Internet Radio Station!!

Dear You,

I am basically a technical person and I love to dream about technology.I have always found that the existing technology interest me no more for I always want some motivation and expectation to pull me along in the technical domain. I want to see the tech for tomorow, today. I want to state it and prove it is possible. It is this urge in me that is fanning my desire to do a doctrate in the future.

Once, when I was working with the Director of Hewlett Packard Research Labs in Bangalore, Dr.Ramani, as an intern, I proposed a model to make available the internet to every nook and corner of the globe. This is posted in today's blog and I warn all those tech-ignorant people to skip this one. My dear Tech ppl, enjoy this!

This is an idea to make internet available as easily as AM radio is today!This basically involves the convergence of the concept of RADIO and RECEIVE ONLY INTERNET.

I think I should first justify why I am suggesting RECEIVE ONLY Internet than the duplex channel.I am suggesting a model of Internet that will be available globally just as an AM Radio receiver in Palo Alto,California can very well tune to the New Delhi AIR station!Which obviously means I am talking of radio waves which are the most precious section on our EM spectrum.Because of its far reaching property,a frequency alloted to one station can never be re-used in any part of the world anytime!A Duplex channel demands many folds more bandwidth than the one-way channel and this is prohibitive.So also is the cost in the case of a duplex channel.

As any basic book on Communications would tell you,a communication to happen needs a Transmitter(Tx),Receiver(Rx) and a medium or a Channel for the transfer of information to take place.I suggest every Radio Station in the world can be the transmitter. A antenna with a card similar to an ethernet card,say,I call it a RADIO CARD which forms the receiver.This card will need a device driver and a S/W like Winamp can act as a user interface in the computer.

Every station announces the schedule of the WEBPAGE it will transmit and the time of transmission.This information can be made available through newspapers and Televisions just as a normal radio program is listed.Few minutes before the broadcasting,it sends out a PREAMBLE which is unique to every station.The tuner at the antenna end in the receiver end can be manually tuned to the particular frequency of the INTERNET RADIO STATION.On identifying the PREAMBLE,the receiver waits for the transmission of START BITS as in any Wireless LAN.The entire WEBPAGE with all the links can be stored in just the same way as a normal internet page may be saved in the computer.The TUNING circuit can be manually tuned to a particular station transmitting a particular website!

Getting into the technical details is interesting for this model.To facilitate long reach of the broadcasted signal,AM wave needs to be used(which is very very precious).The Digital Data can be sent by using Digital Communication Modulation Techniques like FSK/PSK/QPSK. The Demodulating circuit in the RADIO CARD will accordingly demodulate and store the received data in the computer's hard disk.As any frequency shift keying(FSK) used TWO frequencies for the digits ONE and ZERO,an INTERNET RADIO STATION will have TWO identifying frequencies as against only one in a normal RADIO STATION. Freq1/Freq2 may be the way in which a particular INTERNET RADIO STATION is referred to with Freq1 being the one for ZERO and Freq2 being the one for ONE. This facilatates usage of Freq2/Freq1 for an entirely different INTERNET RADIO STATION enabling RE-USE of frequencies inspite of using Radio Waves from the Khz band.

RADIO STATIONS are normally allotted carrier frequencies which are few Khz apart for Filter Design constraints and the like.These intermediate frequencies can be stolen to serve the INTERNET RADIO STATIONS.A normal AM Receiver may find this INTERNET RADIO FREQUENCY as NOISE and reject it.If 100Khz would refer to NEW DELHI AIR,97Khz/103Khz can serve as the NEW DELHI INTERNET RADIO STATIONS (IRS).

I can already feel the reader being displeased with the concept of one-way internet where even search engines like GOOGLE and ONLINE APPLICATION FORMS dont work.Why even STOCK TRADING cant be done and even CHATTING is impossible!!I should first tell that India alone has more than 14000 colleges which are not connected to the internet backbone.There is no point in a technology just affecting the lives of people is the busiest of cities!Technology's ultimate success is not in its working for the previleged few but working for everyone!A person sitting in some remote corner of India getting access wirelessly to technical tutorials and encyclopedia's on the net will be doubly benefitted and that is what I am aiming at.First these colleges should get this internet and then they can even serve as Information Source for the villages around.

I see a different problem though!Though this model is technically strong,the difficulty in implementing does lie in the mindsets of the people of emerging economies who have denied themselves wireless access for almost 50 years since the WW era.Taxi cabs in Chicago have been using walkie-talkies for almost 40 years now and we still are thinking of ideas to provide full connectivity.Government will be hesitant to allocate frequencies in the AM Radio spectrum for this purpose and no RADIO STATION is equipped as of now for even trying out such services on a trial basis.All these obstacles make my idea analogous to building a house in the middle of a road.Its all possible...but will you?!!The traffic police and the next bus will be waiting to knock it down!!Hope we get an overbridge soon!!

Definitely, Me.