There Is No Cat - On an adventure

Groovy '60s Sounds from the Land of Smile!

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

On an adventure

WFMU is the coolest radio station in the world, hands down. They even have a widely read station weblog. One of their program hosts, The Professor (of their program The Audio Kitchen) has for the past several months been publishing a fascinating series of posts called "Adventures in Amplitude Modulation" about listening to distant stations on AM and shortwave radio. He typically also posts recordings of the receptions he describes. A few posts back, he asked for contributions from any readers who might have interesting audio to share. I have some experience in this. So I figured I would put something together.

This week's entry in the series was largely written by me, based on a recording I made tuning across the 25 meter shortwave band in late June, shortly after the summer solstice. There are some interesting tidbits in the recordings. All told, there's about two hours worth of audio associated with the post, which may be a bit much to digest in one setting. My personal favorite is of the late evangelist Dr. Gene Scott® talking about getting laid. Dr. Gene always was a bit outrageous. I also quite like the recording of Radio Nacional da Amazonia from Brazil; there's some nice music followed by station promos that sound like commercials, kinda neat. There's also an extra bonus recording of Radio Tanzania Zanzibar on 11735 kHz; honestly, that station typically comes in somewhat better than the recording I gave The Professor to post. The summer solstice is pretty much the worst time to try to hear them from here. For anyone visiting here from the post, here's a recording of the station made today (just over an hour long, about 21 MBytes), about a month and a half after the one on the WFMU site.

I had a lot of fun putting the post together.

Tags: WFMU shortwave

Posted at 10:54 PM

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Note: I’m tired of clearing the spam from my comments, so comments are no longer accepted.

Dude. You are a serious radio nerd. ;) I'm going to have to take some time to download those segments and give it a listen!

Posted by Elaine at 1:10 AM, August 15, 2006 [Link]

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio