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

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.

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.