Radio

I’ve been listening to a lot more radio than usual lately. Mostly CBC Radio One. And some Radio Two late at night. The CBC rocks. The programming is just totally excelllent. The only problem is that I don’t actually own a radio. So I’m either listening in my car or streaming via the Net. Oh, I listen to Quirks and Quarks via the podcast (and mp3 archive). The web streaming is 32Kbps Windows Media. Yech. To make matters worse, the streaming version of the Vancouver broadcast doesn’t work. And it hasn’t for a long time. So I have to listen to the Toronto broadcast which of course means I don’t get the local news. Bah.

What I’d really like to be listening with is this:

That’s Magnum Dynalab’s MD90. It’s an analog FM tuner. And it would sound gorgeous hooked up to my existing Rotel / B&W hi-fi. And just look at those gauges! Beautiful! Only one problem. CBC Radio One is only available on the AM dial here in Vancouver. AM. Fuck. This is the 3rd biggest city in Canada, and the CBC doesn’t operate a FM transmitter… And apparently there’s no longer any bandwidth availabe in the FM band. So I guess there will never be an FM Radio One Vancouver. It’s so rediculous it could only happen to the CBC.

I refuse to pipe AM through the hi-fi, so I figured I’d get a little $30 AM/FM portable radio and plop it on the kitchen table. But that’s boring. If I have to get some little radio dodad that’s going to sound like crap anyways, I’d might as well get something that also picks up Shortwave. Ah… shortwave. I loved my parent’s SW radio growing up. I’d stay up all night scanning for random stuff. It was a lot of fun, and I also had a lot of fun reading SW dx’ing web sites all night. Yay for the Internet! Even looked up some frequencies for the Radio France SW broadcasts. And narrowed my radio search down to the Grundig S350:

It’s $100 instead of $30, but I think it will be worth it for access to the BBC and Radio France. And it will give me something to fiddle with while pining for the MD90.