When I grow up....

Belated Happy New Year to all! I have no bus work today so I can get caught up on some other things. Like this blog. Or sleeping past 6 AM. Whatever.

One of my ham radio friends who has moved to a warmer place passed along a YouTube video that is now public domain. I share it here to give folks some context as to how we got here, and the only thing to add to this is the conversion of the wave energy (analog) to those little ones and zeroes (digital) for spewing over the web.



Many thanks to John Samuels for this one. By the way, the "OH2FFY" you see at the video's end is the call sign of the ham whose efforts moved this work to YT. John's call is K2CIB, and mine is N2GOP. I spoke of ham radio in an earlier blog post, and we use infrastructure called the atmosphere to get our signals from point to point. Click here to learn something about it... I dare you!!

The infrastructure of the web is still fragile enough and porous enough that it is subject to disruption in a number of ways from your own machine to lord knows where else in the food chain. There are many waypoints between our RandoRadio studio and what finally arrives in your computer.

Radio's expenses are more front-loaded (higher up-front cost) but once you are going it costs the same whether 10,000 or 100,000 listen to you. On the internet the startup cost is lower, but since you are charged by bandwidth usage, the more popular you are your costs skyrocket. We need your support to keep going, both in listening and in finance. This stuff doesn't just happen.

I would love nothing more that to be able to take our programming and move it to shortwave radio. With the current sunspot cycle slowly rising we could have a global audience for sizable chunks of the day, and they wouldn't even need a computer to hear us.

FYI, there is still a bunch of domestic shortwave bradcasting going on here in the US. Since major media companies have no way of tracking individual listeners in radio in the same manner as the web, they have no inclination to push that form of media. But when your power fails (as well as the power for all the surrounding infrastructure) what will you do with your computer? About the same as you will do with your cell phone. Not a lot. See also Katrina, 2003 Northeast blackout, communications failures after 9/11, the list goes on and on.

That said, I'm settling into a decent pattern with my show until the next bizarro event in my life. Stay with us. It only gets better. Trust me.

Peace be with you,
Glenn