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John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC in 1927, said "the wireless is made to alleviate loneliness".
He famously summarized the BBC's purpose in three words: educate, inform,entertain.
"Radio reaches into your mind in a clear, pure, powerful stream of thought and emotion" (quotation from Libby Purves - Radio: a true love story")
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Easy to use
- buy a radio set,
- find your favourite station frequency, leave it there,
- flick the on-off switch: that is all!
Some of us might remember the old radio sets with a magic eye that told you when tuning was optimum.
Then came the portable sets with valves, bulky but with very good sound.
Then the transistor portables, nice, small, easy, even in stereo. And clock radios.
And tuners, part of a hi-fidelity set-up which has now disappeared, to be replaced by boom boxes and combos with CD, tape, radio,etc.
The Braun transistor
It was a very compact model, delivering very good quality, with a very modern design in the 60s. No doubt, its clean outlook and station selector wheel inspired other brands , maybe the first version of the Apple iPod. Who knows?
Going digital, DIY on line, on podcast, on DAB
It's not really feasible to have your own do-it-yourself radio station. Of course there are a few pirates stations around who function with a single operator, with minimum gear, a small aerial on the roof; everything that can be hidden away quickly and easily.The path to your own DIY radio is to go digital and create a site on the internet, build up your own playlist and play it. It does not mean that any body will listen.
All radio station now use digital facilities - at least partly - to produce and transmit their programmes.
And nowadays you can listen to a flurry of radio stations over the internet on a PC, sometimes of dubious quality and weak contents. Some "radios" are just low quality playlists, whereas others, like the BBC really stream their own radio broadcasts live on line in real time. So digital plays a new role in the radio experience.
There are internet radio sets that bypass the PC/laptop and let you tune into internet radios through Wifi. home network,etc.or whatever protocol. And you can stream it through your whole house if you want too.
You can also subscribe to Podcast by getting some software (iTunes will do), then submitting to a feed service, downloading to your PC, listening with some software or copying to your MP3 player. A bit long winded, but it's a different kind of specialised service. That take us very far from the old radio that you just switched on.
A big fuss has been made some time ago about DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast); i.e. the switch over to total digital radio. But it did not happen and DAB sets do not sell very well. The promises of better quality, wider choice and extended service were not kept.
Thus, many people still use a very old fashioned standard (analog) radio set, tune into their favourite station and leave it there. And many programmes are still transmitted the old analogue way, through ordinary waves from antenna to aerials across the land.
