A Low-Watt Hearing Test

While every area has a few low-wattage, small, independent radio stations to fill the dial between the big stations with the more powerful signals, I feel like Cape Cod has more than average. Once you get around the Cape you can't turn the dial in either direction without landing on some station broadcasting from just off the beach. (In one case I discovered over the weekend, you can't even drive down to the local strip mall without finding an independent radio station occupying one of the store fronts. Because nothing says, "take us seriously" like being located between a 99 Restaurant and the local adult video store.) Still, I like these smaller stations - they pretty much only advertise local business and serve an actual purpose. Heck, my first couple years out of college I tried to get a job at half of them. But that doesn't make them any easier to listen to.

The problem with low-watt stations is that their signals are very easy to interrupt. Anything giving off a radio wave can end up being more powerful than the signal these guys are putting out. Some guy in a delivery truck with a two-way radio to talk to his dispatcher can accidentally cause the station to stop broadcasting without even knowing that he's doing it. That's why you should really wait until after dark to listen to some of these smaller stations, as there are fewer people with that kind of equipment at work, which means less potential problems to disrupt the signal. But even then you have to be precise with the radio tuner.

This is something I was reminded of when I was down the Cape for the weekend. Driving around I was listening to a station just a couple of towns over that was having a "Class Reunion Weekend", where every hour featured songs from one specific year. Patiently waiting for it to get to the year I graduated from school, it started to get late and I wanted to get to bed. However, the radio in the bedroom down at the beach house isn't very new (nor should it be, as we are talking about the beach house) and just has an old-school tuner, not a digital dial. So I couldn't get exactly onto the station I wanted; just close enough to get around 97% of their signal, with the other 3% faintly coming from the next station on the dial.

Now, when I was working as a DJ I often worried about hearing loss. I mean, you can only sit with headphones on and the volume up for so long before you start to do some real and permanent damage. Turns out I shouldn't have worried, because my ears are amazing. Laying in bed I could hear the 3% of the other station clear as a bell. I should have to take all hearing tests laying down. In fact, I was more focused on figuring out what song the second station was playing than the station I was officially 'listening' to. Any time they played a song I recognized it was even worse, because now I knew what I should be listening for, which only seemed to make the 3% station come in louder. And of course, because the main station I was trying to hear had a weak signal, it would occasionally fade out, making the second station come in clearer and louder. Suddenly, it was as though I was creating my own little mash-up remix from two radio stations playing drastically different formats.

As you can imagine, this was confusing the hell out of my brain and making it very hard to get to sleep. The only relief came once I discovered that the station I was trying to hear was not doing the years in any type of order, so waiting around for my class year was unnecessary. I eventually decided to give my brain a rest, move away from this section of the dial altogether and up to a station with a stronger signal. I never did end up hearing any of the songs for the class of '98, but at least I got reassurance that my hearing is fine.