Saying Goodbye To Those Magical Radio Days
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“all that which is an arising thing, is a ceasing thing,” said the Buddha, or so I hear.
Our dear FCC, an agency I’ve been hostile to for many decades, has now granted those dwindling AM broadcasters permission to switch to digital broadcasting. That means your older radios won’t work anymore, as with digital TV. Many people won’t care at all. Some will like the improved fidelity.
Other radio historians and crazy collectors like me will be very upset, especially those who have hundreds of radios that they paid a lot of money for during the radio craze of the 1990s. People like me, although I’ve since sold off the bulk. of them. I still have many that I built as a kid from scratch and from old parts and from kits.
I remember my Knight kit CR-1 on which I heard WLS in Chicago when they began a rock & Roll format on May 2, 1960, with the Hollywood argyles and Alley Oop. Remember that one? In fact, that radio sits on a shelf above my ham radio station right now. I’ll keep that one and a few others but shortly it will be useless – another relic of my faded world. I’ll be sending most to the auction unless they also receive “short wave” although even much of that is going digital too.
No, I don’t really use these relics and I no longer build radios. I no longer sit up late in Chicago nights – wearing headphones and trying to pull in WWVA, 1170 AM from Wheeling West Virginia as I did over 50 years ago. Digital radio doesn’t have that kind of range anyway.
Some of my radios are going up at auction next month and more will follow. I’ll keep one or two remembrances of temps perdu, perhaps eventually destined for the dump by philistines yet to come, who prefer unbearable music videos downloaded from low orbit.
Dear Dead Days.
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I have a really old 1930s radio I still listen to once in a while. I use it mainly as a prop now. Just went and looked and I could get a couple hundred for it should I want to. Nope, I like how it looks on my cabinet.
I have quite a few that don’t work any more and it can be a lot of work to repair them. Actually I have stuff from the Marconi/ Morse code era. Some just look so cool.
Oops, I’m not anonymous, I’m Glenn
That is why I have this one. Mainly ornamental due to the art deco style of it. My ‘rents laughed at me when I bought it because of how much it cost me. Dad said Jess why would you spend your money on this. Me: daddy I like it and it will go well on my dresser.
I remember those days though I never got into it like you did Glenn. When I was about ten I went through a phase of building transistor radios along with my cousin. He carried on into the short wave stuff but I veered off into making home-made rockets. Actually, they were more open-ended pipe bombs than anything else. Just charcoal, sulphur, and potassium nitrate from the local pharmacy in the right combo and I was a rocketeer, or in most cases a mad bomber. I blew up my grandfather’s Scuppernong vine plants and that ended that,
charcoal, sulphur, and potassium nitrate – oh boy do I remember that. We had a rocket club in High School but I’m not about to confess to anything.
lol. In today’s world I would be labeled a terrorist.
I remember the first time I heard Elvis. First with a crystal radio and nex using a one transistor amplifier and a piece of wire hanging out the second story window. My parents didn’t approve and I’m not sure they were even aware of Rock&Roll.
Now kids can watch things that my parents would have thrown me out the window for. It ain’t that same world.
I was also a radio guy, and, in 1962, I built my own from a kit my dad, who was in the Navy at the time, somehow managed to purloin from his military masters. I do remember the thrill of being able to pick up faraway places, as well as the Armed Forces Network.
I’m a radio guy myself. Didn’t have a TV in the house until I was 12 years old.
My parents owned a valve radio, long wave and short wave. I loved picking up signals from exotic places like Lyon, Bonn, Warsaw and a strange place called US Forces Network.
The father of one of my schoolfriends was a HAM enthusiast. He owned a ship’s radio, it was a monster. Filled up one side of a room.
There’s a song by Queen called “Radio Ga Ga”. It proclaims that, radio is yet to have its finest hour. I want to believe that.
I think it has many hours left You can call me N4HO and the thrill of talking to some ship at sea or some scientist in Antarctica with your own station is still there, even if less accessible to a ten year old kid. To many people it’s still as or almost as like magic as it was a hundred years ago. Frankly I think AM digital is not going to be popular, but we will see.