Radio Re-Volt: Broadcasting For The Common Man

An anonymous reader writes "Well, almost for the common man. This Wired article describes a project of the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis to teach people about the power of radio through the use of cheap low-power FM transmitters. Although each transmitter is limited to a range of about a block, they're cheap enough that I could see them being spread out across a city to cover it with a signal. It'd be interesting to do something like that and feed these inexpensive networks via a netcast. You could use something like this to air programming that commercial stations won't broadcast because it's not commercially viable or because it doesn't fit in with the interests of big media. You can read the above article or go directly to the Radio Re-Volt Web site."

Comments

Oh, I get it...

[rts008]

"Radio Blogs"...I should probably be scared, yet somehow I'm fascinated!

A further reminder. . .

[TimmyDee]

That culture and new ideas can come from "that place you fly over on a SFO-JFK flight."

Re:Key question?

[zipoff]

And I think you do need a license to operate a CB radio.

No you don't.

Citizens Band (CB) Radio Service is a private two-way voice communication service for use in personal and business activities of the general public. Its communications range is from one to five miles.

Licensing
License documents are neither needed nor issued and there are no age or citizenship requirements. As long as you use only an unmodified FCC certificated CB unit, you are provided authority to operate a CB unit in places where the FCC regulates radio communications.

Black==White; Slavery==Freedom;

[Cryofan]

What so many people are missing about the importance of this idea is that the mass media has created a world for us. Big Money used the media to convince Americans that lower taxes for the rich and lower trade barriers and tariffs were going to be good for Americans. Those ideas were found laughable by most Americans 40 years ago. But when the billionaires and corporations fund think tanks and foundations with billions of dollars, funding and developing rightwing talent, they were able to convince Americans to hold beliefs that were actually detrimental to their own well being.

THat is why this kind of grassroots media is so important.

Re:Black==White; Slavery==Freedom;

[Cryofan]

you wrote:

No not really. There as been public access TV on cable systems for years.


Interesting insight into your logical processes: you seem to think that public access TV is as influential as all the other mass media networks, just because it exists at all. Go figger!

It is mostly crap. The Web is mostly drek as well.
If you give the average person the ability to publish what ever they want guess what you get mostly crap.


How about we tax some of these rich people and use that money to provide social services to people, like healthcare and housing and stipends to video and radio content providers? I bet if you could award $25K/year to 10K Americans who are interested in providing content to public access tv for free, and then provided the airwave space to run that content, you could build interest and viewership. And you would get content that would present viewpoints that favor the little guy over the celebrity, the solo proprietor over the corporation, the labor union over the CEO, the tariffs and trade barriers over the Race to the Bottom, the progressive taxation system over the REogressive taxation system, and the universal healthcare system over the predatory healthcare system.


As to the whole BIG MONEY/BIG MEDIA are running your life... I find it strange how many people think that they are so much smarter than everyone else that they have to protect the rest of the world from being fooled. Ever think that they might be just as informed as you but just dissagree.



No, that never occured to me. I have always known that I am the most intelligent creature ever to exist in the universe, and I will never be surpassed by any other entity, period.

(for you libertarians--the above was sarcasm....)

Umm....I WAS one of you, for years, for decades! I thought just you did! And I have always been quite the reader. Yet for almost 2 decades, I bought into the conservative/libertarian/neoliberal/corporatist mindset.

And I actually grew up in an era when many of the hardcore neoliberal ideas we see in favor today were actually found laughable by most Americans. It is much harder for younger people to see past the mass media smokescreen laid down over the last 30 years--you people grew up in it. It is your world that was created for you by the mass media.


BTW the Kerry Tax "CUT" for people that make under 200k is only a Tax cut if you have kids. It is an increase in the child tax credit and an education credit for College. Since my wife and I have no children it would be a tax increase for us even though we are making under the $200k. Trust no one. Question everything.


Well, I think taxes should be raised except for people making under 25K or so.

Re:Black==White; Slavery==Freedom;

[Anonymous Coward]

How about we tax some of these rich people and use that money to provide social services to people, like healthcare and housing and stipends to video and radio content providers?

You are a moron I take it. I'm one of those folks that, through hard work, good planning and God-given skill, make about $400K/year. At the current tax rate, I pay about $140K/year as do many of my peers. You say you're well read. Ever hear the statistic that 95% of the taxes are paid by the top 5% of Americans (I can't speak about other countries). Just how much of the "national income" for those institutions you mention (healthcare, etc) do you think comes from average Joe/Jane Blow through IRS-collected funds? Are you nuts or was your whole note sarcasm and I missed the tag. I'm tired of all the rhetoric equating well-off/rich with evil. While I feel an obligation to help the less fortunate, I think this is a feeling that should be shared by all, not just the top 5%. There's so much, "gimme, gimme, gimme" or "I'm entitled" out there.

Re:Black==White; Slavery==Freedom;

[ConceptJunkie]

Well said, Anonymous.

The irony is that the same group of people who insist we must forcibly take money from the rich and redistribute it are also statistically less likely to contribute to charities themselves. We can allow people who can afford to pay more do so without being punative about it.

I'm tired of people acting all morally superior by pretending that redistributing other people's money is charity. I'm tired of hearing that the government is giving you something by taxing you less. I get tired of hearing how the rich don't pay their share. The rich are the ones fueling the engine of our great economy, as well as our big, bloated government.

"Fair" would be if everyone paid the exact same amount, say $10000 per annum, for all the services our government provides. We are not one level removed from this level (which could be considered a certain percentage of income, say 17% across the board). We are not two levels removed from "fair" which would be a progressive tax where the richer pay a higher percentage. We are three levels removed because people are exempt from taxes for a good chunk of the average citizen's income. I'm all for closing loopholes, but it's rich people that make jobs, not the government, let's stop punishing the successful, especially those who take risks, succeeds and employ others as a result.

The government wastes more money than it would take to pay a decent salary to every poor person in the country, and there is no politician out there who seems to be seriously working to combat that. If we overthrew the education monopoly that forces poor people to remain poor by not allowing them a decent education we could put a huge dent in poverty by allowing the people who _want_ to work their way out every chance to do so. I'm lucky. I live in a town where the schools are excellent and teachers are professional and competent. Special education services, which my family has required, are well-funded and staffed by professionals who very effective, as well as being caring. I can't see how any student in this system, with a modicum of parental involvement, couldn't succeed.

But I can afford to live where the schools are good. It's funny that the same people who insist we need to throw more money at schools run by incompetant and corrupt bureaucracies and unions would deny those students affected the opportunity to change schools? If throwing money at the problem worked, Washington, DC would have the best schools in the country, perhaps the world, instead of being that city a borderline third-world country. How many members of Congress who have children in the Washington have them in public schools there? I wouldn't be surprised if it was zero. We can see that sons of Senators often become senators, and sons of Presidents can become Presidents, but it would be also nice for more people to have a chance to rise up from more humble origins by having that good first step. We need to quit chasing the false and destructive dream of equal outcomes (achieved by jiggering the criteria we measure) and focus on equal opportunity. Some people will fail no matter what because they lack will even without handouts sapping it away, but with the right opportunities, most people can succeed. You're not entitled to a good living, you're entitled to bust your ass and have a decent opportunity to make a good living.

It's not "out of sync audio"

[poptones]

it's "out of sync transmitters." If you have two adjacent transmitters on the same band and the phase of the two signals is not in sync you will get multipath distortion - this is what causes all that shit you hear on FM when you drive through the city near big buildings. Now imagine you're surrounded by 100 signal sources, all of them very low power, all of them swooshing in and out of tune (because these are just cheap devices, not even carefully calibrated transmitters with stable oscillators).

It just don't work the way the OP "imagined" it. This isn't digital, it's not a "software" problem.

Re:sync

[Ford Prefect]

How does it work out buffering and syncing? How does it avoid "ghosts" or echos in the broadcast when a radio is simulateously received broadcasts from two base stations broadcasting the same broadcast on the same frequency, one getting the source broadcast over a DSL line with some latency, the other over fibre with much less latency?

Simple - the naïve concepts of universal free speech over an inherently limited electromagnetic spectrum will overcome the physics-induced difficulties of multiple transmitters on the same frequency.

It doesn't matter if a technology is completely unsuited for a proposed mode of usage; all that matters is that it's the thought that counts. With a good heart, bandwidth shall be greater than what is physically allowed, and overlapping FM broadcasts shall not encounter the same problems discovered years ago by broadcast engineers!

I've got a radio astronomy background. The electromagnetic spectrum is an incredibly valuable resource, and is heavily regulated for a bloody good reason. Don't mess with it.

Coordinated Broadcasts

[nurb432]

Coordinating with other 'micro broadcasters' so that you blanket a city, might pose a legal problem.. Since the intent was for you to have limited coverage of your content..

No, I don't have the law handy, but .. I would bet there is something in there to account for such an idea.

Re:Or you could broadcast on the internet.

[Hoplite3]

The trouble with web "broadcast" is that it isn't a broadcast. You have to spend bandwidth for every lister connecting. The beauty of radio is that you can send one signal to everyone at once. Also, it is difficult to get proper internet connections in moving vehicles for the price of a radio receiver. If there were a similar initiative where I'm at, I'd love to operate a transmitter.

Yes, exactly as Declared at Independence

[Baldrson]

You are quoting the Declaration of Independence which lays out the foundation for the rest of the official documents of the United States and itself is founded on its first paragraph:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

It is unambiguous. Equality does not imply integration and indeed must allow separation. All men are equal by the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God to separation entirely at their discretion. This is the belief that most directly contradicts allowance for slavery in Article IV, Section 2, clause 3 of the United States Constitution, and thereby allowed the Union to attack and win over the Confederacy by undercutting the legal legitimacy of the Confederacy to declare separation when they themselves would not allow the separation of slaves from their "owners".

Yes. You're right. I believe in the equal right of any people to separate from others as declared in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. It overrides what any Men may put down on paper.

Indeed the entire point of the First Amendment to the US Constitution was to minimize the need for war against or between governmental entities by allowing people to peaceably separate from one another to the greatest extent possible within the laboratory of the States. The founders understood scientific method -- and the need for control groups to discover what works and what doesn't work in social experiments, involving beliefs about how we should live our lives, as well as physical experimentation. If you cannot allow people to voluntarily enter into their own experiments and impose upon them your perverse ideas of what constitutes "equality" then you have just declared war on the Declaration of Independence and on freedom itself.

That they had been corrupted by slavery in no way detracts from the importance of their overall vision.

Re:"Beliefs?" Like "all men created equal?"

[Baldrson]

And what the FUCK does any of this have to do with "bootleg radio stations?"

It has everything to do with it only almost 70 years too late. The Telecommunications Act of 1934, by recentralizing control of disemination of ideas under the new technologies of broadcast, undid the Guttenberg revolution. The Guttenberg revolution was the undoing of the theocratic control of Europe which was maintained largely through monopoly on the disemination of ideas through the written word. It was the theocracy of the pre-Reformation era that controled the armies of monks who scribed the books and handed them out to the priesthood to interpret for their "flocks".

You are simply a new form of "sheep" indoctrinated by the new theocracy that has grown up in the centralization of media.