I once got a part time job as an overnight engineer for a collection of faith based radio stations. Wild stuff. 5 FM stations. One of them, the latin station wa

I once got a part time job as an overnight engineer for a collection of faith based radio stations. Wild stuff. 5 FM stations. One of them, the latin station was the largest FM station in the market. 3 AM stations. Two rebroadcast the FM and one was an AM station to itself. I know a bit about radio, but one of the most surprising things to me was why they had to have me there and paid me so little. I would be the ONLY person in the building overnight and on holidays. Sure I was there to "engineer" a couple shows that were put on by weirdos who paid to have a show on the late night air that broadcast to shut ins and prisoners. But the real reason was AM radio. The sun sets at a different time, every day. The FCC requires a person to be at the helm at sunset to manually lower the power of the AM stations and write in the log book that they did that. If you don't lower the AM power at sunset, your signal will bounce around the world over and over echoing and causing all sorts of interference. Terrestrial radio as it is controlled and broadcast might be "dead" but EM waves are not a product. They are real estate. No one can actually stop you from sending some electrons around in a circle in a little box other than social norms. I think about this constantly, still. Go take a look at CrowdSupply[0] and the products that are shipping now that stick together a bunch of SDR chips to some high throughput and think about what you can do with that and some consumer GPUs. I think in the next couple years the way we use radio is going to change in ways that will really surprise us. There is definitely a meta resonance radio space that our current systems (as far as I'm aware) are not operating in and it's weird and exciting. Also, Jeff is a freaking treasure and is doing some of the best tech communication out there. I'm so happy that he's back from his procedure and releasing new stuff. I should buy some of his merch or something. We all should. [0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/fairwaves/xync https://www.crowdsupply.com/fairwaves/xync