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Michael Black[_2_]

On Sat, 28 May 2016, wrote:

Are such radios sold in the USA via the internet? Is the station really
"fixed"? Someone gave my uncle a radio which is said to have a special
"chip" that receives a Greek radio station. He mentioned to me that years ago
he had another one that suddenly switched to a Philipine station and he gave
it to a Filipino colleague. Amazon and Alibaba have such Metrosonix radios
but not station specific, but also do not seem to allow being sold in the
USA. THe search terms I used were SCA FM radio.

Tradionally SCA was used for "elevator music", it was a subcarrier on an
FM broadcast station, a way for the elevator music company to distribute
its product. You could build your own SCA adapters, once ICs came along
they were really common in the hobby magazines, but it was one of those
things that you couldn't share the results with someone else. It was for
private listening only.

But yes, then at some point it was a way for "ethnic" broadcasters to beon
the air without the expense of a full FM transmitter, or getting a
license. We had some of that here. I think the stations were hoping to
be the source of the radios with the adapters, an income stream ofsome
sort.

But I haven't heard of such things locally. One thing that happened in at
least one case was they were able to leap to their own transmitter (though
if I'm remembering right in that case, the station is now up for sale, it
not being profitable for that market). So maybe it was an intermediate
step, get the listeners, then jump to a full transmitter when you had the
listeners.

Michael