute definite but rely on good sources. Also, I can confirm for definite that Power were definitely using Klub's transmission equipment originally at least, as I was listening when the station was rebranded and the TX never went off.