Oct 10, 2007 1:14 am US/Pacific
Good Question: How Does My Radio Work?
by Pallas Hupé
(CBS13)
DJ Keith Brooks spins songs and pops with personality on the airwaves, but does he know how all that makes it across the airwaves to your radio?
"Yeah what happens is, um no I don't really know. They don't pay me to know. They pay me to be witty and I'm doing okay," said Brooks.
It's really Chief Engineer Jim Balcom's job to know, and he explains it this way:
"In order to visualize what radio waves do, think of it as I've got a big rock and I'm standing in the middle of the pond."
Balcom says transmitting radio waves is like dropping a rock in that pond. It sends ripples or waves out all around it. In radio, those waves are electromagnetic and they have different frequencies.
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FM stations broadcast between 88 megahertz and 108 megahertz (Megahertz are millions of cycles per second.) That means the radio station's transmitter is oscillating, or vibrating millions of times per second. Those vibrations send off radio waves.
"Here at MIX 96.1 there's 96.1 million waves per second. KZZO, the Zone there's 100.5 million waves per second," said Balcom.
The antenna picks up all the waves, but it's something in the radio that picks out the station you want. That's the tuner.
"If you tune your radio to 96.1, it's only going to let in those waves that are at 96.1. There's another circuit in the radio that picks off that information from the waves, amplifies it and sends it out to your speakers," said Balcom.
You may not realize how much is out there in the air, but the tuner's going to let only one station through at a time.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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