a2geeks is hosting a tour of the WCBN-FM control room on Wednesday, November 14, 2012. Tours start at 5:30p, 6:30p, and 7:30p, and you should RSVP for your space. (I'll be at the 5:30pm tour.)
WCBN is an amazing student-run radio station at the University of Michigan, founded in 1972 and broadcasting from the basement of the Student Activities Building. Listen live to WCBN at 88.3 FM (all the way to the left on your dial) or online. You might need to go online to enjoy it if you live outside the transmission area - this map from the FCC shows an approximate radius of where the station can best be enjoyed, though I'm sure I've heard it from further away.
Map credit: FCC station database for WCBN-FM
CBC's Radio 2 has 5 channels of online music going at any time, reflecting the need to provide programming from the Atlantic Time Zone to the Pacific Time Zone. Newfoundland, a half hour east of the Atlantic Time Zone, gets a shout out from time to time but not its own time slot.
It's nice to have a choice of five channels, because sometimes you want to have mid-day classical music, and some days you want to have afternoon popular music, and in this way you can just time-shift your listening all from the same page.
Global Tuners is a worldwide project for people to share their shortwave radio receivers. There are about 50 tuners around the world, and once you create an account you can log in to each of them, change the tuning settings, and listen to the broadcasts that can be heard in that part of the world.
I have an old shortwave set that was my stepdad's, and so I've been trying to pull in stations from home. That's been successful up to a point, but compared to the last time I was following this world (20 years ago) there's a lot less in the English language and more in Chinese. Getting access to tuners around the world, especially to ones that have better antenna setups than I do, is remarkably handy.
The other thing that you can use a shortwave set for most of the time is listening to AM and FM stations that are aimed at a local audience. Here is where some of the most unusual listening comes in - it's just plain fun to tune in an Australian FM station (via a tuner in Australia) and listen to what ordinary radio sounds like there.
For best results, you'll want to pair this with some lookup tools that help you figure out what's on the air at that time that's likely to be heard in that part of the world. Short-wave.info has a nice real time database of broadcast schedules, so that if you are tuning around the dial on shortwave you can see which stations are likely to be broadcasting. FMSCAN has global listings of AM and FM stations, and MWLIST has longwave, mediumwave, tropical bands and a shortwave radio database. It's the kind of information that I recall from sorting through the back pages of the World Radio and TV Handbook, except that it's all linked together (and more up to date than my 1980s copy).
I get all the news I need from the weather report. Here's where I get the weather report from.
Twitter, to chat with people who are also in their basements. The local hash tag is #miwx for severe weather. I have a list @vielmetti/weather that I follow for the news.
Weather Underground for radar and forecasts and what not. I like the classic version of the user interface, which is busy and deep and which I know well enough to navigate. The minimalist mobile version of the site is starkly unbusy and works fine even on a relatively dumb smart phone.
SKYWARN, the local ham radio emergency weather channel. The local repeater is N8DUY, located near I-94 and M-14 in Scio Township, available at 145.150 Mhz or via the Radio Reference relay online. This is the single best source of real time news during events.
The DTE Energy outage map is good for tracking storm damage starting about 30 minutes after the storm has gone through - you start to pick up which power outages will take a long time to fix. Note in this map below from Sunday, May 29, 2011, that the storm damage near Lansing ends at the DTE boundary; that doesn't mean there isn't more storm damage, only that I don't have a map of the other.
Television, which we don't have for over the air reception. WDIV Channel 4 "Click On Detroit" has useful email weather alerts and a Detroit JustWeather page, and WXYZ Channel 7's #backchannel on Twitter always has good chatter from the news desk there.
AM/FM radio. Locally the best bet is WWJ "News radio 950", with traffic and weather together on the 8's; it's intended to be listened to while you are driving, and they do talk
Weather band radio, which speaks in a synthesized scary voice. There are receivers that only turn on when there is an alert in your area, but I don't have one. Details from National Weather Service Detroit about the network of weather radios in the area.
Weather facsimile. Again, never have managed to do this, but if you have the right radio you can decode faxes with weather maps on the that are broadcast over the air. Also known as WEFAX, the technology dates from the 1920s. Details if you are good at such things from National Weather Service marine forecast services.
You should be able to get real time notifications of severe weather even if you have no power, no cell tower, and no Internet; that's why you have batteries for your radio.
Spooky Talk is the talk show that's spooky. It's on weekly on AM 1610 The Station in Hamtramck on Sunday at midnight, after the 10 p.m. The Strait show which plays Detroit electronic vinyl.
