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Lettuce shares with us the appealing world of micropower radio transmisison.
Ah! That's something calling my attention since I was a kid.
Dreamed of building a transmisor with sparing parts. Even wrote stories of people making 'pirate' radio stations to communicate and overcome some difficult situation in a oppressed country, or something like that.
Creating your own station is illegal, as in you need to buy an 'expensive concession and follow requirements from communications authority', being more expensive than the equipment to operate, and inconvenient for some messages. I see why pirate stations are appealing for some.
I worked as well in a college station although transmitting only by Internet and with some speakers around the campus. I was working in a project to build an FM station there. Sadly the university, being private, didn't approved required resources. The local public university still has a station though.
Then I worked on a project to research on digital radio in Mexico (something that never happened, although we have digital TV, weird).
Nowadays, I don't listen to FM stations that much. Only while I'm driving. I don't like that much the advertising, especially every 6 years when we have national elections and we listen over and over again the same 2 candidates.
My wife listens to stations from around the country on her Alexa speaker. I think it's magical, convenient and inexpensive listening to live radio or podcasts by Internet, making the radio transmission not as interesting as it was 20 years before.
I think that with FM we have a similar problem that with CDs:
As I wrote before, if people don't have a device to listen to their 'old' CDs and FM stations, that format will be forgotten, moving to some mobile device.
One major disadvantage is that while streaming radio is generally cheaper to transmit than "on-air" radio, it's a lot more expensive to receive.
I think that by 2024 massively we don't have that problem anymore. In 2008, yeah, there weren't many cell phone towers and mobile data was (more) expensive. Nowadays, some population (around 60%?, no idea) can have WiFi or data, and a multi function device 24/7. Even away from big cities you always have Internet. So I think our 'message is fighting' for attention of digital media being so easy to reach to the public.
Anyway, recently I was thinking of getting some FM equipment to stream random podcasts from my list, so I can listen to it around the house, or perhaps it could reach a few neighbors. Sounds like a nice hobby on top of listening to podcast.
And perhaps resuming recording my podcasts as a way to speak out loud to the world, sharing knowledge and ideas.
I love reading and writing, although sound as a media gives a really different feeling. I should do it :)
EOT
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