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Monday, November 4, 2002
Early erection results 
| | [Later...] And now it's been Slashdotted. Whoa. Hey, and so has Vivato (one frequent blog link contributor works there). |
That's one out of every 57
Nice works
| | One of the best political sites on the Web is e.thepeople.org, which has done an outstanding job of taking the conversation imperative from Cluetrain and making it work in the political marketplace. |
And there's still more to come
Repreciating radio
| | When you live in the hills and mountains of California, you can move a few hundred feet and get a whole different set of FM stations. We moved a mile (by air) from a Montecito Valley to a Santa Barbara hillside, and the difference is radical. |
| | FM sounds best when the transmitter is within sight of the receiver. If you live within sight of Mt. Wilson in Los Angeles, for example, everything that comes from up there is loud and clear. This is true for pretty much the whole LA basin, the San Gabriel Valley, San Fernando Valley and Northern Orange County. Stand on Mt. Wilson (something I highly recommend on a clear day), and everything you see is served well by the farm of antennas radiating signals from up there. |
| | Other regions aren't so lucky. Seattle and San Francisco don't have the equivalent of Mt. Wilson. Without an ideal transmitter site, every station has terrain shadows where its signal sucks. |
| | Santa Barbara is like that, too. |
| | Where we used to live in Montecito, we could see nine Santa Barbara FM transmitters on Gibraltar Peak, which loomed high above the house, about two miles away. Those all came in fine. Everything else was marginal at best. |
| | Now we live at exactly the same elevation (500 feet), but with a spectacular view of downtown Santa Barbara, plus most of the Channel Islands. But not an FM station in sight. |
| | There is a clear view across the ocean to San Diego, however. Even though the San Diego stations' transmitters are below the horizon (and about 150 miles away by air), they come in quite well. |
| | All the stations on Gibraltar Peak are behind our hill, and sound terrible. We're also in shadow from Broadcast Peak, the other local transmitter site. (Here's a nice rundown of all the AMs and FMs in town.) |
| | One upside, however, is discovering KPBS/89.5, the NPR affiliate in San Diego. "A Way With Words" has become a must-hear for me on weekends while I'm putting around my office. |
| | Soon as I leave the house, of course, I lose KPBS, along with most of the other San Diego stations. Such is the nature of radio life in the hills here. |
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