Wednesday, November 11, 2009

More Vietnam Radio

Phil Lenz wrote to me about another homebrew station in Vietnam. It was an FM station, so it is unlikely anyone would think a KAAY tape could be the real thing. Keep in mind most people didn't know the difference between a megacycle and a kilocycle back then; they just turned the radio on and tuned the dial until they heard something they liked.

One of the advantages of having an FM station is the simplicity of a full-size basic half-wave antenna. Another advantage is less radio frequency interference to your audio equipment due to the higher frequency and the type of modulation. When FM is randomly detected in audio equipment, it usually does nothing more than make the equipment produce hum; however, it can saturate audio stages causing them to distort the intended audio source. This is why homebrew FM stations were the likely choice in Vietnam. I'll bet there were more stations than I know about, but I'll bet Lee and Phil were among the few who had AM stations which actually worked.

Check out this link which I found from Phil's suggestion:

http://swc2.hccs.cc.tx.us/rmorecook/klikjingles.ram

73,

Ron Henselman
 
(Ron, I'd often wondered the possibility of how many "mini-broadcasters" that were put on the air by the technically-savvy folks...I'll bet we'll never know! bs)

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