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| Thursday, December 27, 2001 |
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Happy blog year 
| | I met Dean many years ago in the Broadcast Professionals forum on Compuserve, where we were both wordy gadflies. Dean was much more of a pro than I was, and both of us are now long gone from that business, although we'll probably never leave its orbit completely. Like athletes' foot, you never really get rid of the Radio Thing. |
Still better than cursing the darkness, I guess
| | I wondered if anyone has attained enlightenment as a direct result of Internet conversations... |
Have a heart
| | A single heartfelt email exchange can create a deep bond, which can be deepened over time. I have experienced this and it affirms the popular saying that "Words from the heart enter the heart". We need to speak from the heart, maybe not all the time, but certainly some (or most) of the time. |
| | This morning's paper carried a picture of an Israeli boy crying for his lost brother, a policeman shot by Palestinian gunmen. It's all heart, and I can't get it out of my mind. |
| | It's been twenty years since a boy named Chris Baker, the son of good friends and a playmate of my oldest boy, was killed by a gun fired by another playmate. That kid found the gun in his parents' bedroom, where it was kept for 'protection.' Chris's father said "I have a hole in my heart that will never go away." I can still see Chris running around his house in his little league uniform. And I can still see the hole in his dad's heart, even though we lost touch years ago. Chris was nine years old. He was an only child. |
| | We are all only children. And we only make holes in others' hearts when we speak or act from the holes in our own. |
So far away, so easy to like
| | Wannabegirl is an fun blog by Firda, a "well-meaning, butally honest, blunt, sarcastic girl in her late twenties." She also happens to blog from Indonesia. Found her on DayPop (4 of the top 20). |
Toy story
| | After throwing  me off the trail by complaining about the surfeit of electronics that overpopulate my life, my wife gave me — a Radio Freak of the First Water — the ultimate unexpected Christmas gift: the Grundig Satellit 800 Millennium. This mother is as big as a tackle box and as heavy as a piece of furniture (about 24 pounds). In addition to a huge handle on top it has two large grips on the front that work like roll bars to protect the knobs and dials when you rock the mother forward onto its face while you attach antennas to its back or load its capacious innards with D cells. |
| | My wife doesn't want me to keep it unless I'm happy with it. So I've been kicking its tires over the last couple days, as often as I get a chance. |
| | Tonight I sat up on the roof comparing it with my incumbent all-band companion, the Radio Shack DX-398, which is really the Sangean ATS-909. (Full details on the DX-398/ATS-909 are here.) |
| | I got the DX-398/ATS-909 after we moved to Santa Barbara and I found that I couldn't get Howard Stern on KLSX/97.1 out of Los Angeles in our new kitchen, or anywhere on any of the radios in our house. Nor could I get most of the other L.A. FM stations, including the public stations I wanted most: KPPC/89.3 and KCRW/89.9 (rebroadcast somewhat more locally on KCRU/89.1 out of Oxnard). Nor the L.A. sports stations on 1110 and 1150 AM. After some trial and error with other candidates, the DX-398 did the trick. Not perfectly, but well enough. Best of all, it's small: about the size of your average O'Reilly book, with about half the mass (30 oz.). In other words, less than 1/10th the size and heft of the Grundig. And it's pretty cheap, too. |
| | Reviews on the Grundig run to extremes. The much-respected Radio Nederland panned it terribly. Just as nasty was the 2001 edition of the World Radio TV Handbook (which I keep on a shelf and was the first source I consulted — it made me cringe). But apparently some early production models sucked big-time. More recent reviews, such as eHam.net's, are quite positive. Newsgroups are all over the map, but mostly positive. |
| | The AM-band reception is about even with the DX-398/ATS-909, which is pretty darn good. With an external antenna it's far better. The FM reception is the best I've witnessed on anything other than my old Yamaha receiver. It's remarkably sensitive and selective — and immune to overload by local stations, an achievement I've never witnessed in a home or a portable digital receiver of any kind. This matters because about half the Santa Barbara FMs are right above our house on Gibraltar Peak. On shortwave it blows the DX-398/ATS-909 away, clearly receiving endless stuff the DX-398/ATS-909 can't even find. And it has an aircraft band, too, so it picks up chat between air traffic control and every airplane in sight. |
| | The display is as big as the one on a gas pump, and lights up when you touch the tuning knob. (Though it would have been nice if Grundig went one more step and lit up some of the other controls too). The whip antenna is as long as a fishing pole, which is a real plus for short wave. And the readout extends far to the right of the decimal point, for the finest tuning I've ever used. Entering frequencies on the keypad is also better than easy: you punch them in and don't even need to hit Enter: it just goes where you want or gives you an error message. |
| | On the downside, the bass is a bit disappointing for something so damn huge. The speaker is only 4" across, on a front panel with room for an 8" speaker — or even two of them. On headphones the DX-398/ATS-909 actually sounds better. The Grundig seems a lot less immune to noise than the DX-398/ATS-909 on the AM band. And it would be real nice if the thing would scan to the next station on any of the bands, as does the DX-398/ATS-909 and every car radio with a digital display manufactured since 1984. The Grundig will only scan its several dozen memorized frequencies, which are organized in roughly the same infuriating schema used by Motorola cell phones (a series 2-digit memory positions that make no sense and you can't remember). I've tried for two days to figure it all out and I've given up. The DX-398/ATS-909 isn't much better in this department (it has its own nearly incomprehensible preset storage system), but at least I successfully entered a bunch of stations on that unit before I forgot how and gave up on changing them. The Grundig also lacks RDS (Radio Data Service), which is a standard feature in European radios. It's also featured in the GM rental car my sister is driving around as well as the Grundig's smaller predecessor, the Satellit 700. But I don't miss it.. The DX-398/ATS-909 does have RDS, or a subset of it, and few stations in the U.S. take advantage of RDS's features (which displays the station's name, format, current song, precise time signals, etc.). |
| | But those are quibbles. This sucker is huge and beautiful, and I'm keeping it. |
| | Now I just have to find a place to put it. |
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