Darkoshi

This is Halloween. Now that I've turned on some appropriately-genred radio, it feels a bit more like it.

I didn't buy treats to give out, nor decorate outside this year. I had a few reasons. I am still reminded of last year, putting up the decorations, and then Serena dying a few days before Halloween. So few kids even come in a normal year (last year 6 kids in 2 groups). It's in the middle of the week. The current hours I keep have me working till late at night. I have to get up early tomorrow morning.

Yet now I am procrastinating finishing my day's work, because I want Halloween to be more Halloween. Halloween is such an ephemeral holiday.

Earlier this month I applied an orange/purple/green color scheme to the tree of lights. It is in the other room.

Scrolling through the whole over-the-air FM radio dial, not any Halloween music, not even on "Steve FM". One PBS channel is playing what might be vaguely Halloween-themed music, but not of the chipper kind. I'm switching back to streaming.

Oh, it is also the start of Diwali. Happy Diwali! Happy Halloween!

I wondered about that yesterday, as I switched from listening to a local radio station via the Audials streaming app on my phone, to my (over-the-air/OTA) portable radio.

Some parts of that, I could measure myself with my "Kill-a-watt" meter - the energy usage of the radio, and of the external computer speakers that I often connect my phone to. Measuring the energy usage of the phone itself is harder due to its built-in battery. I could check how much it uses while charging, but that wouldn't tell me how much extra it uses when streaming music vs being in stand-by mode.

The broadcast side can also be considered. With over-the-air transmitters, the energy required for the broadcast is the same regardless of how many people tune in to listen. With streaming, I imagine the energy usage increases depending on the number of devices that connect to the stream. If a station transmits both ways at the same time as many do, choosing to connect to the stream won't reduce the power used by the OTA broadcast.

There are many variables and things to be considered. But I did a web search and was pleasantly surprised to get several on-topic pages in the results. Of course, I don't have time to read them all, but it looks interesting.

BBC Radio Services: How much energy is used to deliver and listen to radio?

...we explored four ‘what if…?’ scenarios over 20 years, from 2018 to 2037, which were:

Business as Usual - All platforms retained
Digital Only - Switching off AM and FM from 2030
DAB/IP Only - Switching off AM, FM and DTV radio from 2030
IP Only - Switching off AM, FM, DAB and DTV radio from 2030

All switch-off scenarios showed energy-saving potential compared to ‘Business as Usual’. Out of the scenarios modelled, the ‘DAB/IP Only’ case led to the largest energy reduction of 599 GWh, which was almost twice as much as the second-largest saving from ‘IP Only’ at 301 GWh. For the ‘Digital Only’ scenario, we estimated the smallest reduction of 176 GWh compared to ‘Business as Usual’. However, our results were sensitive to which devices people migrated to after switch-off. For example, a greater uptake in listening via television sets reduced the energy-saving potential in some scenarios.

Our most notable finding, demonstrated in both the baseline and scenario results, was that the biggest factor driving energy use was the standby power of radio sets and smart speakers - more so than the power of devices when they are turned on. Therefore, as a potential intervention, we simulated the removal of this standby energy across all our scenarios from 2021. In practice, this would mean people unplugging devices from their power source when not in use.
By testing this, we found an average energy saving of 38% across our scenarios, which was unprecedentedly large.

In that article, I also found this surprising:
The total energy required to prepare, distribute and consume BBC radio in our 2018 baseline was estimated to be 325 GWh, equivalent to 0.1% of UK electricity use that year.

0.1% is a small number, but still more than I'd have expected to be used just by the BBC radio services.

StackExchange: What is the energy efficiency between FM radio tower broadcasting over an area vs point to point streaming via Internet?

Techsurvey 2023 Shows Gap Between OTA And Streaming Listening Is Shrinking

WUSC, the University of South Carolina's college radio station, is having a fund-raiser week with a Wild West/Cowboy music theme.

I've been enjoying the music tonight. It's nostalgic for me.
Their home page (link above) has a "Listen Live" button at the top and a "Recently Played" playlist towards the bottom.

Every once in a while I wish their playlist stored more history, as I want to check what was playing at so-and-so time, since I enjoyed it but didn't check right away.
I think it shouldn't be hard to write some script to query the webpage every so often, and save off the data to a file, and post it somewhere. Maybe I'll have time to do that some day.

Radio Shack Radio Cassette Player model SCR-58.
Might add photos later.

This is the radio I got at work (last year?) when they were cleaning up old cubes and giving stuff away.

The tape player was working fine when I got it, and worked for letting me record the audio from I'm not sure how many cassettes to my computer. But then something in the tape mechanism started making a rattling noise whenever I press Play or Fast Forward.

So I opened up the case to see if it was something I could fix. The screws holding the back of the case on were each a different length, quite odd. Then I needed to remove a circuit board to get to the cassette parts. The screws to remove are all helpfully coated in a red color to make them easy to see. I got the one screw on that top circuit board removed. The only other red spot was on one of the wire connections of the varicon (aka variable capacitor tuner, from what I looked up). But I couldn't figure out how that piece could come out without possibly breaking things. It has several tiny screw heads on top, but they seem to be adjusting screws, not mounting screws. The bottom of the varicon and surrounding parts were coated in a waxy substance.

So I gave up on fixing the cassette player part of it and put it back together. It's still a great little radio. On the AM radio (which I don't usually tune in to as I never find anything good playing there), before it was even picking up some people talking in French! No one anywhere near here broadcasts in French that I know of. Could it be all the way from Cajun country? Or Haiti? Or a Caribbean island? Who knows. It was too faint to make out much and now I turned the dial and lost it.

And then I almost went to work without my laptop. But luckily, I noticed before driving off.

.


Yesterday I wanted to play some internet radio through my stereo system's speakers, via the audio cable I usually use for that purpose. The cable connects the laptop to the equalizer. The equalizer connects to the receiver via another cable with phono connectors. The speakers are connected to the receiver's speaker outputs, which are the spring-loaded kind that you stick the bare speaker wires into.

I noticed how much white noise was coming from the speakers, before turning the music on. There was also an annoying intermittent rumbling sound. With the radio playing at a low volume, the noise is still audible.

So then instead of listening to music, I messed with my audio system for a few hours. In the process, I came across this term: audio nervosa, which seemed amusingly apt.

The problem seems to be the receiver's speaker connections, not the speakers themselves. I cleaned all the dust out of the receiver's case, but that didn't help. Now I'm using my older set of speakers, which have phono connectors, connected to the equalizer's main-out jacks. The receiver's tape-out jack is connected to the equalizer's audio-in jacks. The laptop audio cable is connected to the equalizer's tape-in jacks.

This way, the speakers are blissfully silent until I turn the music on. A down-side is that I can no longer turn the receiver's radio on with just my remote control; I have to walk over and turn on the equalizer too. Before, I wasn't using the equalizer for the radio.

Another problem is figuring out where to position these speakers. I had been using these to prop up the other speakers (which are smaller and don't have a flat top) up higher, rather than them being directly on the floor. As a temporary solution, I now have the left speaker balanced on an open drawer, to put it at the same height as the other speaker, which is on the same table as the receiver.

A more significant downside is that the receiver's volume control doesn't control the radio volume at all now, and it is fairly loud. How did I not notice this yesterday? Maybe I'll need to change things around again after all, or replace something, or get an extra volume control (amplifier?) box.

Or sheesh, just put it back the way it was to begin with. Maybe.



Update: I now had the idea to connect a cable from the receiver's headphone output to the equalizer's input, as that should be controllable by the volume dial. I'm pretty sure I had done it that way before. But today, I'm not getting any sound that way. Although the sound does work with actual headphones plugged into the jack, but only the left channel... because I'm using a mono 3.5 to large jack adapter instead of a stereo one.. where did I put the stereo one...

Update #2: All fixed now. Found the stereo adapter. Laptop connects to receiver's CD-In jacks. Receiver's headphones-Out jack is connected to the equalizer's Audio-In jacks. Equalizer's Main-Out jacks are connected to the speakers. The receiver's volume control (including the one on its remote) can control the volume for everything. I can even still switch between the laptop audio and the radio with the remote, like I was able to do before. The big speakers are now sitting on top of the smaller speakers which are on the ground; they do have a flat enough surface after all. And no static noise coming from the speakers, woo-yeah!

Pink azaleas:

I've had this radio since about 1981. It still works well. It's much more viscerally satisfying to scroll through stations by turning the tuning knob, compared to modern radios with their seek and scan buttons. And it sounds just as good to me as my larger stereo receiver system does.

The clock display is blank in this video as the button battery went bad and I had to remove it. But after cleaning the battery compartment out and putting in a new battery, the clock still works too.




Video title: Sanyo M1950F Clock Radio Cassette Player
Posted by: Darkoshi
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qExlCPD_Ypk

Qiao's been playing Diablo III as part of this weekend's open beta test. It took several hours to download, and he had some server connection issues, but was able to play for a good part of the day. He's pleased with it. He had already suggested to me before that the game would make a good birthday present for him.

Me: Heard an unfamilar version of a familiar-sounding song on the radio, and liked it a lot. Decided to buy an MP3 version of it, if I could find it. Went online, found it, but listened to several other versions of it, because I liked it that much. Found 2 more versions of it that I liked. But now I'm having a hard time getting the tune out of my head, and feel sort of sick of it.

I am able to tune in to at least 41 over-the-air FM radio stations here. A few of them are faint or have static, but most get fairly good reception. If I moved my antenna I'd probably be able to pick up even more stations. So why do radios provide so few station presets? I have a shiny new radio/cd-player - it even has USB and MP3 audio input ports - but it only lets you save 20 FM stations in the presets. Would it be so difficult or expensive for the manufacturer to provide 99 (or more) instead of 20?

I don't like what is played on each and every station, so I wouldn't want to save them all in memory. But there *are* more than 20 stations which might occasionally play music I'd care to listen to.

If they made radios like they used to, with the round tuning dial, the presets wouldn't matter so much, as it would be relatively easy to flip the dial from one frequency to another. But with digital radios where you have to push up and down buttons to change frequencies 10 Mhz at a time, it's very inconvenient to tune in to stations that way. The automatic scanning/tuning tends to skip over more than half the stations, so I don't like using it.

And another thing. Why don't radios nowadays come with a battery port, so that items in memory can be preserved when the unit is unplugged or when the power goes out? This one says that the presets will be lost if the unit is left unplugged for a few days. My good old clock-radio-cassette-player from 1983 (abouts) has a long-life replaceable battery which keeps the clock working when it is unplugged. It still works, and I still use it! I don't have to worry about the power going out in the middle of the night, and having my alarm not come on in the morning because the time-settings got screwed up.

Oh, what am I complaining about. I hardly ever listen to the radio anymore anyway. I chose this one because it was free (a 15 year anniversary gift from my place of employment) and because it has USB and audio input ports, so I can hook my MP3 player up to it.

I've been working there 15 years. Early on, I considered quitting because they weren't giving me enough work to do, and I was bored silly and feeling guilty about passing time by doing things like writing down numbers from one to a thousand, using both hands. This year I've considered quitting because they've been giving me too much work to do.