Ok, this is a game almost EVERYBODY can play!
I thought up this little survey whilst driving around the North Shore tonight. All you need in order to participate is a radio with good FM reception and a scan button. Traveling in a car is a perfect place to take the survey, but you could also do it on a stereo at home if you get good reception in there (I only say this because the radios inside our house don’t get as much FM reception as the one in the car). If you don’t have a scan button, you can still participate, but you will need to scan through the stations manually. For the rest of the instructions, I’ll assume you’re using scan.
By the way, if you don’t usually listen to the radio in the car, you can still play. Just tune in to the radio for the purposes of this survey, then you can go back to whatever you normally listen to, or silence, or whatever.
To begin, tune your radio to the FM band, and set it to the lowest station. On my car stereo that’s 87.9. Next, hit the scan button to begin scanning through stations. Each time the radio stops on a station which has an audible, understandable broadcast, count it. If it’s too staticky to understand, don’t count it. At the same time, see if the broadcast is something you wouldn’t mind listening to – a song you like, perhaps, or a favorite talk radio show. If it is likable, keep track of it in a separate count, and try to remember which station, and who/what was being broadcast. But don’t stop the scan to listen, just let the radio keep scanning. When your radio has scanned to the end of the spectrum (107.9 or so), you should have a count of the number of stations which came in audibly, and a count of the programs that you might have actually wanted to listen to.
When you’ve got that, post it in the comments here, along with the name of any programs or songs you would have liked to listen to. Also, please make a note as to what time of day you were listening to the radio, and where you were (going?) at the time.
Oh, and feel free to go back and listen to the good programs, if any.
I’ll start.
I was able to make out 31 distinct stations as I scanned from 87.9 to 107.9.
Out of those 31 stations, only one station was playing something that interested me: Boston’s WBCN 104.1, playing Stone Temple Pilots’ song “Big Empty” (I tuned back in to it after I was finished scanning…)
At the time, I was driving from the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers to home in Beverly.
Who’s next?
i got in 29, and would have listened to 2, i also realized that my favorite station which was a rock station is suddenly a country station, happened over night!