There seems to be two main groups of shortwave listeners: the dx'ers
who do marvellous feats of hearing weak stations, and the program
listener who wants to listen to the program material on a clear station
with good reception. My comments are directed to those listeners who
can't find any of their old favourite commentators anywhere on the
shortwave bands. People like Chuck Harder, Bo Gritz, and Robby Noel.
Because of a sprained knee, I was bedridden for a few days with only my
bedside (dx 394) short-wave radio ( and two vintage laptops: an IBM 380
ED and a Macintosh Powerbook 3400c.
Radio reception was terrible: selective fading, auroral garbling,
weak signals, and lack of programs to listen to. For some reason
(divine?) most of the stations that were clear were religious with EWTN
rock solid. After Brother Stair had taught me how to spell
Walterborough several times, I gave up and turned to the laptops to see
what I could find.
The two laptops had similar speeds(180 mhz), memories (50 mb), and
operating systems (win 98se and OS 8.5). To make a long story short,
the Mac was essentially useless, being unable to decode any audio site.
Nothing pointed out Apple's plan of planned obsolescence as much as
trying to load any Mac programs that would run on OS 8.5. Even the old
browser, IE 5.1 had to be supplied by Microsoft, Apple having nothing
to offer. No wonder they are moving to an Intel CPU. Kudos to Microsoft
for letting old machines run on new software and old software run on
new machines.
The old IBM, came through with flying colors, (if a little slowly)
and loaded everything I wanted. When installed, every program ran
properly. For the benefit of others with vintage machines, these were
the programs I loaded:
Winamp 9, Shoutcast, Quicktime (the Mac wouldn't even load its own
program),real player RP7U-S~L.exe ( to avoid all the spybots and popups
in later versions) ( get it from jmcanneyscience.com website), winmedia
9, IE6, Netscape 7.2 (to avoid most of the virii). It had about a 2 gig
hard drive and all these programs used up about 40%.
This whole effort was triggered by the disappearance of Robby Noel
from Genesis and its transmitters just as I hit the sack. I like to
listen to Robby: his view that we are all going to hell in a handbasket
seems quite reasonable to me and I like to have my prejudices
refreshed. I enjoyed finding his website and the blogs and streaming
audio, and later on, Chuck Harder's mellifluous tones were heard once
again as he touted his new satellite system. The session ended with the
infamous Bo Gritz who now lives in the southwest, rarely visiting his
real estate development in Idaho, "Almost Heaven"
To find a lost pundit, go to Google and type in the name. The
pundits are all out there doing something with microphones, it is the
nature of the beast. I find Shoutcast to be quite convenient and it
integrates nicely with winmedia.
Although there were some buffering gaps with winmedia, in general
the IBM could handle a 32 bit stream and gave much clearer audio than
did the short wave radio. Some sites where you can find pundits:
-Shoutcast (in talk)
-rbn
-Americanewsnet.com
-patriot radio newshour
-eaglesup.com
-talk star radio network
-republic broadcasting network

I think the rising cost of energy is making powerful short wave
stations too expensive and the trend to the internet will continue. I
was surprised to find so many of the old pundits still holding forth
and that I was able to listen to them so clearly, and it made the four
days in bed pass very pleasantly. For those who have difficulty hearing
Coast to Coast, they are on the net as is Imus.