Carl Blare

By removing the ‘p’ from Part 15 you are left with the word ‘art’. And indeed radio broadcasting is a medium of several art forms.

By removing the ‘p’ from Part 15 you are left with the word ‘art’. And indeed radio broadcasting is a medium of several art forms.

Technical engineering may be a science at its core, but most engineers show their artistry by doing neat and clever engineering that presents the science in a very attractive way.

Radio programming is a dual art, in that simply choosing a string of appealing shows for the daily schedule is “the programmer’s art,” and doing a smart, talented, pleasant show for a happy audience is the art form that made radio popular from the beginning.

Yet the wording in a sentence can be short circuited, like when I called radio itself an art form, to which my father rightly said, “Radio is not an art form.” I was reduced to stuttering “Ya, but..,ah,…” attempts to explain what I really meant. I may have said, “You know what I mean.”

But I still haven’t gotten to the point of this blog, which is “the life span of art.” Take a great painting, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, for example. The Mona Lisa is one great painting that is still one great painting every day and every year. The artist was not required to produce another great painting every week or every day. His kind of art is infinite.

By sharp contrast the radio program art is anti-infinite, it is finite. Even as the radio program airs it is coming into being and disappearing every second. It is timely. It is coming and going. You cannot hang it on the wall for permanent display nor schedule it 24-hours a day forever. That is where I rebel.

Every time I produce my programs, Blare OnAir and The Low Power Hour, I want each one to be THE ONE, which can stand for all time as the penultimate version. Almost no radio programs in history achieve the status of “THE ONE,” with the rare exception being Orson Welles WAR OF THE WORLDS, although it’s reputation is bigger than the show itself, which is not that easy to sit through anymore. Some program series are somewhat celebrated, including The Jack Benny Show, Amos ‘n Andy and…. it’s a short list.

Radio program creation funnels rapidly into a sink hole. Like sand through an hour-glass. No genius has ever been able to avoid disappearing down there.

Lesson learned: wear mining gear when tampering with radio programming. Maybe you’ll be able to climb back out of the hole you get into.

I have been seeing more wifi internet radios in the catalogs, some of them looking like table model and others like portable radios. I am guessing that these operate under Part 15 and that wifi itself is a Part 15 technology.

What I wonder about the wifi radios is whether they are any more than a private, closed circuit, personal technology. I would assume that a wifi portable “radio” is only able to receive stations from one’s own computer and not from other broadcasters sending stations from other computers.

Therefore, if I am right…. I probably should reverse that to say…

If I am right, therefore, there’d be no point to operating a wifi radio station because the only audience would be one’s self.

True or false?

or maybe I mean…

False or true?

Since the two AM transmitters and antennas just got a very complete tune up, with the new AMT5000 and all, it was time to check out Big Talker, the shortwave transmitter at 13.560mHz. It has been running everyday since being built but I checked it out and re-adjusted the power.

I backed off the modulation a bit, since the audio quality is so crystal clear it sounds like an FM station, and I don’t want those highs to splatter too much.

The power is set at 495mW, which is high, but since the antenna is still indoors I doubt that it matters very much.

Once the antenna is outdoors I’m backing down to PhilB’s recommended 45mW.

Today, as many times before, I put on the seat belt for a ride to get chicken thighs for lunch, and as usual listened to the AMT5000 pumping out Free Talk Live with hosts Ian and Mark.

Today, as many times before, I put on the seat belt for a ride to get chicken thighs for lunch, and as usual listened to the AMT5000 pumping out Free Talk Live with hosts Ian and Mark.

As expected, the strongest part of the signal made it about halfway up the next block, keeping in mind that it is a very long block and I only have a Wintenna (windowframe antenna with added wire), and then the signal started going down into the noise. But, as is often the case at 11 in the morning, I could hear traces of the signal on the main street at the far end of the block, and those patchy traces come and go on the 3-mile drive.

In the parking lot at the store I kept the radio on for a minute because 1680 was unusually noise free and I could hear voices way in the background. I turned up the volume and was astounded that I was hearing Ian and Mark continuing to take phone calls!

Highly impressed by the performance of the AMT5000 I ordered double chicken thighs.

Even lazy minds look for something to do, and I decided to scan the FCC Enforcements for 2011 (to date) over at diymedia.net, looking only for AM enforcements. Not much to report.

Even lazy minds look for something to do, and I decided to scan the FCC Enforcements for 2011 (to date) over at diymedia.net, looking only for AM enforcements. Not much to report.

A group of three transmitters in St. Paul, Minnesota were the target of two letters… two of them were under the care of one individual. Frequencies were 1620, 1630 & 1650. In each case they were measured above the 15.209 power limit and all of them had more length of antenna, lead and ground wire then the 3-meter limit under 15.219.

The only other postal NUOU went to Arizona City, Arizona for 1610 being measured over power with an 8-meter antenna.

I didn’t see any names from this board.

Two years ago I saw a piece of sheet aluminum at the hardware store that was 10-feet long, 1-foot wide and about 1/32-inches thick. I had two antenna ideas.

Two years ago I saw a piece of sheet aluminum at the hardware store that was 10-feet long, 1-foot wide and about 1/32-inches thick. I had two antenna ideas.

First, since I was broadcasting from inside the house, I wondered what that sheet of aluminum mounted on a wall would do, other than being attractive.

Second, I wondered what a flat-panel antenna consisting of this sheet-aluminum hanging in the open outdoors would do.

The indoor scenario I thought would at least be “in-phase” with the wall’s surface and so be somewhat effective, although I was not yet wise to the whole world of capacitive reactions with pipes and wiring inside the walls.

But I wonder what the outdoor version would be like compared to a plain wire. Would it be directional? Would the flat surface give a different signal than the thin side-surface?

Over to you for an opinion.