Offshore Radio

aka Pirate Radio is something that have fascinated me since my early teenages. It is also one of the major operators that made the Brittish R&R and pop-music explosion possible from early 1964.
This issue has got new actuality recently when both Pete and Roger of The Who both have given credit to Radio London and Radio Caroline for their immediate success in recent interviews.

Radio in Europe was something else than radio in the US back then, in most countries there was "public radio" only operated by governement owned monopoly and there was not much space for popular music programs and/or teenager oriented programs.
Commercial radio was not allowed except in Luxembourg but Radio Luxembourg was more or less in the hands of some few big record labels and did not provide much room for young emerging artists.
One method to overcome this was to launch a transmitter on international waters and that was what happened in the spring 1964 when Ronan O´Rahilly launched Radio Caroline.
You can read about my adventures on the airwaves in the mid-sixties here:
http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/hansa/hansqsl.html

If you Google using search phrases as "Offshore Radio", "Radio Caroline", "Radio Nord", "Radio Veronica", "Radio London" etc. you will find a lot of information.
Hans Knot in the Netherlands is THE information source:
http://www.hansknot.com
another good source is Martin van der Vens "Offshore Radio":
http://www.offshoreradio.de

HTPC anyone?

We recently bought a digital-TV set-top box (DVB-C) with a built-in harddisk-drive so one can record programs or time-shift programs when needed.
Now when there is streaming-TV of all kind out there on the web it would be nice to integrate that also into one and the same gadget along with DVD-player-burner. Normal web-surfing in the sofa on the 37" screen would be nice also when there is nothing on the telly.
I decided a while ago that I will try to build my own multimedia-PC and also integrate Digital-TV into the same.
My first preference is low power consumption so it will be built around stuff commonly used in Lap-Tops, my second preference is cheap.
Cheap and laptop components don't really fit together so I must search auction-sites for used or refurbished stuff. That takes a lot of time, trying to get MoBos and CPU:s to a low price.
Then one should find a reliable PCI-card for cable-TV reception here in Europe. The market seems to be small and there isn't much (cheap) stuff around on web-auctions.
But when I've gathered the components I will start to build this fancy apparatus. :)

Anyone out there with experiences from such a project?