I am a terrible insomniac and used to listen to shortwave radio via earbuds at night to drown out the dialog in my head...nothing like the BBC World Service, or Radio Tirana Albania to drift off to...but, with the demise of so many international broadcasters, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and dwindling budgets for expensive SWBC facilities, I had to find something else besides that to listen to...I even used to listen to a bunch of my ham buddies on 3880 or 7290 AM, or 3870 SSB, but most of the fellows I knew have moved on, it seems...I also got into listening to Art Bell, and Cost to Coast AM after that, but since that starts at midnight local and I really needed to try and get to sleep earlier, something else needed to be found that didn't get my blood pressure racing listening to what trouble we were in due to this that or the or the other bonehead move by this politician that the other talk radio stations always seemed to have....
Enter Old Time Radio!
I use
Winamp with Windoze computers and
Shoutcast, search in the Genre search box for "old time radio" and you'll come up with a bunch of "stations"....
I use a couple of mini FM transmitters that I have hooked up to two different computers that I stream two different streams on two different frequencies allowing me to choose between,say,
Antioch OTR and
Audio Noir from the Nakamichi table radio that now sits on my side of the bed, I like having the selection should I not care for one program or the other...
One of the computers is a
PcLinux box, so I use the
Shoutcast website and connect to the streams via Firefox and Kaffeine...the code monkeys did some monkeying around with the Shoutcast website recently and Streamtuner for Linux started giving me no results when I would do searches by genre...bummer, it worked a lot like Winamp....
One of these days, though, I'm either going to build or buy a transmitter for the AM band and lets me use, say my old National NC-183D to good effect...
The Sony SW-77, and the 2010 before that, served me well for years for SWBC listening, but now sit unused in the bottom drawer of the side table next to the bed...guess it's time to put them on ebay...
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