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Radio News: Longtime pirate gets AM license

May 28, 2017 11:45 pm
Radio Caroline, perhaps the world's most famous pirate radio operator, has been granted an AM license from Ofcom, the British agency that regulates the airwaves. It was 50 years ago when the British Parliament passed the 1967 Marine Broadcasting Offences Act after Radio Caroline skirted UK regulations by broadcasting from a boat. Peter Moore, who runs Radio Caroline, said the station plans to broadcast from the ship the MV Ross Revenge on the River Blackwater in Essex, with a signal covering Suffolk and northern parts of Essex. “It’s our intention to broadcast to the same people we used to when we had the ships off the Essex coast,” Moore said. “It will be the same sort of service they would have heard in the past delivered in the same way and presented in many cases by the same people as before.... It’s like a living time capsule.” Radio Caroline began to play pop music the BBC would not in 1964. The station has been immortalized in the film "Pirate Radio" with Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Radio Caroline continued to broadcast until the Ross Revenge was shipwrecked off the Kent coast in 1991, according to the Sunday Post.