Podcasts and listening in today's world

I don't know about you, but it seems to be harder and harder for me to be somewhere I can listen or watch something at an appointed time. Maybe I'm alone in that regard, but I don't think so.

Podcasts of favorite shows are saving my mind, allowing me to catch the shows any time I want to. I now hang an FM transmitter in my Prius' cigar lighter jack, wrap the external audio cord over the rear-view mirror (it is used as the antenna to communicate with the vehicle FM radio), and slap the plug into my Sansa 4 Gb e260 earphone jack. When I turn up the sound, it will let me travel for miles and miles that I have to go to get anywhere significant in Texas without getting sleepy or succumbing to highway hypnosis. Before I travel, I fill up a 2 Gb micro-SD card with podcasts.

While I sit here at my computer, I keep from getting in the way of other things I might want to use the sound card for by plugging the e260 into an inMotion player and listening to those same podcasts.

Some programs I like to catch are these:
Mountain Stage
http://www.mountainstage.org/mtnstagepodcast.aspx

Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour
[I just wish the emcee wouldn't talk so darned much.]
http://www.woodsongs.com/showlist.asp

WHYY's Fresh Air
[Again, I just never seem to be in front of a radio at the right time.]
http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/archive.php?thingId=13

NPR All Songs Considered
http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/archive.php?thingId=37&date=07-27-2009

NPR Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz
http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/archive.php?thingId=24&date=08-07-2009

And, since I'm an inveterate short-wave radio listener, I like things like
Radio Australia podcasts
[you can choose from the large selection of programs at]
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/

BBC podcasts
[again, a huge choice at]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/

Deutsche Welle
[a smaller set in English from the main German broadcaster at]
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1719252,00.html

As you can see from this small slice of the world's offerings, you can find enough audio to entertain you, even if you were a NYC cabbie doing 20 hours shifts for the rest of your (much shortened) life! This piece doesn't mention how to get these automatically sent to your machine. If there's interest, I can do another piece on that.

Comments welcomed.

Console radios: old friends

I was driving down the main street of my new home town yesterday, when I passed someone using an unused building's sidewalk for their own downtown moving sale. As usual, I shopped to see if there were something I couldn't live without. The pictured console radio just called my name. For not very much, it was mine. Now I have to take out the chassis, check the tubes, replace all capacitors, measure resistors to see if they need replacing, align the radio's tuned circuits, replace the power cord, rewind or replace the AM flat coil antenna, and enjoy the results. Maybe I can even talk the wife into refurbing the cabinet.

Fixing old radios is sometimes fun. Listening is always fun, if you can find any station worth hearing in today's vast jungle of AM talk radio.

This post was started in March. Still working to complete the workshop, so nothing has happened yet to the radio. It is awaiting some attention. Comments welcomed.

Old radio troubleshooting tips

While doing some research, I just ran across this wonderful page of tips on troubleshooting and repair of old radio receivers. I hope it might do someone some good to have the information linked to the nice pages here. I coopted the image for effect.

Home Build of UHF TV Antenna

The author of this article asks a pertinent question, "Why would anyone even want to build their own TV antenna?" The answer is twofold:
1. lower VHF TV channels are moving up to UHF during the digital conversion
2. this antenna gets a better signal to the TV than most commercially available antennas.

It is built out of easily-available parts and doesn't look like it takes any machine shop to make it happen. Anyone getting the gumption to make it happen, please report back here via comment.

Cold War...cold shoulder

I was catching up this afternoon with the news on the ARRL (American Radio Relay League) site, when I found an article that floored my sensibilities. This article dealt with a young man who listened to other countries' shortwave broadcasts back in the period of time we call the "Cold War" era. A large percentage of shortwave listeners collected verification cards to show their friends which of the stations they had actually snagged on the receivers they so dearly loved. To get one of these cards required (in the era before email and the Internet) the listener to send a letter to the station, requesting the card and giving details of the signal strength of the station received, their receiver and antenna setup, and details of the program(s) listened to, along with the date and time the station was received.

The teen received a card from (among others) "Radio Habana" in Cuba. As the article explains, his "mom -- who was the local draft board lady -- got a call from the FBI and Greg had to explain why he was 'in contact' with Radio Habana. When he explained that he was just a shortwave listener, the FBI told Greg that if he never contacted Radio Habana again, his mother could keep her job!"

That threat to the livelihood of the mother of a teen radio listener and hobbyist...a hobbyist who was doing nothing wrong, and who was pursuing an innocent hobby, seems to me very shocking. But, at the same time, my own veneer of hardness continues toward my government's frequently misplaced and probably illegal actions towards its own citizens through the decades of my life.

How else can you view something reported like this?

Greg Brown: the man, the music, the performance

This came to my attention today:

Keep that image in mind while you listen. The recording of his performance is after about 1hr22m into this concert.

And if you resist this whispery-voiced intrusion into your status quo, there's probably a truth in the matter of you just didn't hear it all or listen closely enough. He's aged well.

His home page. He's married to Iris Dement, lives in either Iowa or Kansas City, and can play and sing well. I recommend him to you.

The show that is represented by the above link is Mountain Stage, which has persisted for about 25 years on the radio. The longevity indicates there is something good about it. It is billed as "live performance radio from the mountain state of West Virginia". Believe it. It may be too country for you, but there is bluegrass, rock, punk and just about every other genre of music peeking out between the slats.

He first came to my attention on the Prairie Home Companion show.

Enjoy.