One radio show that I listen to fairly regularly is Coast-to-Coast AM, formerly known as the Art Bell show, but now hosted by George Noory except on weekends when Art Bell remains on the air from Manila in the Philippians. After his wife Ramona died, he married a woman there.

Sometimes the show is preempted by local events or programming, KVI might decide it’s more important to air election returns, local news events, Christmas music, whatever, and so I try to find the show elsewhere.

I enjoy the show quite a lot, sometimes. Other times I hate it quite a lot. The show basically will let anyone with an interesting paranormal subject tell their story and the end result of this is that you sometimes hear leading edge science, really interesting spirituality discussions, interesting alien encounters, near death experiences, and other interesting topics, other times you hear completely bogus material. Often it is material that, while it might be legitimate, I simply do not have a strong interest in. But enough interesting stuff does come across that I do listen to it regularly and skip those shows with guests I find boring.

Owing to computer hash from all the computer equipment here, receiving anything distant can be quite a challenge and so I will usually try to find a station on the net. On the Coast-to-Coast AM website they have a listing of affiliate stations but they do not specify which of those can be listened to on the web. I suppose this is because they are trying to sell a pay-for subscription service called Streamlink and don’t want to encourage people to do what I do and find a station that webcasts the show for free.

I stumbled across a useful resource for locating radio stations that have an audio feed called cryptically enough, “Radio Locator“.

Radio Locator allows you to locate stations that webcast by city, state, zip code, call letters, format, or by country, and in the advanced search section you can also sort by frequency or even the name of the stations owner.

I find the ability to search by frequency most useful because one of my hobbies is DX’ing, trying to get stations that are beyond the normal range of reception via unusual propagation modes such as sporadic E skip, tropospheric bending or ducting, etc. Often times such stations will fade a lot and it can be hard to catch a station ID, but if I can get the location and have the frequency, then I can locate it with Radio Locator.

Another function that it has is the ability to locate a vacant FM station in your area, assuming there is one. Here there virtually are none, even those stations it says are vacant there are receivable signals on, 87.9 is clear but it’s not a legitimate FM frequency. 103.1 is used by CKMO in Victoria BC and is quite receivable here, 104.7 KDUX in Aberdeen, not strong but marginally receivable here. If you live somewhere that the FM bands are less crowded perhaps it can find a truly vacant frequency.