Analog Radio for an Analog Life

Radio used to be a huge part of my life.

Back in the '60s and '70s, the outside world consisted of radio, TV, and newspapers.  That was it, and it was good (relatively speaking).  I can't remember a time when I didn't have a transistor radio in my back pocket.  From an early age, a radio was my constant companion.  We did have a TV set at home, but that was home - a young boy with a bicycle was rarely home before sunset.  

I listened mostly to music - what we now call classic rock - and the occasional baseball game.  One of my favorite programs was American Top 40 with Casey Kasem.  

As you can imagine, I burned through a few radios throughout childhood.  One was destroyed during a school baseball game.  I was out in center field, running backward trying to catch the ball, when I tripped and landed right on the radio in my back pocket.  Another time, the radio went bouncing down the road as I was pedaling my bike extra hard to get home by dinnertime.  The radios had a hard life, but somehow I always managed to get a replacement.  This one lasted the longest:

Almost all of the radios I had were made by General Electric.  My family had a loyalty to the company.  We had a GE refrigerator, washer and dryer, TV, dishwasher, and phonograph.  I'm sure it had something to do with employee discounts, but my family was also proud of their products.  My grandfather worked there, my dad worked there, and even I worked there for a few years:

I would dabble with other brands, too - like when Radio Shack came out with their Flavoradio:

I also got a Radio Shack Battery-of-the-Month card, which allowed me to get a free battery every month (I always chose a 9V over the AA, C or D choices).  That kept my radio habit going without putting a big dent in my allowance.

I got into AM band DXing before I even knew it was a thing.  We lived just north of Boston.  I noticed that, at night, I could hear stations all the way from New York or Chicago, but not very reliably.  It was fascinating to find out what the weather was like hundreds of miles away, or to hear of a traffic jam in a far-away city.  So I strung a 100-foot antenna wire out the bedroom window and up into the trees.  I also ran a ground wire connected to a cold water pipe in the basement up to my window.  I connected the ground wire to the negative battery terminal of my little radio, and wrapped a few turns of the antenna wire around the radio.  All of a sudden, I was starting to hear stations from all over the country.  I started keeping a log book of what I heard.  That led me into shortwave listening and, later, ham radio.  DXing back then was truly exciting.  Today, it is difficult due to RF pollution from cell phones, cell towers, computers, WiFi, Bluetooth, routers, microwaves, and anything with a microprocessor in it - but it can still be done.

About the time I graduated high school, GE came out with the Superadio.  Over the next decade, they would come out with two more models.  I wound up collecting all three:

The GE Superadio is known among radio enthusiasts these days as one of the best performing radios ever made.  It has a cult following all its own.  My dad would be proud. 

Radio, prior to the '90s, was a treat to listen to.  We had real DJs, and a wide variety of things to listen to - not anything like the homogenized programming of today.  The DJs were personalities that everyone knew by name.  In between the songs, they would give us trivia, tell jokes, play phone pranks, hold contests, take listener calls and song requests, hold interviews and, once in a while, let us know what they really thought about current events.  Newscasters were more stoic, but they were also household names, at least in the regions that they broadcast from.  Sportscasters were somewhere in between - often speaking with a monotone voice, but occasionally bursting with excitement when the game called for it.

That all went away when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  He removed all the conflict-of-interest protections in the (then) current law.  All of a sudden, the independent stations were bought up by huge conglomerates.  Until then, a media outlet was prohibited from crossing over into other areas.  Now, they can own or invest in anything they want, including the companies that advertise on their media.  The same people can own radio, TV, newspapers, and any other form of media, allowing them to control narratives across multiple media to fit their own agendas.  Deep pockets eliminated competition and fairness.  We now have about five people who own all the media.  You think you can get a fair idea of the truth by going to multiple sources?  Think again.  It all comes from the same place.  Instead of live, local DJs, we now have computer-automated playlists that get aired nationwide.  Syndicated, pre-recorded shows that are identical across the country, whether you're listening in Tampa or Tacoma, Portland or Peoria.  A small handful of people controlling what we hear and don't hear, see and don't see.

Ugh.  Let me take an aspirin and get back to the old days.

Something else I remember from the '70s and into the '80s was a weekly program called the CBS Radio Mystery Theater (CBSRMT).  It was fascinating to listen to these suspense stories play out on the radio.  Unlike TV or movies, you could really exercise your imagination.  It wasn't until the '90s that I really found out about OTR (Old-Time Radio).  Like CBSRMT, these were collections of golden age radio shows - ones that were on the air before my time.  Comedy, westerns, drama, science fiction, game shows, soap operas, musicals, you name it.  I've since collected thousands of hours of these programs.  Some of my favorites are:

• Fibber McGee & Molly
• The Great Gildersleeve
• X Minus One
• Dimension X
• The Whistler
• The Shadow
• Our Miss Brooks
• Amos and Andy

These (and hundreds more) can be found at archive.org - but it's really not quite the same listening to these programs on a computer, phone, or mp3 player.  For the full experience, I wanted to hear them coming from a real radio.  So, I invested in one of these:

This device lets me transmit any audio source onto the FM band to be picked up by any radio.  It has about a 1/2 mile range, unlike those little dongles made to be used with a car radio.  They're only strong enough to transmit a few feet.  Now, I can go sit out under a tree with nothing but my pocket radio and relive the joys of yesterday - or go flip on the radio in the shop while I'm puttering around and hear a game that was played 50 years ago in its entirety.

I'm now working on a computer program that will create a daily radio programming schedule so I can just let it run continually, unattended.  A small Raspberry Pi SBC with an 8TB hard drive containing my OTR & music collection, connected to the transmitter.  Curated music, news, weather, OTR, and whatever else I want to add.  It will be my own personal radio station.  I've already done that for TV - I have my own TV station that's been in operation for nearly ten years.  No cable, no Netflix, no streaming.  That's my way to unplug from the narrative.