WIFI Internet Radio!

When we visited friends in Montreal, we listened to many radio stations on their Crane CC Wifi Internet Radio. Now we have our own Internet Radio and wow, wow, wow, it is incredibly wonderful. I really ought to use it for a week or two before I blog about it, but I can’t wait. You can get it for less than $150. It has a very clever radio user interface, and there’s a lot more you can do to set your radio up online. So far I can only comment on the basics.

Sitting at the radio, you can dial thousands of radio stations all over the world. If you know of a station they don’t broadcast, you go to their website, enter it, and the next day it’s on your radio.

They do more than FM. This radio can dial AM and Internet stations, too.

The radio has 99 presets. We are going to need them.

Our big impetus to get this radio was my wife’s problem: her favorite station is a public radio station in North Jersey, WNJS. We used to get this station with the volume almost all the way up, with lots of background noise, and every time a wire moved near the refrigerator, I had to retune it. On our conventional radio, that is. On the WIFI radio, it comes in loud and clear.

When I bought our current conventional radio, I bought a $150 antenna that enabled us to hear New York City radio stations, until 9/11. After that, I gave up on several of them. But now, WQXR and Columbia’s WKCR are back. On my business trips to Virginia and Florida, I developed a taste for Country Western music. I could not receive a country western radio station in New Jersey. Now I can. I put WSIG, which I blogged about last year, on a preset.

What about Pandora, MP3 files on our local LAN, Podcasts, Internet streams? Apparently I can get them, too. I’ll blog all about it when I do, but for now, I’m overwhelmed with the basics. There are too many good radio stations out there, and I sure am going to have to listen to some of them.