Do you know anything about Radio? I'm interested in starting a small station that requires no regulation due to small size.
I am slightly into radio. I do some SDR work and Iām planning on getting a Ham license soon. I also have a couple old books on radio tech lying around, plus I uh, did an engineering degree including the section on radio antennas and signal processing, which really should have been what I opened with.
If youāre looking to do small-scale broadcasting you probably want AM radio, since thatās the usual domain of beginner hobbyists.
You canāt /really/ run a normal radio station without a license. Depending on where you live there are various bands (ranges of frequency) where anyone is allowed to broadcast whatever they want (e.g. Private Mobile Radio 446MHz in Europe, Family Radio Service 466MHz in the USA, KDR 444MHz in Sweden and Norway, etc.) but these bands arenāt really suitable for conventional radio broadcasting. AM radio traditionally broadcasts on the sub 1MHz band, and FM radio is around 80-100MHz
You could try broadcasting in those public use bands, but a) these bands are often strictly regulated in other ways (usually you canāt build your own transmitter) and you might still get a visit from the radio cops and b) you canāt pick that up with an off-the-shelf consumer music radio, which I guess is probably what you want.
Now I am not a radio lawyer and so this is not me telling you to do it, but if you broadcast low-power AM and you make sure itās only detectable for a couple hundred meters around you, the chances that anyone will call the radio cops on you are, low, to say the least. It depends on where you live and whether anyone is monitoring the airwaves for interference. Broadcasting at higher power obviously comes with more risk. If the Ham radio club is down the road from you they will notice an unlicensed broadcast in a matter of days.
There are provisions in many countries for things like community radio, current carrier radio, college radio which operates on small areas and require little or no licensing. You probably canāt get this, since you likely arenāt a college.
Building your own AM radio station is a fun little exercise, I made a (terrible) one in high school, and if you only run it for a short period of time you really wonāt get in any trouble. If you look up āhomemade AM radio transmitterā on the web youāll find dozens of different circuits and you can probably track down one that you can build. I personally recommend choppers because theyāre very easy to build and tune, but analogue modulated radio with a transformer is also a decent call.
AM radio is quite easy to make, and to understand: you donāt need finely tuned antennas or perfect filters because itās very low frequency relative to modern high end radio technology. AM radio is so simple that a lot of poorly designed electronics does it by accident. Itās a well known Hacker Trick that a two-stroke motorcycleās spark plugs can jam all AM radio for a few hundred meters at least. I can do a post about AM radio theory and the chopper AM radio system, but this post is already getting long.
You probably wonāt want to run this station more than a few hours a day every couple days, so itās not like, a sustainable task, but if youāre interested in radio itās a good start.
My advice if you want to pursue this is a) contact your local Ham radio association. Many of them would be thrilled to hear that someone is interested in radio, and they might be able to help you either get set up with a Ham license. Getting Ham licensed involves studying some basic radio theory, most clubs will do lectures and exam prep for a small fee. You can also b) try contacting a community radio station near you. Radio license rules are wildly different all over the world, so I canāt give halfway reliable legal advice unless I knew where you lived and did some research. A community radio station can probably tell you what is and isnāt allowed if you intend to do long-term broadcasting.
