Radio, Amateurishly

It's 0455 UTC—2055 at home in California—circa 1983. Deutsche Welle's English-language broadcast to the West Coast of North America begins at the top of the hour, but the interval signal has already begun. The drum-style frequency readout on my Radio Shack DX-100 is neither accurate nor precise; searching the band for the interval signal before the broadcast begins is the best way to ensure that I don't miss anything. The signal sounds pretty good on 9545 kHz. I check 6145 kHz to find the signal is not quite as good and quickly re-tune the 31-meter frequency. No matter what happens to the band over the next fifty minutes, I'm committed. Years later the keypunch tuning on my Sony ICF-2010 would give me considerably more flexibility in finding my favorite broadcaster and switching frequencies to find the best signal, but we ain't there yet. The next few minutes are spent listening to the first couple bars of Beethoven's Fidelio overture again and again. Fifteen s...

  The past couple weeks have seen not one but at least two entries into the ham radio YouTube discourse on how amateur radio is dying. The second references the first, and in some ways is a rehash of the first. Neither video presents any empirical evidence, like number of licenses or number of QSOs logged in various databases; in fact, the second video's presenter actively rejects such measures. You might find this hard to believe, but I'm going to give the two YouTubers a free pass on that one. Ad hoc social criticism needn't be subjected to the pedantic sort of methodological rigor as, say, an academic paper. It's okay to make qualitative observations, as long as you don't get too carried away with rejecting scientific evidence that doesn't quite match your feelings. My criticism of the two videos and of the larger ham-radio-is-dying subgenre of blog articles and YouTube videos is in three parts: (1) the evidence supporting the two videos' conclusions re...

TORONTO—At the insistence of Dodgers' manager Dave Roberts, Major League Baseball has taken the extraordinary step of naming two broadcasters as co-MVPs for this year's World Series. The award was bestowed in a postgame ceremony to Fox Sports play-by-play presenter and color commentator Joe Davis and John Smoltz, respectively. "Some teams think of their fans as the twenty-sixth man," Roberts said during the presentation, referring to the traditional twenty-five spots on a regular season game-day roster. "We feel that through the entire World Series we had a twenty-sixth man and a twenty-seventh man right there in the broadcast booth. For seven games Joe and Smoltzie literally showed up every day and gave us the support we needed to get through the tough times." A surprised Joe Davis exclaimed, "I'm not gonna lie. During the top of the ninth I came this [expletive deleted] close to coming to terms with the fact that the What's-Their-Names might a...

Let's get one thing out of the way right off. The original Disney film Tron (1982) was in many ways an awful movie. The stilted love triangle between Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), Lora (Cindy Morgan), and Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) is nearly unwatchable. The electronic world that the film depicts, while visually stunning thanks more to the design work of Jean Giraud and Syd Mead than to any specialized production techniques, is hard to follow and internally inconsistent 1 . The Wendy Carlos score has its moments, but mostly it reflects the thinking of the '70s and early '80s that noodling on a synthesizer was all it took to make a movie sound futuristic 2 . Then there's that Journey single that we hear during the sequence at Flynn's Arcade, so cheesy that even by Journey's standards it wasn't good enough to go on one of their albums, all because Supertramp—fucking Supertramp—pulled out at the last minute. You can't even really make the case that ...

  The 1985 Amy Heckerling film National Lampoon's European Vacation opens with the Griswald family competing for cash and prizes on the fictitious game show Pig in a Poke . The Griswalds, having already won some impressive prizes, are presented with a choice: walk away with their winnings or "be a pig" and vie for the top prize. Clark W. Griswald (Chevy Chase) decides on the family's behalf to be a pig. The family go on to accidentally win the top prize, which turns out to be an all-expenses-paid tour of Europe and hilarity, as the saying goes, ensues. The scene pokes fun at a number of clichés found in American television game shows. There's the pedantry and self-satisfaction of some  Jeopardy contestants. There's the creepiness of Richard Dawson's insistence on kissing each female contestant on Family Feud . Then there's the dilemma over whether the Griswalds will quit while they're ahead or "be a pig". In game show after game show— W...

  In  The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie , Plankton (Mr. Lawrence) hatches a scheme to steal the Krabby Patty secret formula, distribute mind-control helmets as a free gift with his knockoff Krabby Patties, and achieve world domination. In a tense scene, Squidward Tentacles (Rodger Bumpass) reveals that he is onto Plankton's scheming. " You may have hoodwinked everyone else in this backwater town, but you can't fool me. I listen to public radio." When the film was released in 2004, National Public Radio (NPR) couldn't resist the temptation to play that particular quote during their review of the movie. I am—and have been for decades—a fan of NPR and public radio in general. My enjoyment of NPR is probably informed by my experiences as a shortwave listener; the pacing and presentation style of NPR more closely resembles the international shortwave broadcasters that I grew up with than that of US-based commercial broadcast...