My pal Shawn Granton will be in town this coming week, and he's bringing some great videos documenting Portland, Oregon's thriving bicycle scene. Microcosm publishing describes them thusly:
"If you've been hearing a lot about all of the crazy bicycle stuff in Portland but didn't really know what was going on, this is a good introduction to it. Many of the facets of the Portland alternative bike community are represented here including ZooBomb, Bike Polo, Chunk 666, bike hauling and transportation, and some more creative artistic things (like the bicycle audio project). The collection leaves you with a feeling that you could not only go out and ride a bike but also make a short film about it!"Shawn will be a guest on Friday's radioshow, where he'll talk more about the videos and Portland's thriving DIY scene.
It all goes down at a special lunchtime showing, noon at Boardman's Art Theater in downtown Champaign (IL). The showing is free (with a suggested donation), and the Theater has yummy eats available for lunch.
It's obligatory for a blogger to occasionally have to apologize for a somewhat unscheduled absence. Here's mine.
I got married a little more than a week ago, and the commensurate hubub and family entertaining that happened wiped me out, and has meant that I've neglected the blog until the front page was blank (note to self: fix that damn MT template!).
So, I'm back, though with nothing in particular to report. The radio show was not so neglected -- a weekly timeslot will do that to you. So if you haven't already, check out the last two editions,including part 2 of my interview with Pacifica reporter Aaron Glantz, and a discussion with my pal John Anderson about microradio during recent times of crisis.
The nice folks at Odeo have chosen the mediageek radioshow as a featured podcast this week. I am grateful, and as this brings in more subscribers to the feed, I hope all the new listeners enjoy the program.
As always, if you have any suggestions for things to cover or do a piece on the show, please let me know.
Odeo, the web-based popcasting app, portal and site, now has its beta open to the public to help you create, download and listen to podcasts.
Last Friday's radioshow is already on-line and available on the radioshow page, or at Odeo which allows you to listen on-line in addition to downloading it.
It was a fun show, as it usually is when my pal John from DIYmedia.net joins me to talk pirate radio. But you'll have to listen to know exactly how pirate radio in South Florida is connected to driving a tractor trailer at 100 MPH while smoking a bong.
My pal John from DIYmedia will be my guest to talk about recent activity in unlicensed micropower radio, including the shutdowns of radio free brattleboro and Berkeley Liberation Radio.
We'll also hear a phone interview I did last night from a former microbroadcaster in South Florida who fills us in on the unique situation of the pirate radio scene there, where two broadcasters were arrested recently under Florida's new anti-pirate law.
The radioshow airs live on community radio WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign, IL Fridays at 5:30 and Tuesdays at 11:30 AM on Radio Free Moscow 92.5 FM in Moscow, ID. You can listen to MP3s or subscribe to the Podcast to listen on-line. This Friday's program will be posted by Monday at 6 PM CDT.
I've dutifully upgraded by copy of iTunes to 4.9 and was happy to find that the mediageek radioshow podcast is available for free subscription through the iTunes Music Store. Click this link to get it.
I don't have an iPod and during this time of year I don't walk around with a walkman much, since I bike to work. So the mp3 player syncing feature isn't too useful for me. But I do like having podcasts integrated into my iTunes, since that's the app I use for listening to my mp3 collection. I've already subscribed to a pile of podcasts, made all the more convenient for me because I work in a basement that acts like an RF filter which no radio signals can penetrate.
Odeo is a new podcasting web app that provides tools for producing, distributing and downloading podcast audio. Rabble from anarchogeek is one of the developers and he added the mediageek radioshow podcast to Odeo's catalog. Invites to the beta of Odeo have been sent out to 12,700 people.
Rabble sent me one a number of weeks ago, and I've finally logged in and claimed the mediageek podcast channel, and played around with the sytem a bit.
What I like about Odeo so far is that it takes a bunch of tools and integrates them. At the moment I don't think I'll be using their production tool, since mediageek is produced as a weekly broadcast radio show.
However, the podcast channel subscription and download integration is nice, as is the ability to just listen to feeds right in your browser if you prefer. Unfortunately, the in-browser listening features are limited to play and pause -- it would be nice to be able to mark where you left off if you have to stop listening, and to be able to rewind and fast-forward.
So, if you're one of the 12k+ peeps with an Odeo invite, go ahead and subscribe to the mediageek radioshow channel.
Last night I assembled and stapled mediageek zine #3, just in time to haul it out to the AMC today. I'm pretty happy with it, and it features the new mediageek logo, that you can see up on top of the homepage.
Articles include an analysis of the Christian translator scandal by John Anderson, a follow-up examination of cheap plastic cameras and a review of the BBS Documentary.
I'll get the zine page updated when I get back, including adding a PayPal link for ordering the zines on-line.
Meanwhile, I'll be blogging from the AMC, where I hear tell there will be decent 'net access.
On this Friday's mediageek radioshow, I'll be talking to Jason Scott of Textfiles.com, whose recently completed BBS Documentary is now shipping. We'll talk about how he put this 3-DVD project together, and why he chose to release the DVDs without copy protection and under a Creative Commons share-alike license.
The radioshow airs Fridays at 5:30 PM on community radio WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign, IL, and Tuesdays at 11 AM on KRFP 92.5 FM, Moscow, ID. The show is available for download and podcast each week by 6 PM Monday.
One caveat for WEFT listeners this week: WEFT's transmitter was damaged by a storm earlier in the week and is currently off air. There is a good chance that the station will not be back on by airtime on Friday. However, whether the show airs on Friday or not, the program will be uploaded on Monday and you'll hear it on KRFP if you live in the Moscow area.
I'm glad to announce that the mediageek radioshow has now gone global, with Flirt FM 105.6 in Galway, Ireland picking up the show to air during its Kaleidoscope slot on Wednesdays from 12:30 - 13:00.
My friend and fellow ICR student Andrew O'Baoill is a founder and alumnus of the station, and it appears that folks at the station found mediageek because Andrew had been a guest some months back to discuss community radio in Ireland.
Andrew has promised to help out by feeding me some media news from Ireland and elsewhere in the EU.
This brings the total number of licensed mediageek affiliates to three. The unlicensed affiliates are a little harder to count, due to the fact that their scheduled can be more erratic -- but they're just as welcome.
Contact me if your local station might be interested in airing the program.
As you may know, this past weekend I was in St. Louis at the 2nd National Conference on Media Reform. I've got a lot of audio and thoughts, and will post much of it here in the coming days (and at the BeTheMediaBlog, which has lots of other people's thoughts, too).
Drew and I called in to WEFT Friday to do the radioshow live via phone and report our impressions of the first day of the conference. There's also a couple of audio clips from Naomi Klein's and Amy Goodman's appearance in Urbana earlier in the week.
The show is ready for download now. You can expect more about the conference, including some selected conference audio, in the coming weeks.
I just finished an interview about an hour ago with Shawn Ewald, the programmer and one of the volunteers behind the A-Infos Radio Project, which has been archiving and serving up radically independent radio content for an amazing nine years.
Shawn just opened up the source code for the software behind the Project, which I hope will lead to more indy programmers adding their talents to it.
The interview will air on this Friday's radioshow, 5:30 PM on Community Radio WEFT 90.1 FM, archived here (and probably here and there) thereafter.
I was trying to figure out why this blog keeps getting referrals from people searching for some combination of "Rush Limbaugh" and "blowjob." First, why would someone search for that disturbing mental imagine? And, second, why does Google direct them here?
Somehow the news passed by me, but apparently ol' Rushie used the BJ-word on his show April 12, as part of a bizarre tirade about Al Gore's new TV network.
Folks are getting directed to mediageek in their fruitless search more Limbaugh oral sex information because a commenter used the word "blow job" in responding to a post I made back in Oct. 2003 about Rush's prescription drug problems.
What I don't understand is why don't these searchers just use Google News for the most up-to-the-minute Limbaugh fellatio bulletins?
Work work has been consuming most of my energies this week, leaving me with little brain power left to ponder media. Lucky for me, the work is interesting. I'm coordinating a live mulit-camera video webcast out of a campus theater that has shit-ass networking. I think it will work, but it's taken lots of thinking and experimenting.
As a result of this webcast, I won't even be on the first mediageek radioshow of the WEFT pledge drive. Drew will be filling in capably with guests Robert McChesney and John Anderson. With guests like that, I have no fears. Bob, especially, is a pledge drive monster. There are very few people in the noncommercial radio world who like pledge drives, and even fewer who are good at the pitching and spieling. Bob is one of them, consitently bringing his local public radio program Media Matters to the top of the pledge drive earners at its home station.
I'm just sorry I'm going to have to miss being there.
By the way, if you listen to the show at all, either on the radio or on-line, PLEASE make a pledge to keep WEFT on the air. Without WEFT there would be no mediageek... period! WEFT was the impetus and incubator for the program and blog, and without finding WEFT, I'm not sure I would have found this route.
You do have to call in, but WEFT does take checks and credit cards. The number is 217-359-9338 -- and please do tell them that you were sent by mediageek. Thanks in advance!
The last two mediageek radio shows are both on-line and definitely worth a listen if you've been following the FM translator trafficking scandal, or interested in free radio and TV.
My pal John Anderson was our guest on the show this past Friday again, since he's been doing a lot of the digging into Calvary Chapel, Edgewater Broadcasting, their various associates/aliases and the exchange of FM translator station licenses.
The program is now posted for download, streaming and podcasting.
On the program, I neglected to mention that its the phenomenally thorough research of REC Networks that tipped John and I to what they call the "translator invasion." I apologize for the oversight.
For those of you who haven't been reading each post on this scandal, here's a quick compendium on recent posts from DIYmedia.net and mediageek:
- DIYmedia - Moneychangers In the Temple
- DIYmedia - God Squads Fall From Grace
- DIYmedia - Religious Broadcasting As Franchise Operation
- mediageek - Something Fishy in Right-Wing-Christian-Translator-land, Grabbing Spectrum away from LPFM, Maybe Profiting from the Venture?
- mediageek - Calvary Chapel, LPFM and Plausible Deniability
- mediageek - Calvary Chapel: The Decentralized Christian Clear Channel
On the Feb. 11 edition of the radioshow, we featured an interview with virtual reality programmer Dave Zielinski. Willam Rogers has posted a response to the interview on his blog Teleonomy:
The interview stuck too closely to the mode of "virtual reality" (VR) as an immersive and/or responsive sensory experience, specifically directed at human eyes and ears. This was especially confusing because, as they pointed out repeatedly during the interview, this old conception of virtual reality is long-since dead.
In case you don't check the radioshow page every week, here's the last few shows you might have missed. Remember, they're all available for download in low bitrate and high bitrate MP3 and ogg vorbis. There's also a podcast feed.
mediageek 1-28-05: Former Fox TV Reporters Challenge Tampa Station License
We talk to investigative reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. They were fired from FOX TV 13 in Tampa, FL for blowing the whistle on the station, which tried to bury and change facts on a story on bovine growth hormone (BGH) after being contacted by Monsanto.Akre and Wilson are challening the station's license with the FCC, which is up for renewal. They say the station aired known lies about BGH, and therefore failed to act in the public interest.
We also discuss the latest news from the FCC about the departure of Media Bureau Chief Ken Ferree and the Commission's decision not to challenge the Third Circuit Court decision striking down its revised media ownership rules.
mediageek 1-21-05: Powell to Leave FCC & the 5th Birthday Party for Low-Power FM
We discuss the news of FCC Chairman Powell's decision to leave the FCC. Then we talk to Hannah Sassaman from the Prometheus Radio Project about the upcoming celebration at the FCC of LPFM's 5th birthday.mediageek 1-14-05: The 8th Annual Homelessness Marathon
We talk with Karen D'Andrea, producer for the 8th Annual Homelessness Marathon, which airs Feb. 14 - 15.
Based on a number of comments from folks who download the radioshow as a podcast, I've made a few changes:
Some of you may have noticed that mediageek was out Thursday through Monday. This was the result of the commercial DSL line that feeds the mediageek server being cut abruptly. Mediageek is hosted on a community server that got DSL from a local ISP, which is basically a reseller of SBC DSL.
The local ISP notified our sysadmin, Zach, just about 10 days ago that the DSL service was going away, but without giving a firm date. Zach tried to negotiate with the ISP, even offering to buy a T1, but got very little response. So when service went down abruptly early last Thursday, he was prepared, but not quite ready.
Thanks to the generosity of a local tech firm, the server is back connected to the internet while we wait for new service to be installed by MacLeod USA.
Other websites hosted on the server, like the U-C IMC, were back on-line Friday. Mediageek took longer because my domain registration is with a different company that was on holiday until today.
Big thanks go to Zach for getting the server back on the 'net within 12 hours. He has been the tireless sysadmin and host of the U-C IMC website since inception, and mediageek for the last 2 years, and has kept it going through hack attacks, website spam, and crazy service outages. It's dedicated geeks like Zach who keep Indymedia and independent websites running, and they deserve our continuing gratitude.
In about half an hour Drew and I will be calling over to England to interview Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men, who recently pulled off a brilliant prank wherein they impersonated Dow Chemical representatives to the BBC, telling the network that Dow would be taking responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster 20 years ago.
I saw the eponymously titled documentary on their exploits a few weeks ago and enjoyed it immensely. It isn't nearly as brilliant as director Chris Smith's best film, American Movie, but is well paced and snappy enough to wring maximum effect from the pranks it documents. It inspired me to think more seriously about commiting my own acts of "identity correction."
Last night I had the opportunity to interview Leigh Robartes, who is one of the founders of Radio Free Moscow KRFP, in Moscow, ID. KRFP is one of the three stations that currently airs the mediageek radioshow. We talked about how the station got on the air and the media scene in the Moscow area. Leigh was one of the first strikers against Pacifica who helped form Free Speech Radio News in the late 90s, and is an acute observer of independent radio.
Even though there are tens of new LFPM stations going on the air around the country, I think it's very instructive to hear from individual stations and understand why they bothered to get LPFM licenses and hear some of the creative ways they have of running and funding stations. I hope hearing these stories will act as incentive for other people to start their own stations.
About 70 - 100 people attended a protest against Champaign, IL Sinclair station WICD on Saturday, Oct. 23. Amongst the protestors' complaints were Sinclair's threat of running a one-sided anti-Kerry documentary in prime time and the company's "The Point" right-wing commentary that is appended to the local news without an opportunity for an opposing viewpoint. Drew and I were there with minidisc recorder and microphone so we can bring you a report on the radioshow this Friday.
We'll also talk to my pal John Anderson about his new project, Media Minutes, a 5-minute weekly audio newscast about media reform and policy issues.
Listen live Friday at 5:30 PM on community radio WEFT 90.1 in Champaign, IL, tape-delayed on Radio Free Moscow, ID, KRFP 92.5 FM on Tuesday at 11 AM.
If you're not near one of these fine stations, listen on-line here -- the show is posted by 5 PM CST on Mondays.
I'm happy to announce that the mediageek radioshow can now be heard on the airwaves outside of Champaign-Urbana, IL. The program has recently been picked up by two new legal LPFM stations: Radio Free Moscow KRFP, 92.5 FM, Moscow ID and KQRP 106.1 FM, Salida, CA. mediageek airs Tuesdays at 11 AM on KRFP, and I don't know the time it airs on KQRP.
Both of these stations are pretty freshly on the the air, and I really appreciate the opportunity to reach some new listeners who might not otherwise hear of the program in the first place.
Leigh Robartes at KRFP really got the ball rolling on this, contacting me a couple of months before the station went on the air. He thought the show didn't really need to change, in that the Champaign-Urbana specific information would still be of some interest to listeners in Moscow.
I agree, but have chosen to give the Champaign-Urbana local stuff a bit more context, so that the issues are more generalizable and seem less parochial. I've also edited out our pledge drive pitches, since that's really not particular interesting to anyone listening to another station.
Also, I'm trying to learn more about the media scenes in Moscow and Salida, since I think that's important information for those cities, and it's important for Champaign-Urbana listeners to get some perspective on how issues of ownership play out in other cities that aren't attached to a metroplex.
Leigh has also agreed to come on mediageek in the near future to talk about Moscow and KRFP. I hope that perhaps we can integrate something like a "scene report" every so often from the cities where the show airs.
It would be great to get mediageek onto other radio stations, especially community stations (be they full-power, low-power or micropower/pirate) that don't already run any programming that addresses independent media issues. If you think your local station should consider playing mediageek, or your affiliated with a station, please let me know. It's free for non-commercial stations -- just download and play.
In order to lighten the load on the server that hosts mediageek.org, I was using Archive.org's Freecache service to cache the 64 kbps mp3 and ogg archives of the radioshow. Unfortunately, Freecache died without any real notice, putting these archives off-line, and I didn't figure it out until today.
Luckily, it's an easy problem to solve, and all the affected archives are back on-line now.
Yesterday's radioshow is now on-line for listening and downloading. It features audio from the press conference along with an interview with Nicole Lamers, a volunteer with VEYA, the organization sponsoring the Citizen Watch initiative documenting Champaign police conduct.
We also preview Monday's meeting of the Urbana Public TV commission where they will be discussing community efforts to air the news program Democracy Now, and possibly also discussing VEYA's Citizen Watch documentary, which was confiscated from UPTV by Urbana Police, and then turned over to Champaign Police.
On today's mediageek radioshow, we'll talk to Sarah from the A-Noise collective, which provided 24-hour web-radio coverage of the RNC protests for six days straight. We'll also hear the story of one Urbana-Champaign IMC reporter who was arrested and detained at the now infamout Pier 57 facility.
The radioshow airs Fridays at 5:30 PM on Community Radio WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign, IL. It's archived here in mp3 and ogg vorbis for on-line listening.
Last Friday's radioshow featured a fun interview with Greg Boozell, an articulate guest, and the technical director for the Chicago Access Network and a member of the Urbana Public TV Commission.
It's now on-line for listening and download at the radioshow page.
Mark you calendars, I'm trying to post show topics ahead of time! On this forthcoming Friday's edition of the mediageek radioshow, we'll be talking to Greg Boozell, who is a member of the Urbana Public TV Commission, which oversees public access TV in Champaign-Urbana, and who is also the technology director for Chicago Access Network Television.
We'll be discussing what pubilc access TV, as well as explore some local issues, such as controversy over recent efforts to get Urbana Public TV to air the TV version of Democracy Now, carried by Free Speech TV.
The mediageek radioshow airs live Friday at 5:30 PM on community radio WEFT 90.1 FM, Champaign, IL, and is archived here after it airs.
Last Friday's radio show, featuring an IMC report-back from the DNC, is now on-line at the radioshow page.
NeuFutur puts in the first review for mediageek zine #2. I believe I traded zines with one of the guys behind the NeuFutur zine at the Allied Media Conference last June.
The mediageek radioshow archive is now up to date, including last Friday's program -- so download away!
I want to point out that I am experimenting with using the Internet Archive's FreeCache to help speed up downloading the recent broadcast quality files and some of the more popular programs, like Amy Goodman's talk from April. Please let me know if you have any comments or difficulties with any FreeChached files.
On today's mediageek radioshow we'll air an interview with Sunfrog, a member of the editorial collective at Fifth Estate, a quarterly magazine about anarchist thought and practice.
The mediageek radioshow airs Fridays at 5:30 PM on community radio WEFT FM 90.1 in Champaign, IL. The shows are archived here after airing.
I'm quite behind in getting the mp3/ogg archives up to date, but I hope to rectify that this weekend. I'll post when the archives, and this evening's show, are on line.
Finally updated the basic template for the main page here, along with a new logo, taken from the cover of the new mediageek zine #2 (which now has its own page).
I also cleaned out the blogroll on the right-hand column, pruning out the dead links, the apparently-abandoned sites, or the sites that no longer link here. If I removed your site and it's not as abandoned as I think it is, please let me know.
Also, if you've got a friendly weblog or website that you'd like to exchange links for, drop me a line, too.
It made its debut at the Allied Media Conference, where a lucky 16 or so got their hands on the first copies, and now it's available to everyone: mediageek zine #2.
This new issue contains the following articles:
Zining on the Cheap, by Low Hug Editrix Aj Michel - Chock full of hints and tips for getting your zine put together cheaply but with style and quality.
Lomo Me, Lomo You - I Am not a Photographer - My musings on a pile of cheap plastic cameras from the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, along with ideas for taking pics on the cheap.
Evolution of a Radiogeek - Reflections on my first moments as a boy on the radio, using a Radio Shack kit and spool of wire (preview this article below).
Pirate Radio Across the Nation, by John Anderson of DIYmedia.net - John provides an incredibly comprehensive overview of the unlicensed microbroadcasting scene in the US, region by region. This article alone is worth the cost of the 'zine, because data this rich and organized isn't available anywhere else.
Read Pirate Radio - Collected reviews of books on topic of pirate radio, including reviews of: Pirate Radio Stations, by Andrew Yoder; 40 Watts from Nowhere, by Sue Carpenter; Access to the Airwaves, by Allan H. Weiner; Seizing the Airwaves, edited by Ron Sakolsky and Stephen Dunifer.
mediageek zine #2 is available for $3 post-paid, currently via the mail only. Send well concealed cash or money order to:
Paul Riismandel
P.O. Box 2102
Champaign, IL 61825-2102
I will post the full zine here in electronic form once this printing is sold out. However, given that zine #1 is still not yet sold out, I wouldn't hold my breath. So, send the three clams already.
Evolution of a Radiogeek
by Paul Riismandel
from mediageek zine #2
I was a weird kid, always playing with radios and other electronic devices. I drove my mother crazy many Saturday mornings coming home from garage sales with 20-year-old 25 cent transistor radios and $1 record players that I insisted worked fine, despite controls that crackled loudly every time you touched them and the smell of a dozen musty basements. And that was before I took them apart.
Nevertheless, my parents indulged my electronic curiosity, at least within the limits of their tolerance. In order to stem the tide of half-functioning ancient radios piling up, I suppose, my parents bought me a series of toy electronics kits, also at garage sales.
If you've never seen one of these kits, they're intended to introduce kids to basic electronics, kind of like how chemistry sets introduce kids to making water turn blue and the wonder of mild acids. I don't think kids these days get the same wide variety of toxic and flammable substances that kids in the 60s and 70s did -- what with safety and lawsuit concerns, and not wanting to introduce children to the marvelous power of ammonium nitrate until they're old enough for military service. Of course, I had a chemistry set, too, at some point in my childhood, but, perhaps lucky for some, but unlucky for others, radio would be my bomb.
These electronics kits were usually named something like 1001-in-1 electronic projects. What it actually was composed of was a bunch of basic electronic components, transistors, resistors, relays and the like, mounted to a plastic board. Each component was attached to a little spring that stuck up from the board. The kit came equipped with a pile of wires in different colors corresponding to their length. To make something useful out of this thing you connected wires from one component to another in some particular sequence.
Of course, the key to making anything that actually functioned was in the instruction book, which outlined such cool stuff as burglar alarms and Morse code generators. I'm still not sure what a nine year old kid in his bedroom needs a Morse code generator for, since the kit didn't also include a way to communicate with ships or Soviet spies, but I built it and happily beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeeeped for an afternoon.
I'm pretty sure that by age ten I had made most of the simpler projects in the instructional manuals, but there was one project above all that stimulated my interest -- a radio transmitter. I remember this project being a little more complex than most. Lots more connections and even some fairly precise tuning.
Initially I put off building the transmitter, daunted by the long list of instructions -- I thought it would take days to complete. But I couldn't get the idea of having my own radio transmitter out of my head.
Every since I'd been old enough to work a tape recorder and a record player I had been playing DJ, making tapes of myself emulating the DJs I heard on the great New York AM top 40 stations like WNBC, and the significantly less slick jocks on the few stations local to my mid-Jersey Shore home of Toms River. I even recorded commercials off these stations to insert into my programs to make them sound more like real radio.
I'd torture my little brother, who was about three, by putting a an extension speaker wired to the tape player in his room and calling it "cable radio." Even at his young age, he wasn't buying it -- so my proposed billing rate of 25 cents a week never took hold either.
And, come to think of it, to this day I still haven't made any actual money off of doing radio.
But with this radio transmitter kit built out of bargain-basement surplus electronics, plastic and little wires and springs, I could stop making shows just for myself, and entertain the whole neighborhood. I'd been practicing, so I imagined scores of neighborhood kids listening in and calling me with requests.
I decided that I had to rise to the challenge and build the transmitter, no matter how many afternoons it would take.
Actually, I don't remember it taking all that long to actually assemble the transmitter project. Either I'd become practiced enough at securing little wires into springs with acuity, or my eager anticipation collapsed the passage of time. In any event, once I'd finished basic construction I wasn't quite yet done. I would need a good fresh battery and an antenna.
The instruction manual had very stern warnings that the transmitter was designed to only work with about 3 volts of power, like you'd get from two AA batteries and that the FCC put stiff limits on how big your antenna could be. The antenna was a long piece of wire, but was to be absolutely no longer than 8 feet in total. The way the instructions made it sound, if I decided to get ambitions and tack on another 6 inches of wire, I'd have the federales at my front door in no time.
So I very dutifully followed these instructions and precisely measured 8 feet of thin wire -- well at least as precisely as a ten-year old can do with a plastic ruler. Then I scotch taped the wire to the ceiling of my bedroom, figuring that higher was better, and that using the roof would probably get my kit taken away.
To get sound into the transmitter you used the crystal earphone that also doubled as a microphone. A crystal mic represents the height of 1910 engineering, and so the fidelity was just shy of a Fisher Price walkie-talkie. I connected the mic then the batteries and I was on the air, or so I had to believe.
For proof I turned on one of my best radios and tuned around the AM dial near where I thought I was broadcasting and listened for something. Tapping on the microphone provided enough sound that I could find the signal, and it sounded pretty clear, which it should have, considering the receiver was about eight feet directly below the antenna.
Of course, then, I was faced with a dilemma -- you're on the air, what are you going to put on? I hadn't actually planned a show, since I'd been mostly preoccupied with getting the kit actually assembled. I think I did a quick station ID, I don't remember the call letters I chose, and set the microphone in front of the speaker to my record player. I had a decent sized record collection for a ten-year old kid, but I'm not sure what record i chose to play first.
It might seem strange to some people, but the question of what to put on the air was really secondary to the fact that i was actually on the air. The first record may have been my treasured LP of the K-Tel collection "Goofy Greats" or maybe my library-discharged copy of "Abbey Road," I honestly don't recall.
After the careful application of more scotch tape to keep the microphone in place -- it seems my parents always had at least a gross of the stuff tucked away at any time -- I thought I should find out how far my stations would go. This required a portable transistor radio and my bike -- a fine blue banana seat Huffy. Just outside my window in the driveway I could get the signal pretty clear, so I hopped on the bike with the radio in one hand.
And I was good for maybe 100 feet. Which is about 10 seconds of riding for your average one-speed Huffy.
At the edge of the signal's reception, where static was mostly outperforming my transmitter, I pushed my bike backwards a few feet as the signal got better. My excitement at actually broadcasting was tempered by the stark reality of the limits of the 1001-in-1 kit transmitter. It was yardcasting, not broadcasting.
But, I thought, maybe the signal is better in the other direction. In order to verify, I dismounted from the bike, perhaps so the harsh pain of reality would set in just a little slower, and walked up the street in the opposite direction.
Maybe 125 feet later, my radio emitted only static.
However, i wasn't defeated. I knew that it must be those stupid rules in the instruction manual that were holding me back. I went back to my room and powered down, and then set about a search for a 9-volt battery and more wire. There wasn't much more than 8 feet of wire included in the kit, and it seemed like it would take forever to connect all the little lengths of interconnect wire to make a longer antenna. So off i went to my Dad's storehouse of batteries and junk to see what I could find.
I'm was lucky that my Dad was always pretty patient with my tinkering, with an amazing willingness to haul me to Radio Shack to try and explain to the often bemused salesman exactly what component I was looking for to finish a project. About half the time I knew what I was talking about, and the other half my reach was truly exceeding my grasp. However, only about a quarter of the time was the Rat Shack salesguy able or willing to actually help.
Dad was also very tolerant of my rifling though his crap to bolster my supplies. So a roll of unlabeled wire and a relatively fresh 9-volt battery were easily obtained.
Looking at the impotent 8-foot antenna taped to my bedroom ceiling, I thought that having the antenna inside was probably not helping, since I could usually improve my radio reception when I stuck the antenna out the window.. Thus I thought it would be better to move the transmitter closer to the window and hang the wire antenna out to the ground, which would be a good distance since I was on the second floor. I also figured out that I could get the wire through the screen without opening it out, since I would surely catch hell if I opened the screen.
I don't think it took very long to get around 15 feet of wire out the window and get the 9-volt battery attached. Again, I powered on and put the microphone up to the record player. Then off on my bike with the radio, eager to take a long ride listening to my station.
I rode the first 100 feet so slow I could barely stay upright, but the signal stayed strong and clear, bolstering my confidence to speed up to stable speed. I got all the way down the block to the entrance of the park at the end of my street and the signal was still there, so I headed up the street in the other direction.
I breathlessly arrived at the top of the street at the corner of a much busier street and the signal was still there. Not exactly strong hi-fidelity, but I could still hear it, and hear my record about to end. Victory.
On subsequent days I would realize that the signal didn't extend much beyond my block, but that was still much better than only broadcasting to the squirrels in the front yard apple tree. I made several other modifications to extend my signal range using more batteries, more wire and other more voodoo-like techniques, but I don't think things every got beyond a couple of blocks.
Still, I was pretty satisfied in my transmitter, and broadcasted on and off for most of that Summer, being careful to reel in my ever-longer antenna when i was done so that my Mom wouldn't find out I was hanging things out the window. The FCC never visited my station, and I was never really able to convince any neighborhood kids to tune in, since they'd rather play wiffleball than strain their ears to listen to my faint little AM station.
I'd go on to make many other broadcasting attempts until my teen years when girls became a lot more interesting. I don't think I ever constructed anything more powerful than a box full of Mister Microphones, but that really didn't matter. I got bitten by the bug and in twenty-three years, I still haven't recovered.
Even now I still tune throughout the staticky, empty spaces of the radio dial looking for some stray signal that might be a sound-sender broadcasting an iPod to a home stereo or some kid pushing an electronics kit to its limit. When I find them, I promise not to turn them in.
On today's mediageek radioshow, which airs 5:30 PM on WEFT 90.1 FM Champaign, IL, my friend John Anderson from DIYmedia.net will be on to discuss recent happenings in the micropower radio world -- especially some of the legal strategies being employed by stations actively challenging the FCC in court. We'll be taking calls and e-mails for listeners who want to ask questions or comment. The number is 217-359-5483, the e-mail is pau@mediageek.org.
As a last-minute decision, on last week's radioshow, we decided to have listener call-ins for our first time.The show's topic was again the new low-power FM station going on the air in Urbana. We scheduled the show because the station was about to hold its first big public information meeting. We thought that it would be more interes