I was fooling around with my HTC Android phone yesterday and discovered something that has a definite use for radio remotes. An Application called Hertz will record .wav files, which can then be transferred via e-mail or ftp to the studio and played back on the air. The program is pretty slick, it allows sample rates from 8 to 44.1 kHz.
I made a sample recording, the microphone in the HTC phone is okay, a better microphone would sound better. After it was done, I emailed it to myself and listened on the laptop. The email took about 4 minutes for 20 seconds of a 32 kHz .wav file. One could cut that down by choosing a lower sample rate. I have found that 32 kHz is the minimal acceptable sample rate for analog FM. Anything lower than that sounds choppy.
In another potential use, a news reporter could use this to record audio to save and transfer to a computer using a USB cable. The recording time limit depends on the size of the SIM card and the sample rate. Additionally, my HTC Android phone will detect and use WiFi networks, where available, for data services. Using a WiFi network will avoid those 3G data charges and also increase download/upload speeds.
My Verizon plan has unlimited data transfer, so it really doesn’t matter what sample rate I use, your mileage may vary.
Couple the Hertz app with the VNC app mentioned previously, and a person could do all sorts of things remotely with a radio station. The Hertz app is available for free download from the Android app store.
Yesterday, August 14th, was the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II. Prior to the start of the US involvement in WWII, the Army and Navy had been intercepting and decrypting radio messages between Japanese military units, consulates, embassies, and other overseas locations.
Back in the day, most everything was sent via Morse code over HF radio circuits. It was the fastest way to send information from one point to the next. These messages would be encrypted offline, either by hand or by a special typewriter. The message text would then be altered into 5-number, seemingly random, groups. On the other side, they would be deciphered using a key that matched the enciphering key. There were several different ciphers systems being used, some for diplomatic traffic, several others for military, merchant marine, etc.
Since the messages were transmitted via radio, they were easy to intercept. Everyone knew that the other side was listening. The Japanese assumed that their codes were secure because a “Caucasian mind could not possibly unravel the intricacies of a Japanese code.” An assumption the Navy cryptanalysts had different ideas about. Through the 1930s and early 1940s they broke some of these codes, but not all of them.
The Japanese diplomatic code was called “purple” by the US cryptanalysts. It relied on a machine called System 97 (by the Japanese) which used telephone stepper relays to generate an ever-changing stream of random code groups. It was considered too secure to break. William Friedman, a mathematician working for the Army, studied the purple messages and deduced that it was a machine-generated code. He then went to work on duplicating the machine and after a year or so came up with a perfect replica of the Japanese System 97 machine in early 1941. From that point on, almost all of Japan’s diplomatic message traffic was being read by the Army, Navy, and state departments. This work was top secret and carried out at the war department in Washington. Information gleaned would be sanitized and transmitted to major commands as needed for tactical intelligence.
In early November 1941, the Japanese foreign office came up with the following code to be transmitted to the embassies in the event of the outbreak of war:
HIGASHI NO KAZE AME (East wind rain) = Japan – US
KITA NO KAZE KUMORI (North wind cloudy)= Japan – USSR
NISHI NO KAZE HARE (West wind clear)= Japan – Britain
It is believed that on either December 4th or 5th, East wind rain message was received and decrypted. This was testified to Congress in 1945 by the head of the Navy COMMINT section, however, no record of the decrypted message exists. Instead, there is a blank page and a missing message number (JD-7001) in the Japanese diplomatic intercepts file.
The fleet commander at Pearl Harbor knew none of this, as the information was kept under close wraps by the Navy Department in Washington. In early December 1941, almost everyone figured that war with Japan would happen very soon. Most of the Washington set believed it would start in the Philippines, then a US territory. No figured that the Japanese would steam 3,900 miles undetected and launch a sneak attack on the US military base in Hawaii. The attacking planes homed in on the signal from KGMB (after-war reading of Cmd. Fuchida’s (IJN strike leader) diary indicates the actual station was KGMB on 590 KHz, and not KGU as their website claims), to help find Hawaii from carriers still 230 miles away. The station had remained on the air overnight to assist a group of B-17 navigates from the west coast. Unaware of the impending danger, the Hawaii military bases were enjoying a peaceful Sunday morning until 7:48 am, when the first bombs began to fall.
Of course, had the Japanese pressed the attack and launched a third wave to take out the fuel storage and repair facilities, indeed, history might be different. The Pacific Fleet would have had to retire to California, leaving Hawaii exposed and quite possibly invaded.
Most people on the mainland first heard about the attack via radio. At 2:22 pm Eastern time, the AP issued a news bulletin and at 2:27 pm CBS broke into their Sunday afternoon programming to announce the attack. The radio played an important part in WWII from start to finish.
With the advent of computer file storage and automation came unmanned operation. Unfortunately, what often happens with unmanned operations is somehow the engineer becomes responsible for station operation and ends up getting all the phone calls when anything goes wrong:
Traffic forgot to transfer the Sunday log and the station is off the air at 12 am Sunday morning. Call the engineer.
Part-time DJ didn’t read the directions on merging logs, call the engineer.
Windows has encountered a problem and needs to reboot, call the engineer.
The server has locked up, call the engineer.
Silence sensor, engineer’s phone number
I got sick of driving to the radio station when things got out of whack with the AudioVault, so I installed VNC on all the machines. From that point, I could log on from home and see what the problem was. It was great, when traffic goobers up the log transfer, I called the traffic director at home and had her go in a fix it. Untrained operators, called the program director. Unfortunately, I don’t have Bill Gate’s phone number, so the Windows issues are still on me.
All of this was great as long as my laptop was around. Being married, however, I had to occasionally listen to my wife, who insisted that we not take the laptop to dinner or the movies with us. There were those occasional times when it would have been nice.
With the purchase of the Android phone, however, I no longer have to worry about that. Android VNC is a free app that allows an Android phone to connect to any VNC server application. The user can save all the VNC connection information on the phone. It has several mouse options including a touch pad, touchpad mouse, mouse trackball, etc. It connects to most VNC servers: incl TightVNC, RealVNC on Win and Linux, x11vnc, and Apple Remote Desktop on OS/X. 0.4.3. Special commands such as ctl-alt-del are available through the menu. It is also fully zoomable. All in all, I can do almost anything with the Android phone that I can do on the laptop. My wife is thrilled.
This is The Stairway to Heaven for a different decade.
It is so big. She looks like, one of those rap guys’ girlfriends. But, you know, who understands those rap guys? They only talk to her, because, she looks like a total prostitute, ‘kay?
Ordinarily, I don’t much go in for such things as rap music. But this is entertaining and somewhat universal.
Hard to believe that it was almost twenty years ago. Almost every lyric in that song is innuendo for some sex act. Like it. Dislike it. No rules were broken when making this song. It went to number 1 on the Billboard chart in the summer of 1992 and no radio station anywhere ever received a fine for playing it. It was quite scandalous at the time, of course, we were young and naive then. Things have changed.
To the beanpole dames in the magazines: You ain’t it, Miss Thing!
It occurs to me that part of the reason that the radio industry sucks is that the music industry sucks. The radio and music industry used to have a symbiotic relationship, each benefiting greatly from the existence of the other. Of course, the greed and poor business practices of the last decade have driven every fun and thus entertaining element away from both industries. Leave it to the bean counters, who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Sadly, no hit that I have heard on the top 40 stations these days even comes close to the entertainment value of this 18-year-old song.
