Wanted radio stream to broadcast in Cardiff between my shows

[henrythedog]

Hi Pirates

I am looking for a station that wants to be broadcasted in the Cardiff Area on FM. I have made the transmitter and Dipole. Just working out what frquencies we will use. In Wales we have these big brown things called Mountains. They are great for Transmitters at 1000 Meters above sea level. I predict we can cover the whole of Cardiff on 15 Watts. Getting DJ's here that want to do Pirate is not easy so we are going to start with a couple of hours Friday night and then stream a London Station for the rest of the weekend. However it would be good if the station can cooperate so they know they will get shout outs from Cardiff and are transmitting there. Its got to be good for your station to advertise that you are broadcasting in England and Wales.

Looking at starting in 3 weeks time to allow for test transmittions.

Looking at the area in relation to the transmitter site we are going to be testing Yagi Beam, Horizontal Dipole and Vertical. I think the Vertical will waste 75% of the power going the wrong way. So will probably be a 3 element Yagi.

The uplink will be cellular so you will need an internet radio page.

[Albert H]

You might want to try stacked vertical "H" aerials - they give hemispherical radiation with useful forward gain, You'd obviously get more antenna gain from 3-element Yagis, but your radiation would be in a naarrower beam. However, this can be advantageous if you're a bit further away from your target audience area.

My old station in California used as many as four stacked 3-element Yagis from very high sites, pointing at downtown, which was about 7½ miles away at closest. Driving around the reception area, we'd be able to easily identify the predominent lobe of the radiation pattern, because the signal was much stronger there! However, all the area we were aiming to cover got a reasonably good signal, and we achieved quite good penetration between high buildings despite only using vertical polarisation. The high site(s) really helped! For the first few months we ran mono, but when I got some bigger TRW output transistors, stereo became possible. I got the power up to around 400 Watts from the rig, into an aerial array with useful gain, so we had an ERP of about 1600 Watts!

Back in the early 80s, we didn't have the luxury of mobile phones capable of carrying a reasonably good quality signal (or any mobile phones, for that matter), so we had to build our own link gear. In the early days, we used a couple of reel-to-reel tape players at the site, but that was inconvenient (and there was the risk of arrest, of course).

I used a crude microwave link from the studio to a nearby tall residential block, and then used two "hops" of a couple of Watts of UHF to get up to the site. All the UHF aerials were ordinary TV Yagis - they have spectacular forward gain, and don't ever look out of place!