Radio ga ga

Soon, personal stereos started working without cassettes and we had dedicated FM receivers with headphones for radio buffs. The downside? Well, personal stereos and FM receivers required batteries. Easily available, but did pinch the pocket when you were surfing the airwaves for hours on stretch everyday! Also, increased battery consumption gave the greens a reason to frown, all that nickel and lead didn’t make for any rapid biodegradation!

Enter the Free Play Radio 2. The best of both worlds. It’s a modern, high-tech radio that doesn’t need batteries. Or AC power. Just wind up the crank on the back, and away you sail!

A few years ago,a British inventor named Trevor Baylis was watching a TV show on educating Africans about the spread of AIDS. The biggest problem here was getting word out. Radios were the best available medium, but electricity was scarce and batteries too expensive. Within three months Baylis had come up with a solution. An affordable radio that was easy to power. By hand.

BayGen set up its factory in Cape Town, South Africa, and hired handicapped workers to build the devices. They produced an AM-FM-shortwave radio capable of playing for 30 minutes on a single 30-second wind. Needless to say, it was (and still is) a big success not only in remote locations but also with outdoors people closer to the comforts of conventional technology.

And now BayGen has introduced a second radio. AM and FM only. But this time the technology has been pushed to new heights, yielding an hour of play from one wind (less, if you listen loud!)

THE NUTS AND BOLTS

According to the company, the radio’s energy storage-and-releasemechanism is based upon energizing a textured carbon steel spring by winding it from one spool to another.

The radio itself is eight inches by 11.5 inches by eight inches of ABS plastic, and weighs five pounds, five ounces. (Most of the size and bulk comes from the wind-up mechanism). It has a four-inch speaker and puts out five watts. It plays loud and sounds great. You should hear how good AM radio can really sound!

Once you crank it up, the spring mechanism makes very little noise. Only once or twice per hour do you hear the thing churning. The spring doesn’t store energy for extended periods of time, so if you give it a full wind and listen for only 30 minutes, you’ll have to wind it again after the original hour is up. If all of this manual labor gets on your nerves, there is a place to plug in an AC adapter. That of course defeats the purpose.

WHAT NEXT?

The FPR2 retails for approximately 79.95 dollars. It’s available through catalogs and many stores specializing in equipment for theoutdoors. Think of what you’ll save in the cost of batteries over the life of this radio. That’s why it’s a current favorite of green-minded people the world over. And it makes a great gift!

BayGen itself is busy working on items other than radios. The company sees itself producing an entire line of self-powered devices. A flashlight will be first. But BayGen is also working on wind-up toys, cellular phones and laptop computers. Think about that for a minute. A laptop (or palmtop) with no batteries or AC cords, along with a wireless connection to the Net. Now there’s something to look forward to.

Hey, don’t expect anyone to retail this in dear Mumbai for some time, but there’s always the imported maal‘ dude next door who could just have a piece in the near future. Anyway, 80 dollars is gonna translate into a load of our currency – say Rs 3,200!