My name is Bob Cavanaugh. I’m 30 years old, and graduated from Clark College with a CP in web development in September 2023.
I’ve had the idea of creating a website of some form or another for much longer than that though. In 2010, I had to set up a blog as a high school English project. I continued playing around with WordPress after that though, eventually leading to me starting my first aircheck site in 2013. The blog from English eventually became the Radio Crytic, but for several years, I have wanted to combine airchecks and radio commentary into one site. The WordPress class I took at Clark finally inspired me to do that, so now this site exists.
What’s an aircheck?
If you remember putting a cassette into a recorder and recording when your favorite song was on the radio, you’ve made an aircheck without even knowing what it was called. There are people, including myself, that collect these, though a single song isn’t really going to be something we collectors are after. Had you say left the recording on for an hour, then that’s something that might be interesting, particularly if the station recorded isn’t on the air anymore.
Do you record off the internet?
This is a big debate among collectors, is something recorded off the internet really an aircheck? My answer to this is as follows:
The vast majority of the recordings on this site were in fact recorded off the air. For certain markets, I do use Global Tuners, which is simply a website that allows me to listen to and remotely control radios from all over the world. So, while it’s a website, what you hear comes directly off the air at the location of the receiver. I will record off the internet, but unless it’s a speciall situation such as a station going away, will share it here only if the following conditions are met:
- I do not have any other access to the air signal at the time of recording.
- The stream is a complete simulcast of the air signal.