My artistic juices flowed all over with these machines -- they have a 2 minute looping digital recorder inside. For around a half hour yesterday, 1700AM and 530AM had me saying "ignore this message, this is a test" over and over and over. Think of the possibilities! I could read an entire page of "I Am" to it, let it loop as continuous poetry all day long. I could go absurd and record the "We're sorry, your call could not be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again" lady and let it play all day long. I could go so far as to hook up a computer with a text-to-voice program which reads an IRC chatroom into the transmitter (it also has a live input on it). I could set up parking-lot concerts, where the audience listens on their car radio a'la a drive-in movie to avoid noise ordinace violations.

The problem is, there isn't an audience out there randomly checking the AM wavelength. My range is barely a block, so there'd have to be an enormous coincidence for anyone to actually hear it. These transmitters are designed for sationary, constant use, like national park information, info on homes for sale, or specials for your store. These examples are all accompanied by a sign describing the purpose and presence of the station. In order for my ministation to be heard, there'd have to be quite a bit of advertisment to get an audience. Consistency would be required to keep it going - unlike my webpage stuff, there's no worldwide audience to hear my broadcasts. I'd have to rely on the people driving by my home (or office, if I can rig up a portable power supply), or hook up with some media source to promote my service and physically bring listeners to me. So, it looks very unlikely that anything will come of them.

But, man, it would be so cool!

I remember reading about a pirate radio station in Ohio (this was 12 years ago or so) that stuck in my mind for two reasons. 1)The sole operator of the staion was blind and 2) when he didn't want to broadcast personally he would put the local police band radio in front of a mike and broadcast that. His transmiter was more powerful than a garage door opener, but not by much. The signal could be heard clearly throughout the apartment he lived in and it gave anyone w/ an AM/FM radio the ability to hear police calls going out. If they knew the frequency that he was using on that particular day.

--busmun, 6/26/2002 17:49:42