You're listening to New York City's Pirates of the Air on the BBC World Service.

I'm David Goring.

As the workday winds down, I sit at my listening post in Flatbush Brooklyn,

tuning into a clandestine world of unlicensed

radio stations, a cacophonous Sonic Wonder of the City.

As listeners begin to arrive home, dozens of secret transmitters switch on from rooftops and immigrant enclaves.

These stations are often called pirates for their practice of

commandeering and already licensed frequency. Inside the makeshift

security of cramped sheds and broom closets, with perhaps an old metal

bucket as an early warning system, Pirate radio operators tinker behind the scenes.

These rogue stations are hidden away from nosy neighbors and more crucially from enforcement agents working for the Federal Communications Commission, the dreaded FCC.

They're trying to find pirate stations and shut them down.

Thanks to a kind of safety in numbers, the stations of they detection and take to the air.

Blankening their neighborhoods with the sounds of ancestral lands, blending with the new home. Loud and intensely local, a homegrown movement of illegal radio stations thrives.

Gotta say good evening, good afternoon, going out to all the listeners all over if you're driving around enjoying the music. New York City's

City's pirates are an analog anomaly.

The radio waves drifting a quarter century deep into the digital age.

Drawn from the culture of the street, vivid soundscapes

emerge from tangled clouds of invisible signals,

nurturing immigrant communities struggling for a foothold. Fire, like a fire, journal sympathy, oh no, volume rate of our survivor, survivor, survivor, survivor. Survivor

One two, Spice Band Pass, ain't you, hey, I'm gonna, hey, I'm gonna,

hey, I'm gonna tell it to you yes

...