Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be a radio DJ. I built small FM transmitters as a teen starting out with rigging in audio to the internals of another FM radio and using the local oscillator to rebroadcast a few houses down from mine. Grew up and pirated FM with higher power, got up to 10 watts or so on FM and a 40' tower. Covered most of my town. Had friends come over and we'd do shows and had the local Taco Bell guy a mile away call in just to hear his voice echo over the cell phone and his radio.
I got paranoid after a while and part of that was my own doing trying to get the word out and I was always getting high and/or drunk at the time. Had a bad cough syrup habit but that's another story. Anyway.. after learning not only did my friends know about our FM station.. the whole damn town knew which surprised me. Doesn't help it is a 11k population so word gets around, but not in the way I wished.
So I switched up, went to AM because my strength is electronics and having fun with electronics. Got on medium wave and still have it setup for the occasional power switch flip to start broadcasting. I'm saving it for winter though when conditions are best and FCC is stranded.
Thing is the lack of interest now. Radio in general is dying. Any of us who deny that are clinging to memories. I sure know I cling to those FM days in the late 90s to 2008 or so. I had a lot of fun then and we had a ton of listeners. I had a phone patch, aka: cell phone with cord spliced into the mixer, but hey.. it worked!
My point here is the medium itself is dying because in general most broadcasts on AM/FM are talk radio and music, and not good stuff. It's all syndicated garbage, no local calls, no requests.
Us pirates aren't doing so great either in my opinion and I know I will take hate for this but I tune into shortwave on 69xxkHz and it's always the same boring music I can get on FM radio, the DJs don't talk much and some of them resort to computerized voicing.
What happened to broadcasting with actual talk, maybe a friend or co-host? No offense to those who don't, I believe everyone with the ability should get on the air, but the programming has become stale lets face it. We get out our tablet computers or phone to see what song is playing if we don't know just to type up a reception report. Yeah hooray you emitted RF and we could hear it. There are some really good pirates still around and I won't name names, but they can carry a program and often blast a radio. So if you got low power make that programming count or else you just become another log note.
Sorry I don't mean to sound like a dick. I just remember pirates of the 90s and so, there was more effort rather than running a play list. I say this because I realized that is exactly what I was doing with my AM radio station on 1710kHz. Wondering why I didn't get more listeners, then sat back and thought... would I continue listening to this just because it's on the radio?
I'm just wondering what is the way forward? I seem to be going backward with AM now instead of FM broadcast band pirating simply because it's literally getting to the point where FM radio has killed itself and no one wants to listen to Hotel California one more time without shooting their brains out. At least AM offers more fun, which is so damn backward when you think about it. What has become of all this?