Plash phelps full#
Plash phelps portable#
Plash phelps trial#

It’s why AM broadcasters fought for and received power increases for their 250-watt Class C AM radio stations to broadcast with 1,000-watts full-time. If you’re a radio guy, you want your radio station to have more power.Ĭrosley got his WLW up to 500,000-watts (from his original 20-watt station) from 1934 to 1939. If you’re a car guy, you most likely want to make your car go faster. It was a time when commuting from the suburbs to the city for work became the rage.

Plash phelps portable#

Radio was reborn after the introduction of television due to the invention of the transistor – that made radio very small and very portable – as well as its introduction in the automobile dashboard. The Ford Model T came along at the same time massive oil strikes were being hit in Texas cheap cars and abundant cheap energy. Touring the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, I couldn’t help but note some correlations between cars and radio. We went to Yellowstone, America’s first national park and walked around Devil’s Tower, America’s first national monument.Įverything on our list was something special, unique and one-of-a-kind. We climbed aboard Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose” in McMinnville, Oregon (still the world’s largest amphibious aircraft). We rode the Hooterville Cannonball in Jamestown, California. We listened to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City. But it also made me realize that the reason we both wanted to take this road trip adventure was to visit places, people and things that were one-of-a-kind. We’ve always wanted to see Mount Rushmore. What we saw were empty studios and computer automation running each station. We even stopped in to visit some radio friends and their radio stations to take a tour.

Consistent, reliable, predictable and automated or syndicated. The Best Practices formatics were served up like fast-food. I could turn on a station in any city, in any state, and in short order tell you whether it was iHeart or Cumulus. We basically avoided them and opted instead for a local restaurant.Īnd it made me realize that something similar had happened to radio. We didn’t need to wonder what the food was like at either of them, we knew. McDonalds and Burger Kings were everywhere. Over our many miles, we saw lots of fast-food places. John has a large variety of jingles he plays during his show. We both activated it on our iPhones at the next rest stop.Īs a radio jingle lover, Pat St. We even learned from Pat a function that’s on our iPhones we didn’t know even existed, called “announce” that says the name of the person calling you. We heard about other people’s travels and made notes about places we might want to visit. We heard about weather for where we were going next or weather for places we had just visited. We felt part of a large community called the United States. However, when we pushed our SiriusXM button on the dashboard, we would hear the end of the Phlash Phelps morning show and four more hours of Pat St.

Plash phelps full#

Local radio stations we heard were all in full automation mode.

Our road trip’s daily drives between destinations took place during the midday. Take either away and you’ve lost what radio is all about.

Plash phelps trial#

So, before we drove out of our driveway in Virginia for our two-month long road trip we signed up for the two-month free trial of SiriusXM radio.ĭan Mason nailed it when he said radio is all about community and companionship. The variety of formats boiled down to mainly, R&B/Hip-Hop, Classic Rock, Country, Religious or Public Radio on FM and Sports or Conservative Talk Radio on AM.īut that wasn’t our biggest problem, cruising down the highway at 65-mph, it was when we found a station we enjoyed, it wouldn’t be more than 5-minutes before we found it being interfered with by another FM radio station making our original station virtually unlistenable. It didn’t sound like Maine anymore.Ī road trip Sue & I took to Key West, Florida last fall taught us that finding radio stations we would enjoy listening to was a real challenge. Years later on a return trip to Millinocket, this radio station now aired mostly syndicated programming. I remember hearing records that I’d never heard played on the radio before. I remember a trip to Millinocket, Maine that got me giggling, hearing the local newscaster struggling to pronounce a foreign country’s name or the names of their leaders. Every station had its own unique style and programming presentation. Since my earliest days, traveling anywhere meant an opportunity to hear new sounds emanating from my radio. Our jobs have had us seeing this great land from the air mine as a radio manager and educator/consultant, and Sue’s as a flight attendant. Seeing America from the car has been a Bucket List item for both of us. Sue and I just returned from an eight-week, 11,175-mile cross country road trip across America traveling through 23-states.