Technology
Ideas
Robert Gilchrist Huenemann,
M.S.E.E.
October 18, 2007
Compact Disc Player Track Delay
For years, I have been asking for a simple feature in a compact disc player, to no avail. I would like to have a programmable delay between tracks that I could set myself. I typically would set it to about five minutes. But I would like to have the option to set it to at least an hour. Why not?
There are several features I would like to have in a clock radio. It should set itself to WWVB. It should have digital tuning for the radio stations. It should have a non-volatile memory to store radio station and alarm settings. It should keep time when the power is off using a battery or large capacitor. It should be easy to se and program.
I have a Sony ICF-C255RC clock radio. I selected this model because it was the only unit I could find at the time with both automatic time setting and digital tuning. But the backup for the radio and alarm settings only lasts for a few minutes. It cannot receive a time signal when it is being used as a radio. This is not important unless you want to listen to the radio all night long.
I recently bought my wife a Sangean RCR-22 clock radio. It is closer to my ideal. But the alarm is not easy to program and the manual is useless.
I would like to see atomic time in every clock, including those in appliances such as microwave ovens, stoves/ranges, thermostats, etc. But WWVB can be tricky to receive. I would like to see someone sell a unit that would receive WWVB and rebroadcast time signals in a way that would be easy to pick up anywhere within my house, at any time of day. It should be accurate to within one second per day, even with the power out. It should update all my clocks automatically after a power outage, and I would like to be able to update them manually at any time by pushing a button. And they should all be updated routinely once a day.
Scanning Radios
Over the years, I have owned several radio receivers that had scanning capabilities. They have memories that can store frequencies of interest, and that can be scanned. Some have features to allow the scan to continue if a channel has a carrier but no modulation, or if the modulation is some form of data. My experience is that these features do not work very well. Even my ICOM R20 leaves much to be desired. Most allow a channel to be locked out. But with memories numbering in the thousands in the latest radios, it is difficult to remember which channels are locked out, and tedious to go through them all to unlock them.
I would like to see a feature that would allow all locked channels to be unlocked, perhaps by band. It would also be nice to have a way to lock out a channel without having to look at a keyboard - perhaps a dedicated button on the top of the radio.
Image responses are a serious problem in scanning radios, since they typically have a broadband front end. Radios are getting so small that I can imagine having two or even three radios in one package, each with a different frequency conversion scheme and different image frequencies. Then a voting scheme could distinguish between images and desired signals.