His call letters were WTRA, for the Tenants’ Rights Association he was a part of. They seized Kantako’s antenna and transmitters, which he used to broadcast in the John Jay Homes housing complex where he lived. That’s when police and the FCC raided the home of activist-turned- broadcaster Mbanna Kantako in Springfield. You have to go back more than 20 years to get to a really big pirate radio case here. In the last decade, the feds have sent just one cease-and-desist letter in the state, to a pirate station broadcasting in suburban Lisle. It’s been a long time since the FCC shut anyone down in Illinois. Bill said he picked a spot on the dial where there’s room 87.9 FM is licensed to Olivet Nazarene College in Kankakee, and Chicago’s North Side is out of the college’s guaranteed range. The feds consider illegal radio transmissions a serious crime – they say pirate radio can interfere with public safety frequencies and legit stations - and they recently upped the fine for illegally broadcasting to $2 million. I thought that was pretty cool.”īill is a little shocked the FCC hasn’t shut down Audio Noir. Now walk 20 feet.’ And after a while they actually ended up dispersing, so it was a kind of social experiment. “They started out in one spot, and then they were told, ‘OK, walk 40 feet ahead, turn left.
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“ had a series of instructions on cassette tape that I played into this transmitter,” he remembers. He’s helped artists use radio in their work - he once broadcast from the roof of the Hyde Park Art Center. Later, in college at Madison, Bill helped found WORT. That pirate station attracted the Federal Communications Commission to his parents’ home.
The military recruiters wanted to come to my high school, and there were a number of protests that were not covered by any media, but we talked about them,” said Bill. He had an AM pirate station in high school in Milwaukee during “the Vietnam anti-war days. This is not Bill’s first experience broadcasting illegally. He builds speakers and amplifiers on the side wire and transistors are sorted into neatly labeled plastic drawers. The enclosed porch where he has his workshop looks like a mini Radio Shack. “I guess I do enjoy the bad-boy nerd, broadcasting illegally,” he admitted.īill said his station is “halfway between a hobby and a side hustle” listeners send donations to pay for the servers and keep the audio drama coming. “And I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got nothing else to do with this stuff- I’ll transmit this.’
“I already had equipment,” said Bill, 68. Why take the extra step of illegally broadcasting the same content out to the immediate neighborhood? We’re talking about an audio engineer here, folks. Listenership on the online station peaks around 3 a.m., which confirms for Bill he’s not the only one using this to get to sleep. In 2006, he started an internet station,, which streams a 2,119-track playlist on repeat 761 hours in all, about a month of 24-hour-a-day audio drama. He decided if listening to this stuff could help him, maybe it could help others. He has insomnia, and the plot lines from Dragnet and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar help him fall asleep. So it gets out a little ways, but not that far.”īill got into noir not because it’s gripping radio, but rather because it’s not. “And they used to listen at Lane Tech somewhere on an upper floor. “People on the lakefront up in the high rises can hear it,” said Bill. He asked us not to use his last name for fear of “FCC prison.” And there’s Bill, a retired computer and audio engineer who’s been operating this illegal station for some 15 years. There’s a spindly antenna on the roof, visible mainly from the alley, and a 50-watt transmitter in the upstairs apartment. It’s all broadcast illegally out of a nondescript two-flat on a residential block. There are no call letters or DJs, just “audio noir” floating out over a two-square-mile sweet spot on Chicago’s North Side. On tap? Old timey, crime-thriller radio dramas, complete with sleuthy melodramatic music, damsels in distress and classic radio sound effects – footsteps, doors slamming, the gun going off. If you’re driving through the greater Ravenswood area and tune your radio dial to 87.9 FM, you might just enter a sort of radio twilight zone. To stay up to date on the stories that matter. WBEZ brings you unbiased news and information.
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