History of the SonSet™ Radio
We've all seen those picture galleries some mothers make of their children's growth. We have a similar picture gallery of how our solar-powered fixed-tuned radio grew up.
The idea was born about six or seven years ago in the brain of Mike Axman, an engineer at the HCJB World Radio Engineering Center.
The older generation of radio was a little expensive, and it couldn't quite keep up with some of the places people were trying to take it. Mike dreamed about a new generation of radio, so Mike and Ted Miller, another HCJB engineer at the center, talked about what a new generation of radio might look like. One feature the older radio had was that it knew about only one station, and if it was within range, it would sing that one radio station's song.
These radios don't get paid for by the people who listen to them, because they are too poor. Instead, the broadcaster pays for all or most of the radio, so the broadcaster thinks that a one-track mind is a wonderful thing. Some broadcasters wanted the radio to sing the songs of more than one station (all chosen by the broadcaster). This way a listener could take a bus to another place and still be able to get a song from their radio.
Another good feature the older generation had was to be able to keep singing some every day, as long as the listener remembered that the radio needed some sunshine each day, too. The radio could sing in the sun, or it could soak up the sun and sing later inside or in the dark. It didn't need to be plugged into one of those shocking plastic things in the wall, which is good, because a lot of poor people don't have those shocking things in their houses anyway.
Baby Steps
Mike and Ted were very busy, so they decided to enlist some help in getting the new little radio born. Engineering students at three different Christian universities designed baby radios as their senior projects. Two of the three came up with baby radios that looked promising. They looked like this:
One graduate from each of the two teams came to the HCJB World Radio Engineering Center in Elkhart, IN, as interns. They took the best ideas from the two babies, added some completely new ideas to the mix, and created a toddler. At one point the baby looked more like a pile of colored spaghetti covering half a desktop. But it worked! Jeremy (one of the two interns) kept working on a case, trying different ideas to find one that was strong, cheap, and attractive.
School Years
Next came a disappointing time. The two interns didn't have enough experience, and Mike and Ted didn't have time to help. Everything was packed away in a box. One day, a man named Bob Sweat called. He works with the Christian Technology Center. He knew of a baby school that he thought could help the radios grow up. We wrote out our ideas about the radios, and Bob took those ideas to the nursery, and they started working. It took a while before they understood most of what we wanted our child to look like, but eventually they got the idea, and sent us a tweener radio that looked like the picture. It worked pretty well, but it wasn't wearing the right clothes.
Teenager
They were working on the clothes, but they weren't ready yet. Finally, they put the refined insides into the new skin, and our teenager looked pretty grown up, just needed some minor changes. So we asked the nursery to make us 10 like that. After a few more adjustments, we asked for 100 more.
Adulthood
After some final changes and a checkout of the factory, we took a deep breath and ordered 1000 copies. It seemed like it took forever, but they came, and they all looked the same.
We ran physicals on all 1,000 of them and set aside some that needed more time with the doctor. The others went out the door to places like Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific. Meanwhile, we chose a name for our child: SonSet™.
Ted spent a lot of time raising these radios to young adulthood. We are hoping you would like to be part of the project. You see, we have to pay the factory before they will make the radios. The first batch of copies was only 1,000. If we can order 10,000 at a time, the factory will give us a better price.
We need some help pulling together enough cash to pre-pay for the first batch of 10,000. If you would like to help us get together the money we need to place that first order, please send your donation to:
HCJB World Radio
2830 17th Street
Elkhart, IN 46517
Make the check payable to HCJB World Radio, and put in the memo: "SonSet radios".
To learn more about the SonSet™ Radio project, go to http://www.sonsetradio.com.