Radios Next Golden Age

“The Ultimate Rule ought to be: ‘If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin’; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it’s shitty.’   The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don’t like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.”
― Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

Radio is a form of technological high magic. There is something about radio that stimulates the imagination; whether it’s tuning in to a distant station, or hearing something new that opens up a door onto a worthy topic of exploration, or transmits heavenly music, there is a mystery to radio that creates a strong pull over those who become enthralled by the medium.  Deindustrial fiction is already under radio’s thrall. Many of the stories I have read in Into the Ruins and New Maps have used radios, to the point where it has become one of the tropes of the genre. I think this points to the resilience of radio for our deindustrial futures, and I think it is worth exploring what the medium might yet become.

The word broadcasting comes to us from agriculture, and is used to describe a way for sowing seeds by scattering them over the soil rather than planting them in tidy rows. Radio is considered the first broadcast medium, for its distribution of audio to a dispersed audience over the airwaves. Though it is spread out wide as a form of mass communication, the effect of listening to radio is more one-on-one. Radio is intimate. Vibrations of a distant person’s voice are converted into traveling electromagnetic waves, then get reconverted into electrical impulses and come out of a speaker to vibrate the air within a listening space. It still remains magical to me after all these years.  To my mind, at its best, radio is on par with literature as a medium for sowing seeds in the imagination.  

Radio can be a literal theater of the imagination. Voices, sounds, and music edited together in a pleasing or thought-provoking way transport the listener to another region. Commercial interests and market forces have put a stranglehold on the medium, however. For the most part, you have to search out the community and college stations, the low-power stations, and even the pirate stations to find programs that are willing to break the self-inflicted format categories typical of the corporate ruled airwaves. Out on the fringes of the dial, and over the edge of what is normally considered acceptable in terms of what you are allowed to do, play and say at a station, are vast portions of imaginary spectrum that remain under-explored.
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These outlier shows are able to take risks that move the form forward without fear of reprisal. No one is paying them to be taste shapers by playing particular songs and they have no one to offend when exercising their freedom of speech because there are no image-sensitive sponsors paying the bills at these stations. These are directions radio would be free to go when the narrow bandwidth of acceptability imposed by advertising is removed. These under-explored areas are also ripe for retrovation. As our future societies downshift in response to being technologically overextended, the simpler decentralized infrastructure of radio will be due to make a comeback, ushering in its next golden age.   

FROM THE GOLDEN AGE TO GOLDEN ARCHES

The first golden age of radio was the decade between 1930 and 1940, with some bleed-over into the 1950s when television became the next big thing. Many of the shows that emerged during the golden age were born off the backs of successful vaudeville acts who brought their talent to the airwaves.  The popular pulp fiction of the time floated off its pages to be transformed into new iteration of theater: the radio play. This form of entertainment, where the voices of actors are heard but not seen, accompanied by incidental music and sound effects, is great for the imagination. Radio plays give free rein to listeners to visualize the story unfolding in their own distinct ways, similar to the way a story is imagined when reading. 

Television literally tells a vision of what is in the head of a director. It takes away the chance of visualizing settings and characters. People can have imaginative interactions with TV but in general not much is left up to the viewer.   The stars of the radio comedies, soap operas, and science fiction and mystery plays migrated to TV as it became ascendant. Radio still had power but the variety on individual stations began to dissipate as the concept of the format came in vogue. Stations began to narrow their focus. Some focused on news, sports, talk, talk, talk. Religious broadcasters thumped their bibles in the studio. Music shows and then entire stations diverged into pop, rock, jazz and classical. By the 1980s heavily formatted radio stations had become moribund and varicose. With large corporations owning multiple stations in cities across the country, the sounds of the old, weird America, as heard on regional programs, began to fade, while the sound of McGovCorp cut through any static from coast to coast.

Thinking of all the possibilities radio has, it is a real shame that broadcasting in its commercial aspect long ago fell into such a well-worn, predictable, and boring rut. The songs heard on the air when tuning across the dial have been played so many times there are almost no grooves left on the records. Nor is talk radio exempt. No matter what a person’s political persuasion may be, pundits on both sides of the aisle trot out the same plodding talking points time and again, no matter the issue at hand. It often makes me wonder what the heck the point of all the uninspired and placid propaganda blasted across the spectrum actually is; maybe it’s just a form of anti-thought to occupy the minds of hungry commuters and consumers. Broadcast radio as it now stands is a depreciated spectacle spread across the spectrum. It could be so much more.   

By the ’80s in America, there were few places to experiment with anything off the pre-approved, record-industry-friendly playlists or talking points. If you were lucky there was a college or community station somewhere on the dial where DJs and hosts could play and do what they wanted to. Listener-supported public radio offered some variety, for a time, and in some places pirate radio scenes were (and are) active in their electromagnetic resistance to the mandates of the FCC.  

Free-form radio came about as a result of the creativity of disc jockeys who followed their own muses, playing things of any genre or style, and mixing in talk and made-for-radio audio collages without being beholden to the dictates of a station manager—themselves beholden to corporate interests beholden to making money by selling time to advertisers. Big business doesn’t want views critical of any of their products aired on stations running their ads, thus limiting speech and song. The McGovCorp version of radio also put the kibosh on shows devoted to particular styles. Genres such as ambient, electronica, the heaviest kinds of metal, the most independent punk and rap, and those devoted to ethnic folk music are criminally neglected on the airwaves. This lack of variety often drives some to go pirate.   

​All the things that have normally been shunned to the far edges of the dial and overnight time-slots by McGovCorp are actually the things that could make radio great again. I think that time will come during the long descent as the high costs of television production and internet streaming skid into the obstacles of inflation, resource depletion, and waning public interest in spectacle and propaganda. 

AMATEUR RADIO: A REAL CAN OF WORMS

Broadcast radio is only use of the technology. As a form of direct person-to-person communication, radio is a real can of worms. Not in that it causes problems, but that the worms so often wriggle forth to make claim after claim upon a person’s time. Radio is the kind of hobby that can easily become an obsession and take over every aspect of your life. In the coming years those saddled with this obsession may serve to keep distant communities stitched together, support their villages and cities in times of natural disaster or manmade emergency, and otherwise have a blast rag-chewing with people across the country and all around the world.  

Many new converts to the ham way of life come to it from the prepper subculture and already have a built-in mindset around the idea of short and long-term catastrophes affecting civilization. These are the people who are building stations, stashing equipment, and fortifying themselves with knowledge to pass on to others. Not every ham shares these views, of course, yet most are community-minded folk and many participate in public service events where back-up comms provide an extra safety net, should those used by police and fire departments fail. Some hams get involved in the allied hobby of storm spotting, relaying their on-the-ground weather sightings to broadcast stations to put together warnings for the wider public. Others are pure techies who spend little time transmitting and put all their efforts into soldering homebrewed gear on their workbench. Others just use radio as a way to be social and have long back-and-forth conversations and roundtable discussions with their fellows. Still other amateurs just want to chase DX (distant foreign stations) whose call signs they can put into their logbook and exchange QSL cards with (postcards, often with artwork, noting station details and specifics of the exchange). DX chasers often end up with binders and shoeboxes full of these cards from friends far away. Those are just a few cans of worms available to the amateur radio hobbyist. There are many more endeavors within the hobby should you choose to open the can. These include bouncing your radio signal off the moon, learning Morse code, and talking through dedicated ham radio satellites—while we still have them, before Kessler syndrome sets in. 

 The many modes available for hams to operate in also allow a great variety of potential use. Every radio signal that goes over the air is modulated in some way—by voice, by the on-and-off of a tone such as in morse code, or by digital methods that connect one computer to another over-the-air, sans internet. A ham with the right setup can send text messages using radioteletype, for instance. This toolkit can be deployed by those who wish to have a resilient web of communication when the existing web goes down (or becomes so much more full of crap than it is now that it is no longer worth the bother).

The existing ham radio network’s decentralized nature is a core strength. This decentralization will help ensure that it remains viable as society shudders, shutting other doors of connection. In the golden age of radio to come, independently self-organized hams will be able to conduct on-air meetings—called nets—to exchange critical information, news and messages.  If one station shuts down—for the night or even forever—others can remain on the air. If an important message needs to be relayed, the decentralized nature makes it more reliable, as there is no single point of failure.  It is even possible, as the long descent continues, for the dedicated hobbyist to set up their own radio-based Bulletin Board System (BBS) to send email and texts over the airwaves as long as basic computers can be kept running. 

DOWNLOADS FROM THE AETHER

 In the 1980s, in Czechoslovokia, behind the Iron Curtain, citizen access to home computers, and their experience with them, was very different than the West. The science of cybernetics had been dismissed by the Communists as bourgeois. When the Eastern Bloc started to gander how computers were being used for strategic military and science purposes, the authorities started to change their tune.  The Communist computer scientists had to roll their own systems without help from the bros in Silicon Valley. The machines they came up with would be unfamiliar to most Americans. As Communist products, most were not used as personal computers, but as collective computers for schools, institutions, and a few lucky clubs. Yet, as with so much else, western systems were smuggled in and personal systems cobbled together. An underground subculture coalesced around the exchange of information and programs, often in the form of zines and cassette tapes from amateur radio and computer clubs.  

Early computer programs were often stored on magnetic tape, reel-to-reels on the mainframes, and later cassettes. Engineers involved in the Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), a Dutch broadcasting organization, realized the data could be transmitted as audio over the air. They got the idea to create broadcasts where people could tape a game or program off the air and use it on their computer. Such programs gained a niche following in Europe in the early 80s. The tapes, and sometimes the radio signals, sometimes crossed over the Iron Curtain to be copied and traded. 

The sound of these programs will be familiar to those who remember dial-up or those with experience of ham radio data modes. Yet the practice of broadcasting computer programs over the air stopped in the mid- to late ’80s as computers sped up. The audio technique of encoding a program didn’t work for 16-bit computers. Cassette storage was out, and floppy disks were in.

A similar situation as existed in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War could come to the West during the course of its decline. As people are forced to adopt older technologies, a small hacker and ham subculture could trade programs by broadcasting them over radio, to be taped onto cassette and loaded into existing refurbished computers taken out of the basements and garages of avid geeks. Enthusiastic retrovators could do the work to get these vintage computer systems running. When combined with ham-radio-style BBS systems an older ’70s to mid-’80s style of radio-based internet could be kept up for at least some time during the long descent among the technically adept. Mimeographed zines could provide documentation of best practices. 

More recently some ham radio operators have also been known to repurpose wi-fi routers to create line-of-sight internet wireless mesh networks.  Cory Doctorow’s novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town features a punk rocker who runs a dumpster diving operation, salvaging computers to set up a mesh net in Ontario. In the interim before the internet itself is gone, such a mesh net may be useful to those who wish to escape the increasingly censorious panopticon of social media, but want to remain online and able to share files and information.  

Such alternets to the web as it is known today, and other imaginative uses of radio, await the energized hobbyist in its next golden age.

FREE RADIO REPUBLIC

In the absence of a legitimate government, pirate radio is always an option.  The barriers to entry in the broadcasting game aren’t as expensive as one would think, especially if one has a more modest area they wish to cover. If they do their pirate radio on the shortwave part of spectrum they can reach a wider, though smaller audience, due to the propagation effects. Shortwave radio pirates remain active on the air year after year.

Piracy has existed since the beginning of radio broadcasting and there is no reason to think that it will ever stop as long as radio is around. Pirate radio has every reason to continue to proliferate. When certain groups of people and types of programming are kept from speaking their minds and playing the music and sounds related to their culture on the corporate blandwaves, it has even greater appeal. One way of looking at pirate radio is as a “Media Squat,” a term coined by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Instead of squatting in an empty unused house, the media squatter takes up residence on an unused frequency. Contrary to the popular conception of squatters, it isn’t a given that they will wreck the place they are squatting. Many make improvements. The same can be said of squatting on a radio frequency and putting out better programming than the stuff trickling down from the big guns. From my study of the current pirate radio scene it seems the FCC is much more liable to hunt down transmitters on the FM and commercial broadcasting portion of the spectrum than they are the sporadic efforts of shortwave pirate radio hobbyists.   

If you want to put your own station on the air without breaking the law, though, there is another option. Part 15 of the FCC regulations ruling electronic communication do allow for smaller FM and AM broadcasting with limited outputs of power and strict guidance for interference with other stations. But small is beautiful, right? These types of stations can potentially reach a block to a few blocks in a city neighborhood, and can be quite fun to run with a minimum of equipment and technical know-how. Certain patriotic groups have even advocated setting up networks of Part 15 stations. Synchronized to a single source, or daisy-chained together, they would play the same material, creating a low-tech network capable of blanketing larger areas—given enough stations. 

Pirate radio and Part 15 stations can be used to create healthier radio ecology than the current monocropping.

SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE

The radio hobby is such a can of worms that this column can only scratch the surface of all the possibilities that await those who jump down the rabbit hole into its wonderland. Everything from shortwave listening to radio scanning can be folded into the hobby. For folks who are a bit mic-shy and don’t want to talk on the air themselves, these latter two may be useful places to start. Shortwave listening is one tool for getting information from around the world when other sources fail. Even in times when there is no emergency or crisis, listening to news and views from other countries, hearing their music, and learning about their culture is an engaging past time, as is chasing DX. 
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On the local front, having a scanner radio capable of picking up police, fire, aviation and other signals is a good way to keep tabs on what is going on in your community before the media picks it up and puts their spin on events. Having a scanner will be especially useful to monitor situations in events of civil unrest and natural disasters. I find scanning to be somewhat depressing, as listening to people get arrested or hearing another call to the fire department about an elderly person who has fallen isn’t always my idea of a good time. Yet the practice of listening in to this kind of radio traffic does have a definite use. If you enjoy trains or aviation, it’s pretty easy to pick up comms from rail yards and air traffic control. These are just a few of the doors that can be unlocked with a scanner. Those who become adept at scanning can end up being sleuths of the airwaves, tracking down frequencies and listening to government agents, utility companies, and private businesses all as a way of gathering information and signals intelligence.  

​CARRIER WAVES

In the next golden age there will be numerous ways to interact with radio, similar but different to how things are done now. Business as usual in the radio industry won’t be an option. The cracks in legacy media are already widening, and beneficial weeds are starting to claw their way through. With any luck these early colonizers will make things ripe for a bountiful media ecology that nourishes the soil of the imagination to regenerate the medium so its many untapped possibilities are open for new uses in a declining age. 

Local and hyperlocal broadcasting may once again rise up, giving voice to bioregional concerns and culture. On these shows a truly diverse range of programming could be encouraged. As television falls away actors could find a new home in the revitalized world of the radio drama. The home use of scanners can keep listeners informed of the goings on in their neighborhoods in times of quiet and emergency, allowing them to make up their own minds about events. On the national level, a smaller number of larger AM and shortwave stations could be used to tie the bonds of North America and other continents together. A robust ham radio scene, intertwined with the remnants of the hacker subculture, may give rise to an alternet web of radio based communications. And on these carrier waves the seeds of America’s next great culture may be broadcast across the land.

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This article originally appeared in New Maps.

RE/SOURCES: 

American Radio Relay League (ARRL), <https://www.arrl.org/>. For those in the United States, this is a great resource for all things amateur radio, from getting licensed, to finding a club, to setting up your first ham station and getting on the air.  

DeFelice, Bill. Part 15 Broadcasting: Build Your Own Legal, License-Free, Low Power Radio Station. Self-published, 2016. < https://www.hobbybroadcaster.net/resources/free-part-15-radio-broadcasting-ebook.php> Bill DeFelice has put together a wonderful website at hobbybroadcaster.net devoted to Part 15 broadcasting, with many articles and resources to help people get started.

English, Trevor. “You Could Download Video Games From the Radio in the 1980s.” Interesting Engineering (website), Mar. 8, 2020. <https://interestingengineering.com/science/you-could-download-video-games-from-the-radio-in-the-1980s>

Finkelstein, Norman H. Sounds in the Air: The Golden Age of Radio. New York, N.Y.: Scribners, 1991.
HF Underground. <https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php> This site offers the description, “Shortwave Pirate Radio In North America And Around The World, And Other Signals That Go Bump In The Night.” HF Underground is more of a message board where people who listen to shortwave pirates post about what they hear. Active radio pirates have been known to hang out and lurk on the boards.
Lewis, Tom. The Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York, N.Y.: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991. 

Maly, Martin. “Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain.” Hackaday (website), Dec. 15, 2014. https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/home-computers-behind-the-iron-curtain/

Philips, Utah. “Radio: The Story of Radio from Crystal Set to ‘Sandman the Midnight D.J.” < https://www.thelongmemory.com/loafers-glory-episodes> The episode in question is number nine of Loafer’s Glory, but any of Utah Phillips amazing slices of radio are worth taking the time to listen to.

Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB). <https://rsgb.org/> Our friends across the pond tell us great things about RSGB. It is also open to international members. For those in the UK wishing to get licensed the RSGB will provide the relevant details. 

​Reitz, Ken, ed. The Spectrum Monitor. <https://www.thespectrummonitor.com/> A monthly online PDF magazine covering “Amateur, Shortwave, AM/FM/TV, WiFi, Scanning, Satellites, Vintage Radio and More.” Each issue is a hefty chunk of knowledge, history, how-to, and reports from radio active writers.