It's Full Potential

You may recall that while Anna and I were living in the Twin Cities I got my old radio working again thanks to a sweet saint named Del. It has continued to work well here in Dundee, except it is sometimes hard to get something worth listening to, unless you are keenly interested in the price of corn, hogs, cattle, soybeans and the like. I listen dutifully to at least one farm report during the day so that I can understand the economic plights of my neighbors, but when I have heard the same report once an hour over the past three hours I get a little tired of local radio. Anna and I listen to NPR frequently, but even that gets tiresome during the fund-raising drives they do, like right now. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the members of NPR and Minnesota Public Radio, because without them I wouldn't get to listen to things like Click and Clack, the Tappert brothers on Car-Talk, and I would know nothing of Guy Noir. NPR really has nothing to do with my old radio anyway because they broadcast on FM, and it is an AM radio. Country music comes in great, but a steady diet of country is like having oatmeal for breakfast every day. It isn't bad for you, but after a while you get tired of it. It's nice to have eggs once in a while.

Okay, I'm kind of getting into another long-winded prelude, so I'll cut to the chase. When I got my radio fixed in St. Paul, Del pointed out that there is a place on the back to plug in something else if I want to, such as a record player or an FM receiver. Looking at the jack, I couldn't tell what kind of cord would plug into it, so I basically ignored it. Still, I thought, if I could somehow get this thing to play FM, I could listen to NPR through this radio instead of the other stereo, and it would be fun to increase its versatility by increasing the available bands. I remember asking Del if he knew where I could get an FM receiver for the thing, and he basically threw up his hands and said, "Darned if I know!" so I kind of forgot about it.

This last weekend however, Anna and I were exploring Sioux Falls, South Dakota and just happened to find ourselves at a Toys "R" Us store. We were looking for a chess set, and after we found one we liked we just kind of wandered around the store for a bit. As luck would have it, they happened to have Sony Walkman FM/CD players on sale for an incredible price of $5! It suddenly occured to me that perhaps I could directly wire the headphone jack into the jack on the back of the old radio and I could get the FM to play that way, and even have the ability to play CD's as well. I figured that even if it didn't work I would only be out $5 and my disappointment.

When I got the walkman home and wired the headphone jack in, lo and behold, it didn't work. Dang! I was disappointed. "Ah well," I consoled myself, "It was only $5." That sounds like the end of the story, but since I'm still typing there must be more, and there is! Last Tuesday I was rummaging around the house while Anna was at play practice, looking for an A/C adapter to use on the walkman so that I wouldn't have to use batteries in it all the time. I thought I had one, and for some reason (probably a $5 reason) the thing didn't come with one, but after searching every known box in our house that might hold one, I couldn't find it. What I DID find was a patch cord that had a headphone plug on one end, and two RCA plugs on the other. We had used it to plug the DVD player into the stereo, but since the DVD player broke, and the stereo is in a different room now anyway, the cord ended up in a box in storage. I wondered if the RCA plug would fit into that jack on the back of my old radio. I was a little worried about shorting something out that I couldn't fix, but I figured it was worth a shot. I thought the worst that can happen is I might break a jack I don't use anyway, so what the heck. I plugged the headphone end into the headphone jack, and one of the RCA ends into the old radio, which I knew meant I was only getting one side of the stereo signal, but it is not a stereo radio, so there is no other option. I turned on the radio and pushed the auxilary button on the front, and what do you know! It works! I tried both of the RCA plugs and the sound quality seems about the same, so I just left one of them in. The great thing is that, not only can we now listen to FM (and therefore NPR) through the old radio, but we can also play CD's through it. We can listen to our Glen Miller, Benny Goodman and Andrews Sisters with the speakers they were meant to be heard from. It is very fun, and great for our swing dancing! I still don't have an A/C adapter, so next week I think I'll head for Radio Shack and see if I can find one that is compatible, but in the meantime, it is fun to be able to play what we want through the old radio, even if we still don't own a record player. It's still nice to hear this old radio and use it to its full potential. Blogged by Don.