Radio Signals

The Montreal band Godspeed You! Black Emperor is famous for its collages of doomsaying street sermons and sad-eyed orchestrations. But the website You Are Listening to Los Angeles gives that formula a local and often spooky revamp.  The site pairs dueling live-streams of instrumental ambient music culled from Soundcloud with chatter taken from the LAPD Citywide Dispatch and Hot Spots radio frequency. It's a simple idea, but the tandem streams make you feel as if you're starring in your own private " Collateral " or " Drive.

The Montreal band Godspeed You! Black Emperor is famous for its collages of doomsaying street sermons and sad-eyed orchestrations. But the website You Are Listening to Los Angeles gives that formula a local and often spooky revamp.  The site pairs dueling live-streams of instrumental ambient music culled from Soundcloud with chatter taken from the LAPD Citywide Dispatch and Hot Spots radio frequency. It's a simple idea, but the tandem streams make you feel as if you're starring in your own private " Collateral " or " Drive.

With the New York Jets and New York Giants scheduled to experiment with electronic devices in their helmets next Saturday, former Cleveland Browns quarterback George Ratterman recalled when Paul Brown experimented with radio signals during the 1956 exhibition season. Ratterman told Bob Sudyk of the Hartford Courant: "We were playing the Detroit Lions when they kept screaming at me and telling their teammates, 'Break his helmet. Hit him on the head.'

Days after lightning struck both a transmission line and antenna, classical music station KUSC-FM (91.5) said its broadcast signal has been restored to about 95% strength. General Manager Eric DeWeese said that KUSC will not be at full strength for perhaps another 10 days, until a new 300-foot transmission line can be obtained and installed. He estimated the cost at between $38,000 and $39,000. "The remaining 5% is not as robust," he said of the station's signal. "But the fact the phone calls have stopped indicates our listeners are getting it."

FM radio signals that were silenced in most of Laguna Beach and some other areas this summer after a cable company exchanged them for more local television channels will be available again by December, a cable company official said Thursday. Dimension Cable Co. in August dropped two channels that carried FM radio reception, to make room for additional television channels being required by federal law.

After cocking their technological ears to the cosmos more than 30 trillion times over the past year and recording 110 million radio signals, the operators of the world's largest search for extraterrestrial intelligence said Tuesday they have found 164 signals worthy of further investigation.

International Business Machines Corp. and Motorola Inc. said Tuesday that they are launching a personal computer network that uses radio signals, a technology expected to create a billion-dollar market and allow access to large computer databases from virtually anywhere. The high-tech giants said they have formed a new company to provide a nationwide radio communications service giving workers outside the office the ability to converse with their big mainframe computers.

Hopes were raised Sunday that a Placentia couple whose plane is believed to have crashed in the Nevada mountains more than two weeks ago could still be alive after authorities heard what they thought were radio signals coming from the downed craft. Sunday night, however, Nevada Civil Air Patrol officials said that the signals may have been a fluke and that they had decided to put off any further search for pilot Larry Richards and passenger Barbara Keating, both 56.

Cuban President Fidel Castro turned up the verbal volume Tuesday in his battle of the airwaves against the U.S. government's TV Marti, warning of stronger electronic countermeasures that experts say could disrupt radio broadcasts throughout the eastern United States. The Cuban leader, whose government has jammed every TV Marti telecast since the test transmissions began eight days ago, warned that "we have the right to give new responses if this situation continues. . . .

Todd Lockwood, a 56-year-old writer in South Burlington, Vt., often finds an annoying hitchhiker in his Audi when he tunes in to his local National Public Radio station. The outbursts of Howard Stern's program, which airs on Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., sometimes blare from the dial and are particularly unwelcome when his three children are in the car. "It will literally replace the station," Lockwood said of the shock jock's signal. "It's starting to feel more and more like an intrusion."

A faulty instrument landing system that delayed flights this week at Los Angeles International Airport returned to service Thursday after technicians repaired the device's radio antenna, authorities said. Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the equipment was reactivated about 8:30 a.m. after flight tests involving one of the agency's aircraft were successful. The system for the airport's northern runways failed early Monday after heavy fog rolled in along the coast, forcing air traffic controllers to route incoming aircraft to the south side of LAX. Instrument landing systems transmit radio signals that guide airplanes when visibility is poor.

The NFL season is just a week old, and already the San Francisco 49ers have improved their rushing defense. Which is to say they're not rushing around the way they used to. The difference is the NFL now allows one member of each defense to wear an in-helmet radio, allowing him to hear defensive signals from a coach and relay them to his 10 teammates on the field. "It's less of us scrambling or being scared to change the play because we don't think everybody's going to get it," said linebacker Mark Roman, who wears the wired helmet for the 49ers.

With a wave of his hand over a homemade receiver, Georgia Tech professor Joy Laskar shows how easily -- and quickly -- large data files may someday be transferred from a portable media player to a TV. Poof! "You just moved a movie onto your device," Laskar said. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have emerged as efficient ways to zap small amounts of data between gadgets, but neither is well suited for quickly transferring high-definition video, large audio libraries and other massive files.

Todd Lockwood, a 56-year-old writer in South Burlington, Vt., often finds an annoying hitchhiker in his Audi when he tunes in to his local National Public Radio station. The outbursts of Howard Stern's program, which airs on Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., sometimes blare from the dial and are particularly unwelcome when his three children are in the car. "It will literally replace the station," Lockwood said of the shock jock's signal. "It's starting to feel more and more like an intrusion."

Airline pilots departing from Miami International Airport are getting an earful of something unexpected: hip-hop tunes from a pirate radio station that sometimes interfere with their communications with the control tower. The music comes on a pair of frequencies from a station that calls itself Da Streetz. "It's intermittent. Not all day, every day," said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen.

It seemed at first like an open-and-shut case when the repairman came to inspect Shelley Slack's malfunctioning garage door. The Yorba Linda resident was baffled when her garage door -- and that of a neighbor -- would mysteriously open and close several times a day over the last few weeks. The repairman had a quick diagnosis: Military radio transmissions were playing havoc with her automatic garage door-opening system. He may have been right. The U.S.

A baffling mystery was engulfing Los Angeles: Somebody was out there stealing air--and then vanishing into thin air themselves. It sounded like a case for the Green Hornet. And that's exactly who authorities credit with ending an outbreak of radio piracy that has troubled business executives in Los Angeles for the last five years.

With the touch of a lever, "E. T." director Steven Spielberg launched a search for real extraterrestrials Sunday, turning on a giant antenna that astronomers hope will detect radio signals from outer space. "This marks the beginning of a really powerful search that has a decent chance of finding something," said Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University professor who designed the 84-foot communications dish, part of the most powerful radio-scanning system ever used to hunt for aliens.

A powerful burst of radio waves from near the center of our galaxy may have come from a previously unknown type of space object, U.S. astronomers reported in the journal Nature. Some experts nicknamed the mysterious source a "burper." Radio telescope observations revealed multiple bursts from the source during a seven-hour period from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1, 2002 -- five bursts repeating at remarkably constant intervals.