Does anyone else like FM radio?

[Osvaldo de Garay]

Partially alive at nrg.fm

There is another interesting station that emits jazz, Blackie FM oth at RF, internet and app., low ads. The problem (at my taste) is that the vast majority of songs are female singer voices, and because of a question of gendre, the owners are politicians ergo a little IRRITANT.

 

[john61ct]

Hence the ability to switch between stations.

I bet you can even find all-male if that tickles your fancy

 

[Osvaldo de Garay]

May be. Very rarely you can listen a Louis Armstrong, Monty Alexader or Kenny "Blues Boss" Wayne's voices, as an example.

Feminism and genre ideology overran every aspect of life, at least at this lattitude.

 

[DonH56]

I listen to AM radio for local news, alerts, and a couple of talk shows, and the local FM stations for music and sometimes news. Nice for background or when I do not want to mess with something else, and I do not have streaming setup everywhere.

I do need to find a decent AM/FM tuner to add to my media system for when I just need some background or to keep track of things when doing something else (e.g. I practice in my media room since it is acoustically isolated from the rest of the house). Not sure where my old Yamaha T-1/T-2 (forget which) is or if it still works.

 

[Osvaldo de Garay]

Umfortunately I can't help you seeking the tuner :-(

 

[DonH56]

Umfortunately I can't help you seeking the tuner :-(

No worries, there are still a number of them available, I just haven't felt the need strongly enough to buy one so have not done much research. Rolls seems popular for mid/low price models but I do not know anything about that company. I am not paying $500+ for a component tuner from one of the name brands (let alone $5000+ for the McIntosh version!) for something I will use rarely and not as a primary music source.

Off topic: I suspect I am not alone in wondering what you look like in high heels and platforms.

 

[mhardy6647]

I listen to AM radio for local news, alerts, and a couple of talk shows, and the local FM stations for music and sometimes news. Nice for background or when I do not want to mess with something else, and I do not have streaming setup everywhere.

I do need to find a decent AM/FM tuner to add to my media system for when I just need some background or to keep track of things when doing something else (e.g. I practice in my media room since it is acoustically isolated from the rest of the house). Not sure where my old Yamaha T-1/T-2 (forget which) is or if it still works.

Well, I hope you find it, especially if it is a T-2! The T-2 is a pretty serious piece of radio hardware.

 

[JeffS7444]

Easy answer that looks like a hifi component: Buy a Sangean HD tuner.

Down-the-rabbit-hole answer: Software-defined radio, which can take the form of a USB stick, or as a standalone appliance, in the case of receivers like "Malahit". There's no reason that sonic fidelity can't be great, but it's just a tiny part of what these things are capable of.

 

[JeffS7444]

$5000+ for the McIntosh version!

It's a very fancy software-defined radio. Alas, they opted not to have it receive digital broadcasts, but probably could do so with a software update.

 

[john61ct]

FM Radio, is right in the title, 88–108 MHz by definition local to get (half) decent SQ...

Digital broadcast like DAB / DAB+ or HD Radio (IBOC) are even a stretch

but Software-Defined Radio (SDR) or hobbyist shortwave stuff (DXing) seem totally different topics IMO well deserving their own threads, as much as satellite or Internet based "radio"

 

[DonH56]

Well, I hope you find it, especially if it is a T-2! The T-2 is a pretty serious piece of radio hardware.

Nope, T-1, wanted AM and FM. Got it fairly cheap due to employee discount at the time. I really need to drag it out, but some recent "rearranging" of the house led to a pile of boxes (and an old weight bench, I think) in front of the door to the basement closet black hole where my old gear lives. Haven't had the gumption to move everything.

Easy answer that looks like a hifi component: Buy a Sangean HD tuner.

I have a portable Sangean AM/FM/weather radio that is nice.

Down-the-rabbit-hole answer: Software-defined radio, which can take the form of a USB stick, or as a standalone appliance, in the case of receivers like "Malahit". There's no reason that sonic fidelity can't be great, but it's just a tiny part of what these things are capable of.

I was involved in some SDR projects way back in the 1980's. They've come a ways since then. I actually looked at a Raspberry Pi SDR "hat" a couple of years ago. Getting an RPi is on my list of things to play with, but I have way too many expensive and vastly underserved hobbies already.

 

[john61ct]

LOL we should not try to serve our hobbies, not like a proper marriage...

Go ahead and move on when they no longer serve us!

 

[xanalog]

I was involved in some SDR projects way back in the 1980's. They've come a ways since then. I actually looked at a Raspberry Pi SDR "hat" a couple of years ago. Getting an RPi is on my list of things to play with, but I have way too many expensive and vastly underserved hobbies already.

I find SDR as a half-baked attempt.
I've own(ed) 3 separate iteration of SDRs (Aliexpress renditions, in a 5 year span) and each was a cheezy-toy that was put away within a week's time.
meh!

 

[DonH56]

I find SDR as a half-baked attempt.
I've own(ed) 3 separate iteration of SDRs (Aliexpress renditions, in a 5 year span) and each was a cheezy-toy that was put away within a week's time.
meh!

My SDR involvement was with one or two exceptions not in the commercial world but rather government and military radio, radar, and satellite links. The big problem then as now was the data converters, something I made most of a career designing before changing directions for the last ten years or so. Some worked better than others, of course. I know very little about commercial SDRs as they were on the periphery of what I was doing, and little of my career focused on SDRs. Some of my designs ended up in SDR systems but that was above my level.

 

[Osvaldo de Garay]

Off topic: I suspect I am not alone in wondering what you look like in high heels and platforms.

I'll share some pics via PM.

 

[emmodad]

...I know very little about commercial SDRs as they were on the periphery of what I was doing, and little of my career focused on SDRs. Some of my designs ended up in SDR systems but that was above my level.

if you use a commercial digital cellphone introduced any time after the 1980s, you have an SDR in your pocket

SDR concepts – and when the system-on-silicon digital signal processing horsepower eventually allowed, SDR itself – were central to all roadmaps for commercial digital cellphones and basestations starting with 1980s/90s 3G (GSM, North America and Japan TDMA, early CDMA, etc). That was my life starting in the early 1980s (Bell Labs programmable DSP IC design group; eventually a principal developing collaborations with the majority of basestation/cellphone manufacturers, first digital satphones, and a fair amount of "government" applications.

Dem wuz da dayz.

 

[DonH56]

if you use a commercial digital cellphone introduced any time after the 1980s, you have an SDR in your pocket

SDR concepts – and when the system-on-silicon digital signal processing horsepower eventually allowed, SDR itself – were central to all roadmaps for commercial digital cellphones and basestations starting with 1980s/90s 3G (GSM, North America and Japan TDMA, early CDMA, etc). That was my life starting in the early 1980s (Bell Labs programmable DSP IC design group; eventually a principal developing collaborations with the majority of basestation/cellphone manufacturers, first digital satphones, and a fair amount of "government" applications.

Dem wuz da dayz.

Duh, should've thought of that, but I was and am an analog guy and a low-level (transistor level) IC designer, so despite a lot of exposure and work with them the upper layers were beyond my scope. I enjoyed what I did and the path I took, but always wonder about a few different paths I could have taken, like a position to help develop Motorola's early cell phones in the 1980's. Nothing like Bell Labs on my resume, just a hairy-knuckled design engineer.

 

[mhardy6647]

Not sure this is a good time or a bad time to mention it but, if any of you are like me* (i.e., cheap), there are websites that stream SDR, i.e., very broad band radio signal "access" -- I don't know the language to use for this stuff; it's magic to me.

I fiddle with these now and again. Here's an example, FWIW:

Northern Utah WebSDR - Landing Page

Northern Utah WebSDR - Landing Page

www.sdrutah.org

____________
* perish the thought!

 

[emmodad]

@DonH56 HUGE RESPECT, analog design is the hardest
the "transistor-level designers" at Bell Labs Allentown were an absolute center of the universe in our dsp (and especially mixed analog/digital, ie DSP + codec) success
(ssshhhhh: don't tell anyone where MOT sourced the speech compression DSP for their first digital cellphones...)

 

[xanalog]

My SDR involvement was with one or two exceptions not in the commercial world but rather government and military radio, radar, and satellite links.

You were blessed.
I lived thru a similar pro-career (secure-comm/mil/rf/sat) but they were the decades where the exception was that first word (of SDR).