An Old Memory, and 35+ Years Later

Sometime in the autumn of 1973 I was using my brother's transistor radio. There were some songs on the airwaves then that I was taking a liking to, and some of those were played on WABC Music Radio 77, 770 on the dial. The numbers on the tuning knob weren't exactly dead on accurate, but that wasn't really an issue as that WABC was easy to find if you were in northern New Jersey.

As it was, I had stumbled across a song that was in WABC's rotation. I can't remember what it was, other than I listened to it to the very end, and I fully expected the WABC jingle to follow it.

What followed it instead was the station identification of CKLW. I thought Canada??? I'm hearing Canada on this little radio??? It was at night, and I was obviously unfamiliar with how radio waves in that part of the spectrum propagated at night. After enough listening I was able to determine that CKLW was in Windsor, Ontario, and I discovered that I was also able to get a whole mess of other stations. I remember tuning in WLS (Chicago), WBZ (Boston), WLW (Cincinnati), WWWE (Cleveland), CBM (Montreal), WMAQ (Chicago), WBBM (Chicago) and even KMOX out of St. Louis. The fact that I could tune in distant radio stations and instantly know what was going on in another city fascinated me to no end. Shortly thereafter I checked out a book called "Elements of Radio" from the high school library. I was determined to learn how a radio worked, and how its components worked. Thus began a fascination with electronics and radio, a fascination that continues today, a fascination that motivated me to pursue and earn a degree in Electrical Engineering.

Things have really radically changed since then. I didn't dwell on that memory very much, and I mean really dwell on it, until I was here at home this past Saturday night. Kathleen was sick, and advised me to stay away lest I catch her fever, and so I needed something to do. I was on the computer, researching something, and somehow this led me to a search of Canadian radio stations. I then remembered this long available feature called streaming audio, and what the hell, why not see what it does?

Ten minutes later I was listening, real time, to an FM station out of Toronto. Shortly after that, I was tuned in to Radio One of CBC, which had an interesting music program going on. It was almost like old times: listening to some sounds originating from a great distance away, but this time I was using a computer, and not a radio.

Since that night in 1973, I have spent countless hours listening to shortwave, ham radio operators, police scanners, AM and FM. If I wasn't listening, I was talking, as that I've been a licensed ham since 1974. I have learned a lot about propagation effects and what time of day and/or year and/or frequency band would be best for tuning in, say, Japan.

Now all it takes is a few clicks of the mouse.

Things have really radically changed since then.