Chile Earthquake and Tsunami Warnings: Shortwave Radio Providing Emergency Info & Communications
In times of emergency shortwave radio, operated by both amateurs a/k/a hams and government agencies can provide an information lifeline when wired and cellular communications are disrupted. Right now shortwave is being used in the aftermath of the Chile earthquake this morning and in anticipation of tsunami waves in the Pacific. According to Communications Quarterly […]
Radio Survivor’s Top 5 Commercial Radio Stations: #2 Chicago's WXRT
I’ve only lived in Chicago for two years, but I’ve been listening to WXRT in brief spurts for the last sixteen years when visiting the city. Living in the Central Illinois college towns of Champaign-Urbana, I’d often heard about WXRT from friends and acquaintances from the Chicago area. Inevitably it was the one station that […]
Resources for Radio Scholars
Radio gets a bum rap in pretty much every arena that you could imagine: from pop culture, to literature, to news coverage. Academia is no exception, so radio scholars have had to organize and remind their colleagues that radio is worth studying. With that in mind, I wanted to share with you a few resources […]
Radio Survivor's Top 5 Commercial Radio Stations: #3 San Francisco's KQAK-FM
I am a college and community radio loyalist and these days I never listen to commercial radio unless someone else has put it on and I have no way to control the radio (during cab rides, in doctor’s office waiting rooms, and perhaps via cheesy hold button music, etc.). Since coming up with a list […]
Radio Survivor's Top Five Commercial Radio Stations: #4 KFOX-FM in San Jose, CA
The station goes by the name KFOX-FM, but its real call signal is KUFX. It’s owned by the Aloha Station Trust, which runs a gaggle of divested Clear Channel signals (make your way through this FCC document for the tortured details). Anyway, the San Jose, CA based frequency plays a pretty decent assortment of “classic […]
The Radio Survivor Guide to escaping mainstream radio
Radio Survivor’s Helen Yamamoto offers her comprehensive guide to every band genre that she (and we) can think of on the ‘Net.
RadioSurvivor's Top 5 Commercial Radio Stations: #5 WDHA, Dover, NJ
Each month the Radio Survivors will count down our most (or least) favorite radio things. Last month we covered our favorite radio programs. This month we’re sharing our favorite commercial radio stations. As regular readers might expect, coming up with this list proved to be more of a challenge. All three of us tend to […]
Slacker updates apps for BlackBerry and Andoid with caching features
The Slacker mobile radio service unveiled BlackBerry 3.0 and Android 2.0 from Research In Motion today. The upgraded operating systems allow users to update their favorite stations via a “Cache Station” menu within the app. Or they can use an “auto refresh” feature that wakes the mobile up overnight and updates station content. “Cached stations […]
Hopeful week for radio/media stocks?
Given the state of the economy, last week wasn’t so bad for radio/media company investors. And this week might improve depending on what Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke says, and what Sirius XM reports in its fourth quarter and full 2009 earnings press conference on Thursday. Saga Communications, Cumulus Media, Entercom, and Citadel all reported […]
Shirley and Spinoza Radio saves listener from deep funk, at least for now
I don’t listen to the radio much anymore, because there’s nothing on that I can count on either enjoying or finding interesting. And so far as the Internet can create your own channel services, like Pandora or Slacker, they seem to me oddly impersonal and somehow too predictable. But now I’ve found Shirley and Spinoza […]