No static at all
Salute to the founder of FM radio!
It was on this day (June 11) in 1935 that listeners first heard FM radio, when the American inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong gave a demonstration in Alpine, New Jersey. Armstrong demonstrated the clarity of FM compared to AM radio by playing classical music and the sound of water being poured. (The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor)
Armstrong with his new wife, Marion MacInnis, on the beach in Florida with the first portable radio—an early “boombox”—Armstrong’s wedding present to his bride.
In 1933, Armstrong secured four patents which were to be the basis for frequency modulation. This was an entirely new system of broadcasting. Unlike amplitude modulation which varies the amplitude or power of radio waves to transmit sound, frequency modulation varies the number of waves per second over a wide band of frequencies. As static is transmitted by amplitude modulation and cannot break into the wide band of frequencies of frequency modulation, the latter is virtually static–free. Armstrong, who enjoyed aphorisms, liked to quote defeatists who said, “Static, like the poor, will always be with us.” He proved them wrong.
The first public broadcast of FM was made in 1935 from the home of his friend C.R. (Randy) Runyon at 544 North Broadway in Yonkers. Runyon was a ham who operated under the call letters W2AG and broadcast from a tower in the yard of his house. The tower and the house are no longer standing. The Runyon living room served as a studio for a demonstration of different kinds of sound that were broadcast to a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers at the Engineer’s Building on West 39th Street in New York City. Water was poured, paper was crumpled, and live and recorded music were beamed from the Runyon tower to the audience forty miles away.
http://www.yonkershistory.org/arms.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I have one of these, which picks up FM:
...and one of these that gets AM and short wave:
