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Bruce Esquibel[_2_]

wrote:

Are such radios sold in the USA via the internet? Is the station really
"fixed"? Someone gave my uncle a radio which is said to have a special
"chip" that receives a Greek radio station. He mentioned to me that years ago
he had another one that suddenly switched to a Philipine station and he gave
it to a Filipino colleague. Amazon and Alibaba have such Metrosonix radios
but not station specific, but also do not seem to allow being sold in the
USA. THe search terms I used were SCA FM radio.

I'd be kind of suprised if any of those stations were still active.

Here in Chicago, it was probably the early 90's that was the height of
popularity, I think there were 2 greek stations, one polish and 3 or 4
others that were probably used for pocket pagers (normally silent except for
bursts of tones or a data carrier).

The basic idea was the "broadcaster" would get the station from overseas
(probably via a C-Band dish/receiver) and rebroadcast it on someones sca
channel (an ordinary FM station set up for it). They would then rent the
modified radio for like $5 a month or sell you it with a "lifetime"
subscription for $100 or around there.

Usually the radios, which were cheap garbage imports, were fixed to the
primary channel by crazy glueing the tuning shaft or otherwise disabling the
tuner. The boards were just simple 4 wire things, power, ground, detector in
and audio out. Since they were meant as a dedicated service, there wasn't
any reason to make the radio work both ways, normal and special. These
were all handmade and varied quite a bit, depending on what make/models the
local wholesale importers had.

The adapters were numerous, the most basic/simple one used a PLL chip
(either NE565 or NE566, maybe) and off the shelf resistors and capacitors.
They usually worked well enough but had problems with leakage from the main
carrier. There was another design, I want to say MC1340 as the centerpeice
which had the best performance (dead quiet) but required custom rf coils and
oddball capacitors, still simple to build but upped the cost quite a bit.

In any case the boards were probably not even 2"x2" and were easily tucked
in somewhere, usually the battery holder (4xC or D cells).

As far as legality of them, although I don't think anyone considered them a
crime to own, you couldn't open up a cottage industry by building them and
selling them. There was no reason to stop anyone from making one, but they
fell into that gray area where selling one was in some violation of FCC
rules and regs for 3rd party interception of a private (or intended private)
broadcast.

The thing is, once the internet and access to it became the norm (early
2000's), I really don't think those rebroadcasters could survive. On nearly
any platform or device there is usually one or two applications available
for listening to radio stations from aroound the world, if not dozens of
websites that retransmit them.

I'd guess there are plenty of 80+ year old grandmothers from the old country
who can work turning on and off a radio rather than firing up a laptop but I
doubt there is enough to make any money off them.

-bruce