Comment by saul_goodman

Sadly the system is incentivized to kill off "harmless pirates", especially if they are doing something interesting. It's always going to be in the best interest of commercial broadcast operators to lodge complaints against pirates competing in their band. If you are in the business of selling advertisements on any band of radio (AM/FM/TV/etc), you don't want listeners possibly soaking up air time from anyone else when it costs you money to run your station. So the deck is always stacked against pirates in common broadcast bands. On the other hand, the shortwave broadcast band has much less locality so it's easier to do interesting things on those bands. But of course there's only a fraction of people who actually listen to shortwave broadcast bands, at least in the US.