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Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

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Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#21

Post by omnibrain »

kazinator wrote: post #4
ourmandave wrote: post #2

“And I said, ‘Well, so why don’t you stop listening?’” Murphy continued. “And he says, ‘I can’t, because it’s the only station that will go on mile after mile and I can pick it up again.’” Just drove from IA to MI and it's true. Between 90.3 and 92.7 FM there's always an NPR station waiting. Or I could just download their app and listen anywhere / anytime. http://www.npr.org/about/products/npr-one/

It occurs to me that a FM radio should be capable of automatically doing this hand-off, thanks to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System If a station signal goes weak, the radio could scan the FM stations for another station which is known to broadcast the same signal (according to, say, an internal cross-matching database, or some other means).

My car radio (in Germany, german car) does this.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#22

Post by throwaway2016a »

ekianjo wrote: post #15
throwaway2016a wrote: post #9

I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…

>I'm a Libertarian As a libertarian, don't you find the economic news reports from NPS cringeworthy though?

Economics is such a small portion of what NPR covers. And most of the time it is things like what the market did today which are fact based.

Do I disagree with stuff they say sometimes? Absolutely. But not enough to change the station.

Then again, I am more tolerant or opposing views than most, unfortunately.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#23

Post by w0de »

abrowne wrote: post #14
throwaway2016a wrote: post #9

I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…

> Libertarian and thus social conservative and economically liberal Isn't that the opposite of a libertarian?

He's using conservative and liberal in their classical senses, whereby conservative connotes restraint in legislating social issues and liberal connotes freedom of the marketplace.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#24

Post by throwaway2016a »

morganvachon wrote: post #18
throwaway2016a wrote: post #9

I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…

> I'm a Libertarian and thus social conservative and economically liberally That's fascinating; I've been called Libertarian because I'm the opposite. I'm socially progressive yet fiscally conservative, and from what I've read, there are branches of Libertarianism that can embrace either extreme or a mixture. I've listened to NPR since I was a teenager in the early 90s, and while I don't always agree with the comment…

It was a mistake (see bellow - I edited my post). It's late at night and I'm tired. I in fact meant the opposite.

I am most definitely not socially conservative or economically liberal.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#25

Post by taneq »

hprotagonist wrote: post #3

Looking for a "bubble-free" media venue? Not a bad place to start.

It'd make sense that non-interactive mass media such as a radio broadcast would be less prone to the filter-bubble effect. For one, it's not personalized (other than you picking the station). For two, the fact that most listeners can't respond means that there's no tight feedback loop reinforcing and amplifying the demographic's positions.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#26

Post by gozur88 »

nwatson wrote: post #7

I listen to a number of NPR podcasts and perhaps I'm misremembering but it seems there's an uptick in the past few years of interviewing and discussing the lives of just "regular folks", people who work blue-collar jobs, people with conservative religious backgrounds, etc., ... and not in a disparaging way. But ... Fresh Air with Terry Gross still largely wanders the fields of the cultural left with nary a nod to alt…

Ugh. I can't stand Terry Gross. They should call it "Terry Gross Talks About Her Feelings While Interesting Guests Listen And Wonder What They're Doing There."

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#27

Post by throwaway2016a »

w0de wrote: post #23
abrowne wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Libertarian and thus social conservative and economically liberal Isn't that the opposite of a libertarian?

He's using conservative and liberal in their classical senses, whereby conservative connotes restraint in legislating social issues and liberal connotes freedom of the marketplace.

I know you got down-voted and you are wrong about my intentions (it was just a typo) but I up-voted you because I do appreciate that the definitions of liberal and conservative have not always been the same.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#28

Post by AndrewKemendo »

kazinator wrote: post #4
ourmandave wrote: post #2

“And I said, ‘Well, so why don’t you stop listening?’” Murphy continued. “And he says, ‘I can’t, because it’s the only station that will go on mile after mile and I can pick it up again.’” Just drove from IA to MI and it's true. Between 90.3 and 92.7 FM there's always an NPR station waiting. Or I could just download their app and listen anywhere / anytime. http://www.npr.org/about/products/npr-one/

It occurs to me that a FM radio should be capable of automatically doing this hand-off, thanks to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System If a station signal goes weak, the radio could scan the FM stations for another station which is known to broadcast the same signal (according to, say, an internal cross-matching database, or some other means).

It certainly can, however OTA radio is very localized - to the city usually, by tradition - so it wouldn't make much sense to build such a network.

NPR is probably the only radio network that could do a common band cross country, but even then, NPR just syndicates itself to other stations so it's not really in their interest to do so.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#29

Post by kuschku »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #28
kazinator wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It occurs to me that a FM radio should be capable of automatically doing this hand-off, thanks to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System If a station signal goes weak, the radio could scan the FM stations for another station which is known to broadcast the same signal (according to, say, an internal cross-matching database, or some other means).

It certainly can, however OTA radio is very localized - to the city usually, by tradition - so it wouldn't make much sense to build such a network. NPR is probably the only radio network that could do a common band cross country, but even then, NPR just syndicates itself to other stations so it's not really in their interest to do so.

In the US, yes.

In many other places you can get lots of channels that exist over entire countries, and actually support this kind of automated handover.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#30

Post by dghughes »

omnibrain wrote: post #21
kazinator wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It occurs to me that a FM radio should be capable of automatically doing this hand-off, thanks to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System If a station signal goes weak, the radio could scan the FM stations for another station which is known to broadcast the same signal (according to, say, an internal cross-matching database, or some other means).

My car radio (in Germany, german car) does this.

In Canada CBC Radio is the public broadcaster sort of a cross between the BBC and NPR.

There are multiple stations from coast to coast and I think a person could hop from one to the other but it would have to be done manually not automatically. Quebec may be the wildcard but there may be a CBC English station there too, I think?

I drove quite a bit when I was in my teens and 20s when I worked for a coin-op video game/grey area slot machines. You get tired listening to music even if you like it at first your favourite song ten times in a row is ugh. But interesting talk radio is better it's food for the mind.

Now with satellite and the Internet it's different. It was such a subtle change I don't think it was noticed how radio died and was replaced by the Internet and satellite radio.

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