Pictures on the Radio
Thu, 16 Feb 2012
I bought a little Chinese shortwave radio last week and by tuning in to a fax broadcast on 2618KHz last night and holding my iPhone near it while running an app called HF Fax I was able to receive this weather map. I was quite impressed. Radio has always fascinated me. Despite knowing broadly how it works (I have a radio license which I took an exam for ages ago), I still consider it to be basically magic.
All radio frequencies exist in the same place simultaneously, their waves travel around our world almost instantly and we can't see or touch them. Yet we not only managed to not only discover them in the first place, but are able to control them in such a way that within decades of discovery their use became essential to the modern world.
For a while I've been thinking about a project that would look to visualise the radio spectrum around you in a creative way - letting you see, hear and 'feel' the waves around you. Making the invisible, visible. I'll report back when I've made some progress.
