Short Wave Magazine - Early Days Listening Online

Back awhile, I wrote of the impracticalities of owning something like a RACAL RA17 due to the space it took up.

I justified it by saying that a fairly standard PC takes up about the same space, only to find my eye drawn to the thing all the time. There can be nothing uglier in the house than the switched-off PC. Or do I mean powered-down? Unbooted?

Anyway, I now know why husbands justify the home computer by shopping online for her and surf the Web for him.

I can't think of anything worse than the Tesco van backing up your drive taking the one branch off the ornamental cherry that supports your long-wire aerial and delivering unto you five litres of bleach when what you really wanted was cling peaches.

The PC has gone now. I have a laptop. Why they call them that I'll never know, you have to be deformed to have it on your lap. The sheer weight with the special long-life battery pack will require a steel pin in each knee - that phrase long-life obviously does not refer to me.

To write this piece I have a groin-top computer, a printer, power supplies everywhere, a modem to inflict digital tedium on a distant Editor who has never done me the slightest harm and a tray with tea and Hobnobs. I think that's what we ordered.

I wonder what you get if you put hobnob in a search engine? Anyway, my station now takes up the space of a decent train set or a couple of RACAL's with perhaps room for an 18 SET at the end.

And all these cables? Back in the quondam days of a radio youth, you could grab a wire and if it did not knock you through the serving hatch into your luxury diner with 1400 volts on the way to the most linear PA ever made, you could say what it is for.

The PA is linear is because I designed it and who will be listening at the seventh harmonic anyway? I digress.

All these wires seem acceptable on the PC but back in the shack, you'd be high on adhesive fumes, tripping over MDF off-cuts boxing them all in.

One chum who has given up on our hobby has gone all out on SKY and DVD, refers to his inter-connects as his little power station. His wife calls it something shorter.

Another chum used a printer cable as a towrope. It gets out of hand.

It's radio for me. The AR7030 is the smallest wireless I have ever had, its installation comparatively wireless. The SKY chum says I can do Internet Radio on the PC and I have tried it.

Pages of stations are listed when you click the RADIO folder, click on one of them and you already know all about it before the audio loads. You can read that WXXX is LA's foremost FM rocker, playing yesterday's hits tomorrow.

No sound yet? Ah, yes. That's because the Real Audio player has gone off somewhere else to get an update. It now tells me it can handle embedded test messages and so to a distorted rendition of Don't Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult, a little box comes up to tell me that WXXX is LA's foremost FM rocker, playing yesterday's hits tomorrow and anytime I'm in town, remember to call The Krazy Kow Diner for all I can eat for 6.99

That audio. When it's good, it can be very good. Most of the time it either drops out or sounds like a Dalek singing in the shower. Add that to the poor quality of add-on PC speakers and its back to short wave for me.

Turn the dial and the usual suspects are broadcasting on the same channels they have for years. Old friends. Turn the dial through the channels in between and you have no idea what will come up.

As I write this, Africa No 1 is romping in, some zipping guitar stuff a bit like Bert Weedon on acid. I had no idea it was here even after forty years of listening. SWLing is about serendipity.

You choose your Internet station on the PC. On the radio, the ionosphere makes the selection - the station chooses you. All you need is an open mind to take on what conditions bestow upon you.

The cost! My brief flirtation with Web Radio was done over an 0845 dial-up which Lycos said was free. I have just paid the phone bill.

For the same price, I could have flown out to LA, taken a cab to WXXX, married the DJ who promised yesterday's hits tomorrow, divorced her in Vegas and made off with half of our CD collection, flown home in tears and still had enough money to bore the locals in the pub on how fickle DJ's can be and CD's are cheaper over there anyway.

One day we will have the bandwidth to allow good radio by modem. One day, a Telecomms firm will forget its OFTEL membership and give we Children Of The New Frontier 0800 rates.

Until then, I think I'll delete the dial-up connection on this PC, pack up the cable spaghetti if I can get it all in the case, then it's back to radio for me. Apparently we need the table space for something called lunch.

One last modem call, the one that mails this in. They have got to pay me for this one; its cost me 0.43p to get it to them.