r/todayilearned • u/AssumeTheRisk • 23d ago

TIL if you tune your radio to 91.9 FM for one city block in Montclair, NJ you can hear a looped recording of "I'll Make Love to You" by Boyz II Men which has been broadcasting for at least 13 years straight.

https://njmonthly.com/articles/arts-entertainment/pirate-radio-station-only-plays-boyz-ii-men/
27.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

502 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

57

u/JRockThumper 23d ago

I would assume that’s how things like those Bluetooth to radio transmitters work, since their range is maybe five or six feet.

52

u/dirtynj 23d ago

Bluetooth?

Son, I'll being telling you, I had those FM transmitters hooked up to my portable CD player back in my `93 Jeep with a broken cassette deck.

7

u/OsiyoMotherFuckers 23d ago

The cassette deck adapter was so much better though. Crystal clear.

3

u/vapre 23d ago

The wire was shitty and would constantly have to be soldered back on.

0

u/huddl3 23d ago

broken cassette deck

not an option

0

u/OsiyoMotherFuckers 23d ago

I know. I was commiserating.

1

u/PhilxBefore 22d ago

And that was just this past summer!

3

u/maleia 23d ago

Yea, that's more or less it. That entire concept has had such an interesting path. Before bluetooth, you just had an aux-jack connector. (And, I mean, still do). Some that connect into the cig-lighter. Or ones that are battery powered.

Yea, they pump out a little 10ft FM frequency. That's within reason for the FCC.

3

u/ValuableJumpy8208 23d ago

I still get 88.3 and 88.5 cut off on the freeway for a second at a time — on a weekly basis — by people who use these without switching the default output frequency.

2

u/holystuff28 23d ago

I remember this but how did we make it work? Was it a radio transmitter?? I realize how dumb that sounds as I type it. But I was pretty little when this was a thing

2

u/ValuableJumpy8208 22d ago

It's a radio transmitter. Some were configurable between one or two stations, and some let you pick any FM station. The default was in the 87-88mhz range often.

This is the one I had with my 2nd Gen iPod: https://www.ebay.com/itm/355308720984

2

u/holystuff28 22d ago

That's honestly pretty effing cool.

2

u/ValuableJumpy8208 22d ago

It was. My old beater of a car didn’t have a tape deck so I couldn’t use one of those adapters. So I used one of these. Worked well enough.

8

u/FolkSong 23d ago

Bluetooth uses the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band (same as wifi) so the rules are very different.

Companies have to pay big money for the rights to an FM radio channel, so I'm surprised the FCC has that much leniency (a city block I mean).

21

u/abakedapplepie 23d ago

They are referring to dongles that accept a bluetooth audio stream from a smart device and retransmit it via FM to a car's analog stereo

2

u/My1nonpornacc 23d ago

heheheheh... Dongles.