Many thanks to Stephen Cass for the interview and excellent piece about the Radio Spectrum Archive in the IEEE Spectrum magazine:
Building a Time Machine for Radio
The Radio Spectrum Archive will let you listen to old broadcasts as if they were live
Thomas Witherspoon is building a time machine, of sorts. With it, you’ll be able to pick a date and tune through an entire broadcast band as if you had a radio that could pick up transmissions from the past. Sure, well-established shows already make past episodes available, but with Witherspoon’s time machine you’ll be able to hear not just that programming but everything else that was on the air as well: the local news, the commercials, the pirate stations, even the mysterious number stations that lurk on shortwave.
Witherspoon’s time machine is The Radio Spectrum Archive. The technological advance that makes it possible is the proliferation in recent years of cheap software-defined radios (SDRs), which can digitize enormous swaths of radio spectrum. The SDR’s software can be used to select individual transmissions and listen to them live. Or the swath of spectrum can be recorded and played back through the software later, letting listeners tune into broadcasts just as if they were live.[…]
Click here to read the full article at the IEEE Spectrum.
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