Work and other matters often takes me to London and while there I listen to the radio whilst driving round from place to place. I’ve noticed that there has been a huge jump in the amount of ethnic minority stations that are operating. Some, like Voice of Africa Radio on 94.3 MHz which broadcasts from a site in the London Borough of Newham are licensed by Ofcom, but there are many, many others that appear to be operating without a licence. None of these unlicensed ethnic stations appears to be being shut down by Ofcom, which used to be very active in policing the airwaves, which is leading me to wonder whether Ofcom are going easy on these stations for fear of being called ‘racist’ or for some other politically correct reason.
The radio spectrum is a finite resource, no two stations can share the same analogue frequency in the same area without causing interference to one another, therefore some level of frequency co-ordination and indeed licensing is necessary so that things all work smoothly. Frequency and broadcast power levels must be chosen carefully so that all the different users of the spectrum can operate without causing problems for one another. In London Ofcom seem to have really lost the plot with all manner of illegal ethnic stations broadcasting without any regard to transmitter power levels or the users of adjacent frequencies.
Some of these stations must be running tremendously high levels of transmitter power, using many hundreds of Watts, often from badly adjusted transmitters that splatter spurious emissions all over the shop. There is a section of the North Circular Road between Bounds Green and Colney Hatch Lane where the commercial station LBC is completely knocked out on my car radio when that receiver has its local attenuator switched in. With the attenuator taken out, it is just about listenable although with some dropouts. When you realise that LBC is running 4 kilowatts of power from Croydon, it gives you some idea of just how much power some of these illegal ‘splatter’ stations must be running.
Parts of the locality near Turnpike Lane is also an area where legal and commercial stations have been knocked out by pirate ethnic stations and a friend has reported to me that it even Classic FM is effected by the ‘desense‘ effect of nearby powerful transmitters. For background Classic FM has a transmitter power of 2 Kilowatt in the London area (100.6 MHz) and 125 KW (100.9 MHz) for London and the South East. This means that somewhere in the Turnpike Lane area is a very powerful and pretty poorly adjusted unlicensed transmitter. In parts of London the airwaves are getting so crowded by illegal transmissions that a friend humorously suggested to me that maybe some sort of ‘Kraut-sieve’ antenna might be one way of nulling out the unwanted illegals and allowing me to listen to LBC in the affected areas.
It is part of Ofcom’s remit to keep the airwaves, and in particular the broadcast airwaves clear so that they are usable for those who have either paid megabucks for a commercial licence or who have proper restricted service licences for community radio stations. A small amount of low power radio piracy is probably sort of tolerable in the great scheme of things and back in the late 80’s I was friends with people who took part in pirate hobby radio on the 11 meter band, but they didn’t run enormous levels of power because they knew what they were doing was a bit naughty and took care not to give interference. In fact I’d probably say that some of their stations were probably a lot cleaner with regards spurious emissions than some licensed Ham radio operators because they knew the Department of Trade and Industry would kick their doors in if they were suspected of causing interference. The fact that many of these illegal ethnic stations are running large amounts of power and there seems to be very little enforcement action against them leads me to believe that Ofcom might be going easy on them for reasons of political correctness. Ofcom have massive radio monitoring resources available to them including the major monitoring station at Baldock in Hertfordshire and numerous unmanned monitoring points throughout the capital. It is well within Ofcom’s technical and logistical capability to stamp on these illegal ethnic minority stations, some of which are probably backed by some quite unsavoury characters and are broadcasting who knows what in languages other than English.
It does make me wonder how long a hypothetical ‘British Patriot’ station would last in London if it started broadcasting, not long I’d bet? I can well imagine Ofcom wetting themselves in their haste to shut it down. We’ve all seen stories that give credence to the idea that there are two tiers to policing in general and it is possible that there is two tier policing going on with regards to the FM band in the London area. Ofcom already seem loathe to deal with the excesses of Islamic cable stations like Peace TV, the Islam Channel etc and back in 2012 handed out only a derisory fine of £4,000 to a Leeds based licensed Islamic community radio station.
We need to ask the question, are Ofcom, like South Yorkshire Police and West Midlands Police, yet another entity that because of pandering to minorities has become unfit for purpose? In London it seems that Ofcom have, on the VHF FM band at least, well and truly surrendered.
Technical and other notes
Comparison of transmitter power for various devices so that readers can understand what is a high power and what is a low power transmitter.
Mobile phone handset 0.6 Watts average to 2 watts theoretical maximum
446 Mhz walkie talkie 0.5 watts
Citizens Band Radio both UK 40 channels and EU 40 channels 4 watts with 12 watts for single sideband modulation where permitted
licensed business walkie talkie 5 watts
Minicab or lorry radio licensed by Ofcom 25 watts
Vodaphone transmitter tower (this is an example from East London) 6 watts although I have seen some of up to 100 watts
Amateur radio – depending on grade of licence which is dependent on technical proficiency and the higher the level of licence the higher the power permitted
Foundation licence 10 watts
Intermediate licence 50 watts
Advanced ‘Class A’ licence 400 watts
Links
There are whole TV channels stuffed full of Islamic fanatics.
List of community radio and restricted service licence radio stations from Ofcom. Along with the football commentary, music festival and micro-local stations there are an awful lot, a worrying number in my view, of Islamic stations that Ofcom is allowing to broadcast.
Interesting page on community radio in London
