Source: Wallpaper.com
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares a link to this radio project by Emanuele Pizzolorusso who wishes to combine a modern Internet radio with old-school city-labeled memory buttons. From Wallpaper.com:
CityRadio, designed by Emanuele Pizzolorusso for Italian design brand Palomar, allows you to access local radio around the world, with a simple – and satisfying – click of a physical button. It’s a contemporary re-imagination of radio’s early history, where city names where displayed to identify frequencies. As travel looks to remain restricted for the time being, get your multicultural fix through the airwaves.
Of course, you can go online and access local radio anywhere fairly easily, but for Pizzolorusso, there’s a certain romanticism to, and interconnection with, the act of listening physical object. ‘In my childhood home there was an old portable radio, one of those appliances that had the names of several European cities on the tuning dials – a feature from the time when one could still listen to stations from foreign countries,’ explains the Italian designer, who is based in Helskinki. ‘The list of those places, which to me as a child appeared so mysterious and exotic, stimulated my imagination and gave that ordinary forgotten object a deep sense of magic.’
Press magnetic keys to access 18 different cities around the world – from Barcelona to Beijing, Nairobi to New York.[…]
the specs say “Automatic BT connection to the dedicated app” – so Hello “internet of things” .. Call me cynical, but, It will rely upon a smartphone app to work, rather than giving you the ability to set it up as you want 🙁
Why not just stick a “raspberry pi” in it with a simple web interface to connect to with a browser? – it will work with *insecure*, un- updatable firmware and will have no support in a year or two ( just like a “smart fridge!)
I like the way he (Mr. Pizzolorusso) thinks.
This same idea is returning to real radio but they must be digital radios.
DAB+ digital radios are tuned by the broadcasters’ name but the propagation distance would not generally make it so you could name countries.
DRM however will operate on any broadcast band and those radios can be tuned by frequency or broadcaster’s name. So the labels might be Voice of America, BBC or DW to name a few.
This idea can be extended through the use of the station logos which can be transmitted in DAB+ and DRM.
For HD radio, xperi is promoting Hybrid radio, where you send by wireless internet a list of station frequency to tune the radio and their logo to be displayed on the screen. HD radio has a very weak digital signal, so when the errors increase the receiver will switch to the internet sound instead of the AM or FM sound.
The actual “radio” can be purchased here:
https://www.palomarweb.com/product/the-cityradio/
Thanks, Richard! Looks like it would cost around $125 USD shipped via DHL to my home.
When I was quite young, my Dad had a cabinet sized ‘radio set’ which I guess dated from the sixties.
A long standing memory of it was the linear illuminated tuning dial, and for some reason ‘Luxembourg’ is the city I always remember.
It didn’t take long for me to question how a station’s frequency was so immovable that it could be baked permanently into the tuning scale.
Actually, Radio Havana has been at 6.000 MHz for many decades, probably since it began broadcasting in the early 1960s. So painting something like that on a radio dial isn’t such a ridiculous notion.
Several US medium wave stations are approaching 100 years old, and some have been on the same frequency for nearly as long.