radio planet

Bizarre good luck today when I was buying a couple of light bulbs. The local Curry's where I bought the bulbs (halogen specials not sold in Tesco) also had a pile of these little radios on sale- reduced to 1/3 of their original price. The interesting thing is its an Internet radio. As rashbre central is bathed in enough wifi to fry a chicken, I thought I'd give it a try.

In the store I looked at the deceptive lack of sockets aound the back, noticed the little bass duct and a headphone socket, so I took a punt and brought one back to base.

And its plug and go. It found a stack of the local wifi signals, asked for the WEP passwords and then proceeded to download about 6,000 radio channels of the entire planet, sorted into countries and genre.

So I dialled a couple I knew: KFOG of San Francisco and Whole Wheat Radio of Alaska, then listened to a few at random from Tokyo and SWF3 from Germany. Sound quality is fine for a small radio. Tuning so many stations is a little laborious, but its kinda fun to have quite good quality world radio for less than a tank of gas in the car. And it somehow found my iTunes library too and lets me select from that and build playlists.

I like the sort of analogue pioneering spirit of it- only less than 10,000 users globally at the moment. Three years and all radio will probably be like it.