KGB

[secondchoice]

A deceased family friend who was a former Eastern Airlines pilot who started out flying prop planes in the 1930s and ended flying 727's told me that often they would check their navigation at night in the prop days when they flew around storms by vectoring commercial AMs stations. He said between WSM, WLW, WWL and WSB you could always check your location in the Southeast. The early receivers were analog so an ID was comforting to the flight crew in a dark cockpit. Also commercial piloting if done correctly can be very boring. Call letters at radio stations were "important" to him then. Now with GPS are they still using VORs?According to a documentary I saw on the History Channel, the Japanese listened to one of the Hawaiian stations on their way to Pearl Harbor. I don't know if they had the loop to vector on the Zero but the some of the DC 3 photos I have seen had the loop.

 

[CTListener]

Good Lord! (if I may permit myself to borrow the catchphrase of a regular poster who hasn't commented in this thread yet)

 

[davideduardo]

Good Lord! (if I may permit myself to borrow the catchphrase of a regular poster who hasn't commented in this thread yet)

Good Lord, squared.

 

[Yabadabado1]

Answer: You wouldn't and (as David said) most people don't.

Yes, I would. And stations out of the U.S. also, more so in the winter months than summer because I'm running a seasonal business in the summer as well as some announcing. About the only local station I listen to regularly is on the far left side of the dial and non-commercial and even then I usually listen to it only when I am driving somewhere in my car. I basically have quit listening to local commercial stations because they repeat the same damn songs over and over and over to the point where I have the urge to drive my car into a bridge pillar to end the madness. I scan the dial every once in a while and one week "Majic" had the same Billy Joel song on at the same damn time of the day for three days in a row! [and strangely I was listening to the online stream of an Irish station when the DJ ID'd himself an he had the same last name as I was born with-adoption has a way of changing that-and after a long email conversation it turns out we were related by some ancient ancestors-meaning sometime late 1800s- of my dad. We didn't keep in touch though, he either left the station or was terminated and I lost track of him.]

 

[davideduardo]

Yes, I would. And stations out of the U.S. also, more so in the winter months than summer because I'm running a seasonal business in the summer as well as some announcing. About the only local station I listen to regularly is on the far left side of the dial and non-commercial and even then I usually listen to it only when I am driving somewhere in my car. I basically have quit listening to local commercial stations because they repeat the same damn songs over and over and over to the point where I have the urge to drive my car into a bridge pillar to end the madness. I scan the dial every once in a while and one week "Majic" had the same Billy Joel song on at the same damn time of the day for three days in a row!

To put things in perspective, when people had iPods, a study was done of how many songs constituted "variety" based on the number of ones on their device: it was less than 300.

 

[radiofan2023]

Yes, I would. And stations out of the U.S. also, more so in the winter months than summer because I'm running a seasonal business in the summer as well as some announcing. About the only local station I listen to regularly is on the far left side of the dial and non-commercial and even then I usually listen to it only when I am driving somewhere in my car. I basically have quit listening to local commercial stations because they repeat the same damn songs over and over and over to the point where I have the urge to drive my car into a bridge pillar to end the madness. I scan the dial every once in a while and one week "Majic" had the same Billy Joel song on at the same damn time of the day for three days in a row! [and strangely I was listening to the online stream of an Irish station when the DJ ID'd himself an he had the same last name as I was born with-adoption has a way of changing that-and after a long email conversation it turns out we were related by some ancient ancestors-meaning sometime late 1800s- of my dad. We didn't keep in touch though, he either left the station or was terminated and I lost track of him.]

 

[Yabadabado1]

To put things in perspective, when people had iPods, a study was done of how many songs constituted "variety" based on the number of ones on their device: it was less than 300.

I never had an ipod so I have no idea how many songs could have been loaded on one, assuming you're talking about early versions that may not have had much storage on them. At least for me, I loaded up USB drives and plugged them into my car radio USB port and I know I could pretty much drive 12+ hours or more and never have a song repeat. But then again I also took the time out to scan the dial to see if their were any interesting stations to listen to.

And last two day [8/21-22] were interesting days. The non-commercial station I listen to was breaking up pretty bad with another station cutting into it so started dialing around and ended up getting stations at almost every position on the FM dial. Most seemed to be coming in from a swath that was southwest to east-NE pattern with a few popping in from a NW direction. Usually it only lasts for an hour or two when it happens, but it was still going from late afternoon well into the evening and was even stronger on the 22nd

 

[Yabadabado1]

View attachment 5568

You smell something bad? [and that made me laugh.]

 

[davideduardo]

I never had an ipod so I have no idea how many songs could have been loaded on one, assuming you're talking about early versions that may not have had much storage on them.

The point of the study was to show that, even if one could have a thousand or more songs on the system, the average person had well under 300. That supports the real radio meaning of "variety" which is "only songs I like and none that I dislike".

At least for me, I loaded up USB drives and plugged them into my car radio USB port and I know I could pretty much drive 12+ hours or more and never have a song repeat. But then again I also took the time out to scan the dial to see if their were any interesting stations to listen to.

100 songs is about 350 minutes, give or take. That is about 6 hours. "Just under 300 songs" is good for about 16 to 18 hours.

 

[ercjncpr]

A deceased family friend who was a former Eastern Airlines pilot who started out flying prop planes in the 1930s and ended flying 727's told me that often they would check their navigation at night in the prop days when they flew around storms by vectoring commercial AMs stations. He said between WSM, WLW, WWL and WSB you could always check your location in the Southeast. The early receivers were analog so an ID was comforting to the flight crew in a dark cockpit. Also commercial piloting if done correctly can be very boring. Call letters at radio stations were "important" to him then. Now with GPS are they still using VORs?According to a documentary I saw on the History Channel, the Japanese listened to one of the Hawaiian stations on their way to Pearl Harbor. I don't know if they had the loop to vector on the Zero but the some of the DC 3 photos I have seen had the loop.

Hence the creation of the Conelrad emergency broadcast system