Thursday, January 04, 2007

Homecast radio broadcasts world radio stations


Experts say that if you want to improve yourself in a matter in a short time, it’s better to surround yourself with that stuff. English is one of those matters to me nowadays, so I try to surround myself with English as much as possible in any way from air, earth, environment, radio waves and etc.
Yesterday when I was relaxing in my spare time listening to local radio with my small mp3 player, I found that there isn’t any reason to restrict myself to that boring radio stations or a few song tracks in my player memory. Then I thought about thousands of radio stations through world wide currently streaming on the internet.
With a few small changes to an old 10$ portable-sound headphone, I converted it to a short range FM radio transmitter, just setting its frequency to standard FM radio range and connecting it to my PCs audio output. . The results are wonderful; I have world radio stations broadcasting to my home with the range of near 100 meters, I can tune my player or home stereo to listen to favorite English stations in the home range. In this way my ADSL connection will be used to access the world radio stations and will not idle while I’m not working with the computer.
Although most of the radio stations are devoted to music, there are too many great English news and talk show stations that I haven’t discovered them yet; but currently my favorite ones are V.O.A, Air America, NPR and a little CNN.
My next step is to share the internet connection with mobile devices via Bluetooth, but unfortunately my damned K310i cell phone doesn’t have Bluetooth!

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