As I am typing this, I am listening to Radio Argentina. If I were down there I would have a radio tuned to 570 kHz to do this. Radio is still involved, except that I am listening via an internet connection to a remote receiver somewhere near Buenos Aires. The link to the connection is:
http://lu4eec.ddns.net:8073/
Once I connected, I was able to tune the radio to the frequency I desired, and I've spent this evening tuning around, like I did last night. Last night I learned that the David Lee Roth song "Just a Gigolo" was big down there at one time as that I heard a station play it. When I tuned to 570, I discovered Radio Argentina, and I am finding the music from them (and from Radio Rivadavia) to be interesting to listen to. Radio Rivadavia went heavily into the Argentine tangos, as has some other stations down there.
Had this been a few decades ago, I'd be doing this the hard way: a good shortwave receiver, a good antenna, and hoping for good propagation. I have heard Radio Argentina via the shortwave before (and they were beaming an English broadcast to North America), and they were proudly playing their tangos. I knew that other shortwave listeners were getting Radio Rivadavia, and they (along with me) were tuning the "tropical bands" to search for them as well as the Colombian and Venezuelan stations.
And here we are, years later, and the world is even closer to our fingertips. I could connect to some (most?) of these Argentine stations by using the net itself without the remote receiver. I've listened to the Falkland Islands this way. I might tune the remote receiver to see how well their signal is making it to the remote receiver.
So why am I doing this?
In one way, it's an extension of a hobby that I have had for many years. If I wasn't trying to make contact with someone in a different continent, I was listening to signals from different continents. The listening aspect of it would tell me what propagation was doing, but there was something else that was happening: I was learning about the world. I was becoming informed of world events.
There's another reason. If I'm tuning in to Argentina, then I'm being relaxed. I can read books to relax and I do, but I like to vary what I do for relaxation. Later on I'm going to disconnect from that remote receiver and I'm going to go upstairs and continue my re-read of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And after that, maybe I'll pickup a real radio and see if I can get that one station in Gallup, New Mexico, which mixes country & western with Navajo music.
Is this like going out to try a different kind of food? Like going out for Peruvian, or Indian, or Polish food? I think it is. I suffer from the theory that if one widens the variety of what they expose themselves to, or tries different things, then it can be good for your mental health......but up to a certain point.
Not all of what's out there is good for you. If you go out in the wild and harvest some mushrooms, you are risking a fatal mistake. If you fill yourself with listening to hate speech of any kind or you spend too much time reading about how wrong the world is, odds are it ain't doing you very much in the way of good.
All of that said......I find the tuning in of distant radio stations, either via my own radio here in Tucson or using a remote receiver in Buenos Aires to be an enjoyable experience.
That is my simple pleasure for this evening. It's also taking my mind off of current events, which I don't feel very much like discussing right now.
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