03/03/07 - Note: I wrote this post over a year ago and a few things have changed. For one, the morning hosts got moved around, and the new ones just aren't quite as good. I don't mind much, though, because now I take the bus to work. The premise remains though, and I'm reposting this to remind myself to get the foxhole radio back out of the closet and get some pictures, write up a post on how I built it and try to get a station again.
01/06/06 - I was driving to work the other day, listening to the local AM morning hosts talk about everything from local sports and city government. A member of city council came on and talked about the upcoming agenda for the year, project priorities and budgeting. The reason I love AM radio so much is that no other news source feels as compact and useful. In a short stretch of time I can hear about a wide variety of topics of interest to me. The single drawback to this format is that I have no say in which stories are covered, and very little say in which ones I listen to (there are only so many stations in my area). The reporting, I’ve found, is superior to print media – papers in particular seem to be very bad at getting stories correct, and grammatical and spelling errors don’t jump out in radio. The stories are better than can be found on television, which is much more ridden with gimmicks locally and annoyingly repetitive nationally. Cable news is especially depressing because there is enormous opportunity to cover a wide variety of interesting news stories and they really drop the ball.
The second reason I like AM radio so much is that it is very accessible and nostalgic as well. I recently began fiddling around with plans for a foxhole radio. The concept is great, some wire coiled around a tube, a metal pin and a razor blade for a diode, an antenna, ground and earpiece, and there you have it, a working radio! Try building a television that simply. While it’s true that print media is far simpler to create and use, I find that words printed on paper are far more effective if they’re describing things a bit more intellectually hefty than what gets reported in USA Today. Things like programming languages, Christian history, political treatise (unlike the dribble spouted today). AM radio has shortcomings, I recognize that, but I still find it to be the best way to hear about what’s happening in my area, with some insights to the rest of the world too. Besides, it’s the best I can get on the drive to work. Thank you Nicola Tesla (notice, I didn’t thank Guglielmo Marconi).