Full disclosure: once upon a time I was a radio deejay. In the 1980s I took jazz/public radio aficionado Jim Bennett’s engineering course at KPFA in Berkeley and learned how to run the live studio board at the station. The more I “board-opped”, the more I was called upon to substitute for various absent hosts. […]
Much of what you read about radio station contests these days is depressing. At best, some operation botches a game by misrepresenting the rules or winnings and winds up paying the Federal Communications Commission a fine. At worst, a signal launches an ill-advised water drinking marathon that literally kills a contestant. To be fair to […]
I spent some of this weekend up to my nose in Soundrop, a Spotify chat room application. Soundrop has been available for about two years. I wouldn’t call the feature competition for plug.dj or its predecessor, Turntable.fm, but it is around and worth knowing about if you are a Spotify fan. To access Soundrop you […]
No less than fifteen different organizations have applied for a single Low Power FM signal in Los Angeles, California: 101.5 FM. I would not want to be the Federal Communications Commission staff person who has to decide which of these groups get access to that frequency. Here are some excerpts from their application statements. Future […]
Turntable.fm‘s latest blog post reached my inbox on Friday. It focused on Turntable Live, a new feature in which Turntable room participants interact on a real time basis with bands. Then came this last distressing paragraph: “As much as we all love turntable.fm, we have decided to shut it down to fully concentrate on the […]
After reading our story about the end of a commercial classical music radio station in North Carolina, Fred Krock sent us this reflection on his career working in radio. I began working for a major market commercial classical music station in 1953. All major markets and many smaller markets had a commercial classical music station […]
Perusing through the Federal Communications Commission’s database of pending new Low Power FM applications, I see many worthy contenders. But I would like to be a fly on the wall when the FCC considers the following organizations. What caught my eye are their names: The Global Service Center for Quitting Chinese Communist Party is among […]
Looks like the Voice of America radiogram project is super busy these days, running lots of trials with text messaging via short wave streams. When last Radio Survivor checked in on the initiative, we stopped to admire a 1938 Philco radio console rigged by a short wave operator to pick up VOA radiograms. Now there’s more […]
As of this writing, almost no comments have landed in the Federal Communications Commission’s docket on AM reform, save the interesting ones of amateur radio operator Nickolaus E. Leggett. Some of his remarks focus on the consequences, as Leggett sees them, of converting the whole AM system to a digital operation. There is “a specific […]
I have an RSS link to everything that YouTube produces tagged “radio,” and the strangest things come into my browser as a result. Today’s example: this Gmod video titled “radio” by Eltorro64Alt, whose work seems to be inspired by cult movie maker Alejandro Jodorowsky. In this piece the rather meaty protagonist wanders about some kind […]
