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A blog for radio artists with transmission art news, open calls, microradio news, and discussion of issues about radio art, creative use of radio, and radio technologies. free103point9 announcements are also included here.
This is the original upload, now with improved sound quality. During a broadcast of the Dr. Who episode "Horror of Fang Rock" on WTTW Chicago Channel 11, on Sunday November 22, 1987, at around 11:15 p.m., a video "pirate" wearing a Max Headroom mask broke into the signal and transmitted one of the weirdest, unauthorized things ever to hit the Chicago airwaves. Earlier in the evening on the same day, during the Nine O'Clock News on Channel 9 (yes, a completely different channel) the Max Headroom Pirate also broke in, although it was for a much shorter time and there was no audio.
Members of a Czech art group who hacked into television broadcasting with images of a hoax nuclear explosion were charged and will have to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Thursday.
A freeze-frame from the Web cam shows an image of a nuclear explosion. Watch YouTube video here.
The six members of the Prague-based Ztohoven group were charged last month with spreading false information and face up to three years in jail if convicted, said Dusan Ondracek, the state prosecutor in the northern town of Trutnov, who is in charge of the case. The trial could begin by the end of January, Ondracek said.
On June 17, viewers of a Czech television channel watching a Web cam program monitoring weather in various Czech mountain resorts could see a nuclear explosion taking place in the Krkonose or Giant Mountains in the northern Czech Republic. In December, the project was awarded the NG 333 prize for young artists by Prague's National Gallery together with a cash prize of 333,000 koruna (US$18,350).
The "pirate" radio stations picking up Howard Stern's satellite radio show and remicrocasting it on free airwaves, are back in the news again. Both The New York Times and Los Angeles Times are reporting Stern FM transmissions in those cities.
The New York Times Jacques Steinberg reports hearing Stern near 239th Street in the Bronx on 88.1-FM on a car radio. He quotes Russell Skadl, the faculty adviser of a Long Island radio station, WXBA, that operates on very low power on 88.1 out of a high school in Suffolk County, hearing Stern on that frequency on Long Island, quite a distance from the Bronx. The Daily News reported pirates in Brooklyn and New Jersey broadcasting Stern's signal last January, just as his show switched from FM to satellite.
In Los Angeles, the Times there has one person hearing Stern on 88.1 FM where jazz station KKJZ should be, and another on 88.3-FM. They say a local TV station is blaming "Pirate Cat Radio," which has always used 87.9-FM, not those higher frequencies. More likely, it is someone with less of an agenda then the Pirate Cat folk, and more likely some Stern fan with an electronic equipment fetish.
While some pirates pick up satellite feeds now, others have broken over top television feeds. Recently someone YouTubed the infamous November 22, 1987, interruption of Chicago's WGN-TV local newscast. WGN-TV's on-site technicians neutralized the "pirate" transmission of a Max Headroom-like figure spouting dada gibberish by switching to an alternate transmitter, but two hours later the Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW's "Doctor Who" transmission got a similar Headroom visit. Below is the clip from the WGN hijacking. Below that is the CBS News national reporton the incident, also YouTubed.
