Have you ever encountered something out in the world that is a blatantly obvious fact but for some reason you never really gave it any thought, but now that you have you suddenly realize that you never knew the fact to begin with but should have? This will occasionally happen to me and it did a few days ago.
I was driving in the car when for some reason the two wires in my brain that connect reason with common sense connected and I realized: "There are no even numbers on radio frequencies after the decimal". By this I mean that there isn't an 88.8 FM or a 550.2 AM. All call numbers on any frequency are followed by an odd number.
I don't really know what made me think of this but once I did I felt extremely stupid. Of course all of the numbers are followed in odds. Why didn't this ever occur to me before? I'm 25 and just discovered a well known fact about radio frequencies. I am an idiot for not seeing it sooner.
The proof was always out there for me to see. I have looked at too many bumper stickers touting "La Musica 195.3" or "93.3 The Bone Rocks Harder" to not have seen this. I think these instances are the universes way of saying, "Hey Stupid, You are getting way to cocky and to show you you're not so special here's something you should know."
That is all,
Newt
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Things I should have knows - Radio
Posted by Trinity at 5:57 PM
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1 Ripples in the pond:
FM radio stations all transmit in a band between 88 megahertz (millions of cycles per second) and 108 megahertz. The band is divided into 100 channels, each 200 kHz (0.2 MHz) wide. The center frequency is located at 1/2 the bandwidth of the FM Channel, or 100 kHz (0.1 MHz) up from the lower end of the channel. For example, the center frequency for Channel 201 (the first FM channel) is 88.0 MHz + 0.1 MHz = 88.1 MHz. So there can be a station at 88.1 megahertz, 88.3 megahertz, 88.5 megahertz, and so on. The 200-kilohertz spacing, and the fact that they center on odd numbers is completely arbitrary and was decided by the FCC. In Europe, the FM stations are spaced 100 kilohertz apart instead of 200 kilohertz apart, and they can end on even or odd numbers.
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