Everybody's a Pirate in Their Car! (Feb 16, 2006)

That is...if you use a device that allows you to listen to your music through your car radio...but you don't have an auxiliary input jack for your iPod or other MP3 playing device.

You have a small FM transmitter that does the job for you. Just plug the FM transmitter into your cigarette lighter jack, plug the transmitter into the speaker out of the music playing device, select an open FM channel, and viola! Instant micro pirate.

How can this be?

In San Diego, there are about almost dozen places on the FM dial where there is an open slot for your FM transmitter to transmit your music through. You can select from 89.1, 92.9, 93.7, 96.1, 96.9, 98.5, 103.3, 104.1, 104.9, 106.1, and 106.9 where you can transmit your music through without receiving adjacent channel interference from most of the nearby local channels and receiving almost no co-channel interference from the local broadcasters.

Most of the portable FM broadcast devices that I see in Fry's, Best Buy, and other places can transmit your music about the length of three houses, or 100 feet, but some of the geeks have managed to tweak with the devices to make their signals travel further than they are legally allowed to broadcast.

In my car radio, I have most of the above frequencies programmed in case I drive near a car with an FM transmitter device and I can hear what they are listening to. One person was listening to something like Kanye West or Ja Rule or whoever that rapper was. Another one was listening to Shania Twain...and it was coming from a MAN's truck! One was listening to something that sounded like a Girls Gone Wild video; I even heard the F-word on my car radio! The list goes on and on. Everybody wants to be a radio pirate whether they know it or not!

Some of the iPod listeners are taking it to the broadcasters by advertising their FM transmitter location on their bumper sticker on their car. In New Canaan, Connecticut, Tim Lynch is using his iPod and an FM transmitter to broadcast his own music while commuting in his car. He uses a bumper sticker on the back of his fender that reads "iPod @ 89.1 FM" to let passers-by know how to tune in.

You never know who just might be listening to your iPod. Just be careful what you broadcast.

Lynch decided to put it to the test when he put on some early R-Rated Chris Rock comedy on his iPod and broadcast it through his iPod. He called up somebody on his cell phone who was driving two cars behind him and told him to tune in to 89.1 FM. "You're not going to believe this, but somebody up here is broadcasting swear words! Tune to 89.1FM." He tunes in and looked at the expression of his friend two cars behind him in his rear view mirror. "It was a big joke for a few minutes," he says.

The iPod pirate revolution could be a culprit that could be taking some of the listenes from the broadcasters during the drive times as people hungry for unpredictable programming are flipping around the dial looking for micro pirates that could be driving alongside them in traffic and hearing what the driver with the iPod is listening to. The progamming is pure shuffle mode, unlike that of Jack-FM or even dfsxradio.com. One minute, you're listening to Mariah Carey, the next minute, you're listening to a download of an unsigned punker from myspace.com, the next minute, something like a podcast from NPR.

Most of the iPod listeners just don't know that they're wielding more power than they think they are. They're not just bypassing the likes of DSC and Jeff and Jer to listen to music that they like on their iPods, they're also broadcasting it to other commuters who may be also tuning in to what they are listening to.

Some geeks are tinkering with the power of the iPod transmitter to boost it enough to override someone else's micro FM transmitter and instead of listening to Busta Rhymes, you get Mel Torme.

Just be careful that the FCC agents don't pull you over for broadcasting Howard Stern relayed from Sirius and through your micro FM broadcaster with its power boosted strong enough to cover the square mile area of Chula Vista.