I’ve been watching this technology for a while, and it has finally advanced to the point where I was ready to buy in (to the tune of $99.99 plus shipping).

The Radio Excavator is a small USB device that allows you to listen to radio broadcasts on arbitrary frequencies at arbitrary points in time. The active ingredient is a digital amplifier that amplifies residual wave-traces. (Although the surface of a pond appears still a few seconds after you drop a pebble, the ripples are in fact still there—they’re just too small to see. The Radio Excavator in essence magnifies the micro-ripples.)

The depth of accessible time has been doubling every couple of years (as predicted by Krink’s Law), and the (low-cost, consumer) device the UPS guy delivered today can reliably extract broadcasts from as early as 1934 (which covers my target year of 1935, hence my willingness to drop a hundred bucks).

The major catch for my purposes is that the Excavator is still (for obvious reasons) dependent upon the user’s physical location. That is, I can listen to radio traffic from 1934 onward on any frequency I like, as long as that traffic would have been audible in Northfield, MN at the moment in question. If I insist on listening to traffic in Addis Ababa in 1935, I’m going to have to find somebody in Addis who owns an Excavator and is willing to record and e-mail me some MP3′s. (Or I suppose I could fly there, but I don’t see that in the family budget in the near-term.) So far Google and the obvious user fora haven’t turned up anyone like that. Anybody have a friend in Ethiopia who might be able to help me out?