h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A week ago Poets, our analog TV officially became obsolete, so I do understand with your efforts to save analog radio.

Here in the states we have a pretty weird scene where nearly all radio is owned by giant companies, possibly even one giant company, and nearly all radio stations are unmanned (no humans, only relays). This makes for some fairly stupid news bulletins. It also makes for amazingly uninformative emergency warnings that would be humorous if only the emergency wasn't real.

Nonetheless I wonder, in a digital radio environment, what happens to the portion of bandwidth formerly allowed to analog? Is it auctioned off to cell phone companies? Can individual low-powered broadcasters (sometimes erroneously called pirate radio) continue to broadcast?


HN

There's a big difference between TV usage, which is mostly static, and radio usage, which is mostly mobile. Digital radios have to have the equivalent of a computer inside, and that *eats* battery power. Analogue radio, on the other hand, (at least AM) requires no power at all - it's called a "crystal set", and it was the introduction to electronics for small boys for the last 100 years or so.

I'm thoroughly pissed off by the whole idea.

As for "pirate radio", here in the UK it took us twenty years to make radio controlled toys legal, and another twenty for low-powered FM transmitters that'll carry a signal from your iPod to your car radio. Technically, we still need a licence for a CB radio. (And we only get to use FM CB - AM, as used in the US, is illegal...)

Yeah, we're sort of being herded that direction too:

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-962671.html

and I hope that future boys and girls will still be able to get these little lovelies:

http://www.peeblesoriginals.com/crystal-kits.html

HN

Yup. They're going to have to retitle the next edition of that book "Radios that used to work for free"...

Did you notice that that cNet article is over 7 years old...?

Sorry. *Almost* 7 years old. I thought it was published in February, but it was from October 2002.

Well, here's an even older article, this one on radio:
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/02.01.96/radio-9605.html

Nothing much has changed in the dozen intervening years, except for the straight-to-podcast nature of much of the programming. Just visit the station's website, point-click-download.

But what you are saying, yes, absolutely. I can't build any of the components with everything in my garage. My computer, my iPod, all from factories overseas.

Slight: I hate the term radio because it is not. It's merely free speech, free expression, supposedly protected under the Constitution. What the mega-corps did to grab the spectrum, now that's piracy.