Show HN: RadioSide turns your spare device into a radio | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: RadioSide turns your spare device into a radio

radioside.com

6 pointsAlexDragusin6 comments

Hi, as a shortwave radio listener, I felt as time goes by, the shortwave is becoming more and more empty yet I do enjoy the discovery of new stations and so on. On top of that, all the EM noise generated by all the electronics is not helping either.

The typical internet radio site/app does not give me the same feeling I get from my physical radios in terms of operation and stumbling upon some interesting station (radio.garden does help but not looking like a radio) so I got to make my own that combines the looks and operation of a shortwave radio with the availability of internet radio stations.

One aspect was to create this sort of virtual frequency allocation for the stations, that way you can key in the number and takes you to the station.

Been using this and enjoying particularly the random feature as I come about some pretty nice stations that I had no idea existed and would not have thought of searching for specifically.

It's free, no tracking and no app to install, it works in the browser. The presets are saved only on your device using local storage. What, when, where you listen to is none of my business.

Good to repurpose some of your spare devices, perhaps?

Hope someone else enjoys this as much as I do!

https://radioside.com/info/

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I've used it a bit, and saved a few presets.

Is there a station catalogue or search feature somewhere? Without yet knowing any station numbers, I can only use the next/previous arrows as a linear search.

Might also be nice to have more of an indication of progress while waiting for a slower/unavailable station to tune in. My tendency, due to physical radios, is to pause more briefly at each potential station than RadioSide sometimes wants me to, resulting in quickly going back to a station which started to play just after I gave up on it, in turn meaning I have to wait the whole delay all over again before it starts playing.

Most stations take long enough to tune-or-timeout that I'm hesitant to use the Random button.

If you press the "KTM" button ("keyboard tuning mode"), you can search for a string.

I'd like to say that this is an excellent way to re-purpose an old device. I have an old Windows Phone charging up right now to dedicate this to.

I like the idea of a virtual frequency, but it seems a little confusing since it currently appears to be randomly assigned. Perhaps adding a decimal point to separate location and service could make it easier to remember a frequency. Using a structure based on country calling codes could potentially allow users to identify or learn the origin of a specific virtual frequency [1].

Example: 679.001 would be a station in Fiji; 353.001 would be a station in Ireland; 206.001 would be a station in Washington State in the USA.

[1] List of country calling codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_calling_codes

Thank you for your comment, nice to hear that, wondering if the Windows Phone browser is capable of runing it properly? Would you mind letting me know if it works fine once you get a chance to set it up? Thank you!

In the process of designing it, this idea came up as well, however I ultimately decided against it because on a closer look I realized it will be an issue, for one some countries have only 2 digits while others 3, then for a country like US with many stations the number will end up even longer than what we have now.

It was a system I liked also yet upon implementation things became clear that are not workable and will cause a lot of headache programming wise.

Another system that also came up in the procees is using the 2 letter country code plus station number, so FJ001 and so on. Will have to see how the people receive the current setup and take it from there.

The power button on radioside didn't seem to work on the Windows Phone browser, so I haven't had any success with it yet.

RadioSide is great, thanks!

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