On the Radio, Whoa Oh Oh Oh, On the Radio

We bought a new car and, unlike our old car, the new one has a working radio. That's when we realized that it had been so long since we'd actually listed to a radio in the car that we had no idea where to find any of the local stations. So we used the "seek" feature repeatedly until we had a few presets, most of which turned out to be lousy. Then we wondered where on the mighty Web we might find a complete list of radio stations in the Chicago area. Turns out we found a wonderful site that allows you to search for radio stations all around the world and on the Internet (streaming). The site is called Radio-Locator and can be found at http://www.radio-locator.com.

Radio-Locator's home page lets you search for stations by city or zip, state, or call letters. You can also use the Advanced Search to search by a myriad of other categories like format, owner, and more. You can search World radio by country or streaming Internet radio by format.

We ran a search on our zip code and it brought up 53 radio stations within listening range. Listed for each station are: Info, Call Sign, Frequency, Dist./Signal, City, School (if applicable), and Format. Clicking on "Info" brings up a page of technical details about the station like Web site, owner, address, coverage map, and many other things I can't imagine I'd ever need. The coverage map is actually pretty cool, showing the point of origin and color-coded rings emanating out from it. Slick.

Back to the main search list, clicking on the Call Sign brings up the stations Web page (in a new window, thank you very much). If the entry has a little lightning bolt to the left of it, you can click on it to launch their Internet stream. Also slick.

http://www.radio-locator.com