Pocket Pirate Radio

So yesterday Atomic pm'ed and notified me that he wanted to escape the city. I was game, yet I was a little shocked to learn that yesterday was Friday. I've lost all bearing of time since the 4th of July. He had mentioned Duluth, which sounded like a fun place to head out to in the late evening. Well Atomic has a very Geek side to him that not many see, and he got caught up playing some online game. This made our departure time later than originally anticipated. We had to do some running around for errands and whatnot. I was experimenting with broadcasting my own radio station from Atomic's car. I had recently dug up an old FM transmitter that I had acquired several years ago. A cheap one used to broadcast your CD or MP3 player to a car stereo. Apparently I had gotten ahold of an item that is quite desired in the hacking circles because of a few hacks one could do to increase power and broadcast range. See for yourself http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/20/44/ . I have that exact same model. The purpose of this experiment was to see about rigging a small but slightly more powerful pirate radio signal for the Strategic Beer Command's trip to the Nevada desert. SBC radio, it shouldn't be a problem to do. We'll be travelling through some of the most lonely and desolate places of America. Places where there is maybe 4 or five radio stations, if that. And most of them will be of the farm report or Jesus Freak nature. So our own little micro station shouldn't harm anyone. Besides the FCC would have to track a relatively small signal while we were continually moving. But that was the plan anyway. This preliminary test worked well, and improvements to my design are being worked out. Anyone got a cheap four track mixer with a mic input so I can do some real broadcasting on the road?

Back to the mission at hand.

Duluth was dropped in favor of something closer, we thought we'd give the Farmington Nike Launch facility a try. Well at some point we stopped and chilled with the Guys from starvinggeeks.com(The site is down now). We watched a snippet of a movie shot in their living room. A decent production, that was fun to watch while we had some chicken. This diversion didn't get us any closer to the Farmington site, yet I wasn't complaining. These guys were like the LoneGunMen, monitors and touch screens, and network cables all strewn about. A rack full of networking hubs and other gizmos that blinked and carried about transferring the 1's and 0's of their operation. After awhile they were accustomed to our presence and settled into their game of Mafia Network. At this Atomic and I decided we'd better get on our way, we wanted to shoot some video of this Nike Site. Then we realized what time it was, a little later than we had thought so we resigned to cruise around Atomic's old stomping grounds. After getting eaten alive by mosquitos near Minnehaha Creek in Minnetonka, we get inspired to price a decent inflatable raft. so we were off to find a Wal-Mart. This journey took up the rest of our night and we eventually wondered all the way to Coon Rapids. Wal-Mart sucked on raft stock, seemed everyone bought rafts for the 4th. So we made our way back home in the wee hours of the dawn. A night of aimlessly wandering behind us. Wandering like we so often do without a set destination. Good Times.

Asylunt