Every couple weekends someone in my neighborhood has a big house party with a live band in the back yard. They are a few streets over, but I can hear clearly the music from my yard. I can even hear muffled low frequency content from inside my house.
No one complains. I assume because the band is not shouting 4 letter words and the loud music ends at a reasonable hour.
The live sound system for the party has more range than a part 15 complaint FM transmitter. What the band is saying is probably heard by more people. With Part 15 FM, someone needs to have their radio on the correct channel when they are in range of the transmitter. For the band to be heard, someone just needs to be in the general area with the car windows open or out for a walk.
So if the goal of a part 15 FM station is to spread political opinions, it may be easier to find out just how loud you can be and put a speaker at the edge of your property, while obeying all disturbing the peace, noise, and quiet hour laws. That is probably more defendable in court by the first amendment than any arguments that pirate radio is protected by freedom of speech.
An added advantage (I think, consult with a lawyer to be sure) of sending out content as audio waves rather than radio waves is who has jurisdiction to respond to complaints. If I broadcast with 251uv/m@3m on 88-108MHz, the FCC can enter my house without a warrant and seize all my transmitters, even if they have nothing to do with 88-108MHz. If I have a speaker in my yard blasting my political opinions the police have very strict rules they should follow when they respond.
On the other hand, playing copyrighted music from a speaker in a public place is a public performance of a copyrighted work so that is a whole other set of issues.
The way most local governments work is that they are on cruise-control until a complaint comes in.
A complaint about loud sound is very likely to bring a visit by men in costumes.
Your local band concert is likely happening because no one is filing a complaint.
There are other possibilities. The band might belong to the mayor's son or some other "high up," which would of course be treated with official tolerance.
If a man used a PA sytem yelling something like "9_11 Was An Inside Job!," he might end up in a mental ward.
Some thoughts and some speech is not allowed.
In my area there have been at least two incidents of loud music causing problems. One involved a popular restaurant which is located 1.5 miles from my home and which had outdoor patio live entertainment. This would start around 9 PM and continue to midnight a couple of days each week and I could hear it clearly including the lyrics.
When I realized this was not an occasional event I called our police to complain. I was told that they had received numerous complaints but were not able to do anything since the restaurant was located in an adjacent town. The adjacent town police would not respond.
The problem solved itself when the restaurant was sold and the new owners closed the patio.
The other example was a new amphitheater seven miles from here so I wasn't affected but many in that area were. It was so bad that the jurisdiction involved passed a noise ordinance placing a limit on the sound in so many dB at a certain distance (sound familiar?) This was rigorously enforced to the point where name brand bands would not perform because they couldn't crank up the volume to their liking. The amphitheater closed down due to lack of income.
Strange how some think it is OK to bother others with their music simply because they enjoy it loud.
Neil
STVCMTY: You have a good case about Noise traveling further than most Legal part 15 transmitters. If bands and restaurants would use part 15 transmitters and these transmitters had better Range then people near their events could hear the event with car Radio's, Headphone Radio's and Walkmen style Radio's. A part 15 transmitter should be able to reach (In Full Quieting) the same distance as what a Rock concert's Audio could reach. And Copyright??? Its gonna kill itself just give the RIAA enough rope they'll hang themselves. I think its safe to say that some loud Rock concerts can certainly be heard 1/4 Mile to a Mile away. So the answer may be closer than you think here.
Neil's 1st example is identical to a situation I encountered in the early 80s.
My house sat across the highway from another town which opened a city limits dance restaurant/bar with super amped music at night.
My local police passed the buck because it was in the other town, so I got a witness and we went in person to their police department, where we were put in a couple of courtesy chairs for over an hour until we realized they were avoiding us.
Turns out all the cops had a free pass at this place, lunch, dinner, drinks.
But I think there were no real custumers, so it went out of business.
We have an annual neighborhood street party with an ultra loud band blasting in everyone's ears. I never attend because there's no way to hold a normal conversation.
Radio has a more polite way of speaking aloud.
it won't be long until the restaurant owners discover these 500 mW FM Transmitters and that will solve the loud block party issue. Then some wining will get going from the NAB and a few will get busted but many more will slide through the cracks. The ones forced to stop will go back to their 10,000 per channel amps. The police will be called and they will say "Blame it all on the NAB. The public complaining of the noise and the NAB and their suit and tie choking the oxygen from their brain well have to explain to a raging mob why they felt a station going 1 quarter mile is so hard on them. then there will be even more riots probably more so then Ferguson New Jersey.
My location is about 9-miles south of Ferguson, Missouri, a hotspot in recent protests and activism, and I got audio feeds from a local video streaming operation, and came very close to promoting part 15 radio as a tool to augment their hand-held bull-horns.
If they had part 15 transmitters then neighbors blockaded in their homes could tune in to be connected with the action, which might reduce their fear.
The systems used for video streaming were slick because they were feeding to the internet in real time.
I don't remember where I read this but I was using Google to find a good transmitter and I was reading up on FM Djing. I read about this Block Party that was started in California and the dude had a FM Transmitter in a backpack with an antenna out of a backpack and the transmitter was connected to a small mixing board the type you can purchase at Radio Shack. He had many followers as he played the tunes and started a parade though town with his FM Transmitter. I did remember that it did go about 1/4 mile and people followed him with boomboxes and cars because they loved the music he was playing. It sure beats a 100 Watt/Ch system blaring from a car while your doing a parade. Yup another good reason for micro power FM.
That FM Parade story is great.
We had a "Parade of Part 15 Transmitters" on the Low Power Hour, and float # 1 was the SSTran Float with inventor PhilB sitting atop a giant replica of the AMT5000, waving a 10-foot pole at the spectators.
Our plans for a Part 15 Transmitter Air Show fell through because aviatrix Amelia Airhead went off course in her KDX traffic glider and the whole air show went off the radar.
The Part 15 "Transmitter Throw" is still talked about, where we had a contest to find out "How far each transmitter will go." As I recall the AMT5000 was thrown farthest.
What would have happened if someone took a Whole House FM Transmitter 3.0 up in a gluider and or hot air balloon and hovered over a certain part of the city and transmitted on a blank frequency. I bit it would surely get further than 250 feet and yet the field strength would still be 250uV/m but since they are in the air the transmitter sould reach Miles. And since technically there is no rule saying you can't launch a hot air balloon and transmit from it. You could have that 1 mile plus station on FM and be legal and the NAB can't do jack squat. Just a thought. Take your laptop up with an external 1-3TB of Album Rock tracks and you'd be the Rocking station everyone would talk about.
We have had pirate radio ships in the ocean, now we will have pirate radio blimps in the sky.
The FCC might borrow a drone from the White House and show up for an inspection.
@ post #10
You have the right idea if we are talking about a decent amount of power into an antenna that avoids radiating energy up into space, but unfortunately for part 15 transmitters neither of those hold true.
The field strength still falls off just as fast as it does on the ground. More people would be able to see the transmitter from it being above the city, but radios farther than ~800’ away probably would not be able to receive it. Reception may even be worse than that; if a vertical antenna were pointing straight down; any radios below it would get nothing because a dipole has a null off the end of the element (cone of silence).
I think the field strength was set so even with lots of HAAT the signal still does not go far.
If a part 15 transmitter had an isotropic antenna, then at every point on a sphere 3m from the transmitter the field strength would be 250uv/m. There is no antenna that is truly isotropic, so it is safe to assume in the plane with the most power delivered by the transmitters antenna the manufacture designed the transmitter to produce 250uv/m @ 3m. If a transmitter were held up by a hang glider or a hot air balloon I think it is unlikely there would be very many receivers in the plane where the most power is delivered.