The Anime Music Network
A Look Inside the Facilities of this Professional-Oriented FM Station
Plus Broadcast Technology & How It's Done

"If the right to "bear radios" isn't in the Constitution,
it's only because radios weren't invented at the time."
--K1BQT

INTRODUCTION

This story is told in roughly chronological chunks, from pieces of text I culled together from various writings about my enterprises over the recent years. The author is strongly committed to the belief that a blanket federal prohibition on public access to the airwaves runs counter to the principles upon which this nation was founded. It is believed that the airwaves are a modern version of the printing press, and that "spectrum scarcety" is an overblown issue (though certainly true). I myself believe that technology rightfully belongs to those with the willingness and the intelligence to harness technology, not to be given to indifferent, ignorant political and corporate beaurocrats who will misuse this once wonderful medium for the sole sake of exploitation of the public for sake of rapacious greed.

The days of blanket prohibition of use of radio by private individuals may be coming to an end, or at least experiencing a change for the better, in terms of altering this over-restrictive policy of "prior restraint" applied to broadcasting. It is the author's opinion that we need some type of coordination, at least on a regional level (as applied to FMs) if not a national or global level (as applied to AMs and SWs), so that contention for channels and protection spacings may be maintained to insure the prevention of chaos on the air. There are presently several Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRMs) before the Federal Communications Commission at the present time. You will find these on the LINKS page of this site.

It is hoped that the pressure of the "microbroadcasting" movement will implore the FCC do do something about the long-standing corporate headlock on the use of the airwaves. While Sturgeon's Law applies to the microbroadcasting community at-large, there are still a rare few of us who take our broadcasting seriously. And if we could come "out of the closet," we would gladly make our stations available to our community government, so that they too would have a voice in our own communities. For example, instead of playing Japanese music all day, this station would carry town meetings, local news, traffic reports, political campaign advertising (probably at no cost to the candidates, as I don't believe that money should be the determining factor of who wins an election), public service announcements by the police department, local traffic safety committees, and other public benefit spots aimed at improving the quality of life in our community, in between our fine musical programming (which in itself is a welcome relief to "top 40" programming of every other station in the area). When the most vocal opponents of LPFM complain that we don't serve our communities "in the public interest", frankly the answer is that most of the unlicensed operations are maintaining secrecy for their own personal safety. If allowed to be licensed, all would see how quickly these underground stations would spring to become an important and vital part of their communities. A further refutation of this argument is the example set by too many commercial stations already. Quite a few are licensed, but in reality, are no more than a automated jukebox, running from a computer, with no live persons operating the station. If these stations are allowed to be licensed, then the argument that LPFMers aren't serving their communities is hiporocracy.

The story on this web site that your will read is the story of a "high-class" FM station. This was no child's play operation, typical of the "pirate" stations you've seen or read about. In my experience, most unlicensed stations say they are running a clean signal, but in fact, do not. I discover that they are modulating anywhere from 130 to 200%, are causing interference to adjacent channels and are spewing out filthy, foul language and meaningless sound effects and noise over the air. Listening to my station however, you'd swear it was a commercial station both in audio quality, signal strength and program quality, with the exception of a lack of commercials, few announcers and the most unique, sane, melodic music ever heard in the USA. It's like a throwback to 1959, in terms of the feel of the broadcast presentation. This is the story of one person's dream to both build and operate a first-class FM station because the journey was as much fun as the destination.

HISTORY

Actually, I've been a compulsive broadcaster for the last twenty-one years. I'm incurable. I'm a "coaxist" who loves to put his ear to the studio turntable from a remote location outside of town. Actually, the thrill of being some 20 miles away from my home and hearing a pin drop in my studio over the FM band via pre-recorded material is something I get off on. I love to do newscasts and then hear them from afar, all the while listening to the room acoustics and incidental noises like ventilation systems and creaking floorboards.
I started out with a station on the top of the AM band in 1976, with a Beautiful Music format, but we didn't get any listeners until we switched to rock music, and in 1979, found an unused FM frequency and began monophonic transmissions there. At the time, I had help from three friends and we had a regular schedule. We played pretty much the same dreck that most college stations were playing at the time, but that was before my "enlightened" days arrived.
My first FM transmitter was a tube job, a single 6W6-GT oscillator. What the heck, it got out for a few miles with a detectable signal. But it was enough to impress friends and draw a bunch of us together to do regular shows.
The following year, after reading and digesting Norman H. Crowhurst's book on FM Stereo Multiplexing, I experimented with several design concepts. It took over half a year, but I eventually came up with a practical circuit design that worked perfectly.

[1982 photo] The main FM transmitter, during testing of a new closed loop noise reduction prototype. The prototype module sits on top of the main transmitter, which houses my new stereo limiter, multiplex generator, and PLL-synthesized exciter.

In 1980, I developed the PLL transmitter with a superior modulation system, which became necessary for proper stereophonic transmission. Along with my stereo generator and limiter units, each component was built and constructed as if it were going to be submitted to FCC testing labs for type approval. Complete, finished PC boards were fabricated for everything. Modules of sensitive nature were placed in copper subchassis within the main chassis. In short, I wanted the best for my transmitter's performance, so I went to extremes to shield everything, provide redundant safeguards and remote control capability.

The most recent high-gain J-pole at 82' height.

Meanwhile...

Eventually, life's turns split up our group of Deejays. One went to Japan, another New York, another Boston. So the broadcasting went by the wayside for a few years. But always the hobbyist, I continued building, refining and testing new and better transmitter designs.
Then one day, my friend from New York returned and we did some talk shows, commentaries on the employment situation in New England, a kind of satirical look at life of the average job hunter. We taped it on 6-hour open reel tapes. Why, we even had a galvanized steel bathtub hanging from the rafters, with a speaker and microphone in it, for reverb effect, just like the old AM radio stations of the 1960s! All through the first half of the 1980s I ran the rig 24 hours a day with taped source material and an estimated 3-5 watts output into a Radio Shack 175-mile range FM receiving antenna that had a 13db forward gain. The station was copied from as far as 30 miles away to the north (the direction in which my antenna was oriented.) I'm located in a rural area, on a mountaintop.

.	[1989 photo] The main broadcast studio control desk

I've had this fascination with high-fidelity transmissions in stereo for many years. This has caused me on more than one occasion to see if I could turn out a patentable product, a closed-loop noise reduction and dynamic expansion system. That never came to pass, as I didn't have the financial wherewithal to see it through the legal red tape, so I dropped everything after 1985 and moved into the field of graphic design and prepress color graphics, aided by the computer revolution. My FM rig sat quietly for many years. After 17 years, the antenna came crashing down on the roof (the victim of rust) and utterly destroyed itself. So my station was not only OFF the air, but now utterly UNABLE to get ON the air. I did not feel too comfortable with that.

[1982 photo] Part of the lab in which I designed most of this stuff.

January 1996, The Monster Stirs

A few months ago, a friend gave me a 6-element RatShack FM antenna because he was cleaning out his attic. I kept it for a while and forgot about it. Then one day, I decided to power up my FM exciter, just to liven up all the caps in the power supply and make sure it still worked. Then I remembered the antenna. Next thing ya' know, I was digging up a 10 foot aluminum pole from the back yard, which was under a couple of feet of snow. I hooked that up and put the exciter on the air. When I mentioned it to some friends of mine, their curiosity got the better of them and I soon found out that I was getting out for 12 miles with that dinky antenna! Something in my chemistry changed. That evil grin I had thought I'd lost years ago slowly came back. The sinister mad scientist was at work again in the back of my head. I knew it was time for another "cleansing". The air waves were saturated with putrid signals modulated by acid rock, RAP, and other asundry unpleasant outpourings of a sick society. My collection of fine Japanese music CDs had grown to immense proportions, and I was dying to start sending out these positive signals to counter-balance against the evil signals out there, to "appease the gods". So I began unofficially transmitting the music through the little antenna for a few hours a day. My friends loved it and listened all day, in their cars and at home.

Pump Up The Watts!

After a couple of weeks, I dug out my Motorola MRF-316 VHF amplifier project that stymied my efforts at making functional back in the '80s. It needs enough drive to operate, since it appears to run in class C only. Well to make a long story short, I guess I had learned a few things about critical impedance coupling of VHF amplifiers since those early days, because I soon was getting some decent power output from the device. Eventually, I burned out the balun matching transformer on the antenna, too. I decided to scrap the whole receiving antenna and build my own from this point. My first attempt was a half-wave dipole, fabricated from 10 gauge wire and 1/2 inch PVC pipe. I mounted that on a thirty foot aluminum pole. Suddenly, I had a solid, fade-free signal almost into the neighboring state of New York! The pattern was almost omnidirectional, as it seemed ubiquitous no matter where I drove in the greater Danbury area (a city of 95,000). I was thrilled that my signal was covering over 100,000 people.
Since then, I bought 100-feet of RG-11 foam coax and I eventually built a "3-meter" J-pole. (Actually, I built an earlier J-pole out of 1/4" copper tubing housed inside 1-1/2" PVC piping but that proved impossible to tune by virtue of being encased in the PVC. And after that, I built an all-copper J-pole, but that proved to heavy and unmanageable after 2 more bays were added.)

Ethics

I have just one rule I go by: "One can do anything one wants, as long as it is at one's own expense and not the expense of others and in such case as this latter condition cannot be met, then one may proceed only upon receipt of the willing consent through a means of fair exchange with the affected agreeing party(ies)." In more common terms, one might say, "Do not do unto others what you would not want done unto you." I run a clean operation here. When operating a clandestine radio station, the last thing one wants to do is give the FCC valid cause for action. When researching the available unused FM channels, I chose a frequency that was clear for at least a 300-mile radius. This has the added benefit that my station is not plagued by co-channel interference, a common problem among commercial stations in the 3,000-watt to 18,000-watt class. If you can catch a strong enough signal from my transmitter, you can enjoy better than 80 db of s/n ratio in beautiful high-fidelity stereo. Ethical behavior does have its "fringe" benefits (pun not intended, but what the heck, it fits this instance well). In addition to that, the quality of my signal was head and shoulders above any pirate station and those of many commercial stations as well. Carefully-engineered equipment does make a difference in the "on the air" sound. And lastly, the music I discovered after my great Enlightenment took place - the Japanese audiophile recordings - set The Anime Music Network apart from every other station on the dial. You could come away from listening with a beautiful song in your heart, a real melody, full of surpises and unexpected chordal variations, full of sophisticated rhythms and mature lyrics about love, winning battles, conquering space.

Politics

It seems ironic that we, living in what is touted as being the most free country in the world, have some of the most Gestapo-like government agencies in the world (the IRS, BATF and FCC, to name a few). I love Japan, but I didn't know that what I'm doing is totally legal there. Canada too. I find that encouraging, especially in a day and age where my property taxes are approaching my yearly income figure.

August 1998

		The Broadcast Studio, as it looks today. Automation is slowly replacing analog tape decks & CD players. Center of photo: Modulation monitor time & temperature indicators. At right, automation computer, now trialing Raduga 2.1. CD #1 is under keyboard. Effects processor, Ibanez SDR1000+ resides under countertop. PC sits under counter.
		Detail of metering.

The transmitter, including limiter, 2nd generation stereo generator and exciter, they look today.

A view of the transmitter, showing 1KW 28VDC power supply for the finals.

They say all good things end. Well, in a way that's true, because just as the whole operation was getting into great shape, with the transmission system fully debugged and working well, covering a 30+ mile radius (in fact, I was thinking about setting up an all-digital studio, with all program material stored on huge computer disk drives for total automation) and after an eternity of this channel being clear, the ultimate April Fool's Joke happened on that day: A new FM station went on the air on the very frequency, some 65 miles away. I realized this wasn't going to work out, as the broadcasts would no longer have a decent signal-to-noise ratio due to co-channel interference. The potential danger of MY signal interfering with theirs was also a determining factor in my shutting down The Anime Music Network. At present, some alternatives are being explored, but not many frequencies offer the kind of wide open space that AMN enjoyed at 102.5 FM. I'm even thinking about BUYING a real FM station now. Any investors want to partake? (grin)
But who knows... once broadcasting is in your blood, you live with it 'till the day you die.

The Present, December 1996

It's deja-vu all over again. After the loss of a channel in April, I succeeded in locating another channel, further down the band. Slowly, things resumed. The J-pole that was cut for the old frequency would not work, so the Circularly-polarized design you see in these pages came about as an experiment. It worked, but coverage was weak over all. Not great, but the station resumed semi-regular broadcasts in the summer. As fate would have it, I found myself building another J-pole (actually, re-working this one with new aluminum wire) for the new channel. The initial attempt was clouded by a design modification that rendered the whole antenna with little or no gain. Within a week, a hurricane blew through here and the J-pole, having just 3 guy cables, came down. That was okay, since the antenna wasn't working anyway. I repaired it, and got rid of the design change, going back to the dimensions for the top element that coincided with formula, not minimum SWR readings on an analyzer. We had another raising party, which included help from someone from a local radio station (which shall remain nameless). This time, the antenna worked superbly, and we saw some new records for distances. We worked with that antenna for perhaps a month, until another rain storm and hurricane snapped this one in half, above the now eight guy cables we had installed this time.

Determined to keep The Anime Music Network on the air, and spurred on by the calls from listeners, and even local broadcaster personnel, I resolved to fix the antenna and go overboard with guy cables this time (16 of them). Not wanting to just get back to status quo, I decided to make this raising pay off with some small benefit. So I increased the mounting height by 18" and optimized the feed point connections. We had another raising party, late in the fall, on the last weekend this part of the country would ever see good weather in 1996. Four people got together for the dangerous and harrowing raising of the 45-foot long monster, up to the third floor rooftop. As always, there was the risk of mishap. But we made it, again. This was our most successful antenna yet. There was no more room for improvement. We broke all records for field strength and distance once again, surpassing all prior pattern tests. The station worked with this wonderful antenna for a couple of months, lasting us from early October to December 7. In late November, I decided to try an on-channel synchronous booster amp, into a second antenna, a 6-element beam, aiming east into the central part of the state. HAMs said it wouldn't work. I never allowed that to dissuade me. Initially, I built up a second 100-watt amp and split the output of the driver amp to feed both 100-watt finals. The first tests revealed some weird multipath problems and a somewhat degraded signal that sounded like co-channel interference. One of my spotters was reporting the strangest thing at a location on the highway, about 15 miles way - 10 out of 10 LEDs lit on his signal strength meter, but lots of noise. The next day, I decided to reverse the connections on the beam, thinking that it was out of phase and producing enough overlap in the polarization to affect the vertical pattern. The next day, more tests were conducted and the results were dramaticly changed. Signal strength in the east hemisphere picked up so much that that same HAM (the one who said that two amplifiers and two antennas would never work) reported something that never happened before: from his home almost 20 miles away, on the other side of a hill, he was receiving a full-quieting stereo signal with just one clip lead dangling straight down from the terminals on his receiver -half an antenna. I continued to work on perfecting the drive circuits to get both power amps up to full power output. I estimate at this point the combined Effective Radiated Power, figuring antenna gains of 8dB for the vertical and 6 dB for the beam, at close to 900 watts. It certainly gave all impressions of a class A facility, judging by the signal pattern.

Meanwhile, our station received a format facelift. Sixteen new Japanese CDs came in, along with some really nifty liners/sweepers, done by a talented young lady in Canada, who happens to be literate in Japanese as well as English. By this time, several local broadcasters were quietly showing their support. I had made many new friends in the industry. I even got a job finally, as a direct result of the fine operations of this radio station. Things were going really well. The broadcast schedule was from 4:30 pm, catching the afternoon rush hour, to 1:00 am weekdays, and 2:00 am weekends. The programming was solidified into a well-defined format by now. I was buying up Japanese CDs like there was no tomorrow (little did I know that the fall of Rome was coming sooner than expected) and adding new material. The station was sounding good now, not only in audio, but in the choice of quality J-pop music (daytime) and ethereal new age and symphonic music (nighttime). I was amazed by the number of people who actually commented on how great their crummy factory car stereos sounded when tuned to my station. They said they could actually hear bass out of their cheap speakers and were amazed that this was possible, as they never heard sound so rich from their automotive systems with other stations and tapes. It was true, we didn't roll off the low end below 50Hz, and I kept a RealTime Audio Analyzer connected to the monitoring tuner, always keeping a comparative check with other stations, to make sure that the audio spectrum was filled at the extremes during the daytime programming.

No matter where one went, The Anime Music Network could always seem to be heard. In the west, about 12 miles away, I monitored on a friend's portable Walkman headphone/tape player, noting that although I was indoors, the signal was not finicky about where I walked in the house, or how I positioned the wires. With a fade-free signal in the car, all around the 20-25-mile radius of the station's "big signal" area, I was really pleased with the way things were. We were set for the wonderful "winter of broadcasting" that two of my "competition" station operators and I were looking forward to. We had reception reports out to 50 miles away, though with some adjacent channel interference. Our format was so ecclectic, that nowhere else in America could this music be heard. I didn't believe in simply playing a rehash of what other commercial and college stations were playing, so I went all the way and offered a format so diverse from the common fare, that our listener base was modest, but devoted. At night, this station catered to the wealthy audiophiles, with a superb-sounding signal, a reprieve from the daytime signal processing, and wonderfully-recorded Japanese CDs. We were something unique, for the tri-state area.

I had further plans for adding some automation for the daytime programming, so make it more varied, using computer-based music servers, but things abruptly changed after December 4^th. That evening was to be my last broadcast. The last 5 hours of the day had me feeling the onslaught of some powerful malady -first pain in the kidneys and dizziness. Then a rising temperature. I felt my lungs filling with liquid to the point where it became increasingly difficult to speak. I barely finished the broadcast day and then I went to bed. For five days straight. During that five days, we were to experience most unusual weather, and a freak ice and snow storm that would take down trees and knock out power for two days all over the state. That storm would hit us on Saturday, Dec. 7^th.

Thursday, Dec 5^th, I couldn't even get out of bed. My kidneys hurt, I was having "time dilations" (I look at the clock, it's 3:17am. I roll over, doze for an hour? and I look at the clock again --it's still 3:17am!) I had psychedelic double vision in daylight, and by night, when I opened my eyes in the darkened room, my vision had a flickering, like rhythmic lightning. I had a tremendously high fever and was delirious for several days. All told, I was in bed continuously for 5 days. It was to be several more before I was strong enough to descend the 3 flights of stairs to my studio. In the interim, on Saturday, Dec 7, I experienced a snow storm and ice storm like nothing I had witnessed in 33 years at this same house. Loud "BOOM!" noises on the roof for the entire night, and sounds like a herd of elephants running back and forth on the roof all night. At one point I thought I heard glass shattering up there somewhere. Looking out the windows, all I saw were great, white-covered branches, like some incredible growth, that had closed in on every formerly wide open space in the yard and driveways. Places where no trees existed, now were filled solid, with these white outcroppings from trees that had been bent all the way to the ground from other parts of the yard. It was startling to see the landscape so drastically changed.

Once I was well enough to step outside, a few days later, I looked at the situation. We still had a foot of snow on the ground. Large tree limbs littered the patio and yard and driveways. I looked up, with concern, to see how our antennas came through this. To my utter sickening shock, they were so completely mangled as to be unrecognizable as antennas. Trees had fallen across the rooftop, pulling down the guy wires and snapping the mast in multiple places. The delicate aluminum wire was now a mangled, twisted and kinked mass that bore no clue to it's former shape. What remained was only half the height and there were no guy wires left intact. The top of the house looked as if a giant lawnmower had passed over it, taking down anything and everything that stuck out.

So now that I am mostly recovered, I'm coming to the realization that I've lost too much money, time and life fighting against the powerful forces of Nature here on this mountain. I cannot protect my antenna from all these elements. Other things happened to converge at the same time, making the cumulative experience start to take on biblical proportions for me. I considered my options, none of which were good:

• Wait until spring and try to build another J-pole antenna, only to have it destroyed again, inevitably
• Put up several beam antennas and aim them in different directions
• Put up four omni folded dipoles on a mast to try and emulate the J-pole.

None of these had appeal. Since we didn't have cable service, the RF field intensity in the immediate proximity beneath the broadcast antenna had to be kept low, so as not to overload the TV front end. Only the J-pole had a sharp enough E-plane pattern to throw all the signal over the TV antenna, leaving the field pretty moderate close in. The other antennas produce a strong field that touches the ground immediately (destroying the TV front end, and wasting much power locally, instead of sending it toward the distance).

There are more reasons, some of them related to finances, and others far deeper, like the realization that this project was running my life and I was not financially sound, nor secure in a career. As I find myself now on the precipice of losing my home due to a long-standing deteriorating situation, I have found myself reevaluating my priorities in life. I will have to give up the hobby I adore so much, at least for a very long time. So this may be the end of a legacy - a legacy that brought a touch of real quality to our corner of the world. I will remember these months fondly, and always adore the mutual respect we shared with our licensed neighbors in the area. I think The Anime Music Network was pretty unique among free radio stations. I may never know how many dedicated listeners are now missing those ethereal sounds of oriental music with a western touch. But I know that out of several million homes covered, we certainly had some. Maybe someday again, possibly through a different technology, this station will reappear, perhaps in a new form. Meanwhile, I've many a personal task to complete, taking a new direction in life -a radical change lies ahead for me.

And so I leave this page behind as a legacy, so that others can choose the best parts to use for their hobbies and endeavors. Use them wisely, use them in good faith.

Setting Up Your Own FM Station: A How To Guide

... See Photos of an Excellent High-Gain FM Antenna