I built my first radio when i was just ten years old. I’ve been bitten by the radio bug ever since. Today I’ve become quite an avid fan of internet radio, and try to provide useful articles and links for those with similar interests.
“Shortwave radio recordings” is a small collection of recordings of various HF and VHF transmissions. These have been hanging around since I recorded them using my Icom IC-R20 radio scanner back in the mid-late noughties. I’m not sure how much interest these will be to other people. But considering Garfnet’s 30th anniversary is only just…
Considering that internet radio has become quite a hot topic on this site, I thought it might be useful to compile a database file for Yuri Saurov’s excellent and increasingly popular Advanced Radio Player widget for the KDE plasma desktop. This list contains international streams for all the BBC national and local stations. It also…
Editor’s note: TL;DR Latest streams can be found here. For reasons best known to itself, the BBC decided to close many of its internet radio streams yesterday (2025-01-21). Fortunately there are alternatives. After a bit of scrambling and hacking, I’ve been able to cobble together an updated list of BBC national and local radio stations,…
For an increasing number of Brits, BBC Radio is about the only thing the modern BBC has to offer that might justify its antiquated and much resented television licence fee. Or rather it was up until yesterday (2025-01-21), when sadly 3/4 of its AAC/HLS internet radio streams inexplicably fell silent. I’ve written to BBC Sounds…
I’m often amazed by the money some Hi-Fi buffs spend on their systems. I’m something of a tightwad, and I took a rather different approach. This involves mixed tech – or as I prefer to call it, “appropriate technology“. I run one of these. It used to be an Acer Windows box, but all that…
EDITORS NOTE 2025-01-22. BBC changed its streams, yet again. Consequently, most of the BBC of the streams on this page no longer work. New streams that do actually work can be found at:- Internet radio player URLs Following the fiasco at the end of last week, when the BBC killed all its HLS internet radio…
Editor’s note: a list of new BBC AAC HLS internet ratio streams can be found here. Over the last few hours, some new BBC streams have appeared. At the moment I don’t know whether these are official BBC streams or if some public-spirited person is re-streaming. Though I’m pretty sure the ones coming from the…
Editor’s note: a list of new BBC AAC HLS internet ratio streams can be found here. Seems the BBC has decided to make all its AAC HLS streams only available to wealthy people who have Apple or similar devices. And the good old-fashioned “shoutcast” MP3 streams have gone altogether. Seems that if you can afford…
We’re busy replacing a customer’s ageing Sonos distributed sound system with a Linux Media Server (c/w SAMBA for remaining Sonos kit) c/w these tiny Linux-powered SBCs (single board commuters) as replacements. Granted, this is merely a prototype. This unit us based upon a Raspberry pi 4B c/w 8GiB RAM, a capacitative touchscreen and an external…
Seems that as London and the midlands – not to mention much of central Europe – sizzle in 40°C temperatures, our planet is to be hit with unusual weather of a different kind: a solar storm. Activity in the upper atmosphere of the sun, known as the ‘corona’, creates huge ‘solar flares’. These generate powerful…
I recently purchased an unlocked Chinese Ulefone Armor 3W ruggedised smartphone – c/w Mediatek chipset, 8-core 64-bit CPU, dual unlocked SIM slots, 256GiB TF slot and 10300mAH battery. I have quite a soft-spot for cheap generic Chinese phones. Of course, one has to choose the product quite carefully. You need to ensure your preferred device…
A few snaps of my old Roamer Ten kit radio in the garden and in the shed, on a bright sunny day. Well, it seemed a relatively enjoyable way to spend a sunny COVID-lockdown day.
I was 12 years old when I built my first multi-band shortwave radio – a Radio Exchange Roamer Ten kit – as pictured above. After many nights surreptitiously listening to it hidden under the bedclothes so my mum never found out, I soon realised just how insular and generally pisspoor most our media is in…
The lovely Alexa Allure wearing a cheongsam dress and listening to the world on a 1981 vintage Sony ICF 2001 multiband receiver. Back in the day, Sony used to be one of the market leaders in shortwave radios. Its big selling feature was the continuous AM band that covered all the standard LF, MF and…
I recently treated myself to a laser gobo. The patterns it makes remind me of the speaker grille on my old Roamer Ten kit radio. So I thought it might be interesting to combine the two and capture a few snaps.
I decided to have a go at repairing the HF tweeters unit in my vintage Tannoy Monitor Golds. It was a tricky old job. More pictures to follow.
“…playing his favourite music, I hope you like it.”
These are the first words you will hear when you connect to the internet radio stream of Radio Pécs International. And I recently had the pleasure of meeting the man behind the show, Hans Randau. His station is located in a small basement room in his lovely home, which overlooks Pécs, a Mediterranean style town about 200km south of the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
Editor’s note: the Garfnet internet Radio player has been discontinued and this article amended accordingly. However the streams have all been updated and can be played through your browser or separate media player. This is a brief introduction to Internet radio. In a nutshell, we finally had to abandon GarfNet’s somewhat ageing internet radio &…
I had a lovely model called Onna come down from London today for a retro technology photo shoot. While she was here, she posed with some of my favourite radios, including my Icom IC-R20 and my AOR AR 8200 handheld communications receivers. Which I continued to photograph long after she had gone home. Here are…
It seems that with a little determination, the CS-R20 for the Icom IC-R20 software can be persuaded to run on Linux. I eventually made the CS-R20 software load under Kubuntu Linux using Crossover (a commercial implementation of WINE). The method in this article should work with many other Debian-derived Linuxes too, perhaps with a little…
Being a geeky type of chap, I generally find that the best way to guarantee that Santa puts a decent geek-friendly Christmas present in my stocking is to buy it myself! So this year I treated myself to an Icom IC-R20 hand-held, all-band communications receiver/scanner. I have always had a penchant for small communications receivers….
