A DIY FM Radio, the Dummy Version

Does it bother you as much as it bothers our staffers when you run across freelance internet content written by people who have abso-lute-ly no idea what they're talking about? It should: if you don't mind getting bogus information from your freelancers, you must not mind getting fake news from your media sources. Chuckle. Well, regardless of whether you're a fan of MSNBC or FOX News, you should be pretty unimpressed by the electronics chops of one Tiesha Whatley, at least based on her eHow.com post "How to Build an FM Radio."¹

It's not like Whatley hasn't been here before. No, we've already singled out the wedding planner-slash-English major four times, mostly for her bushwa about computers. Why she decided she was competent to write about building your own FM radio is beyond human ken, but we did figure out the probable source of her... can we call them insights? It might be a book named Gonzo Gizmos, or more likely a website that copied one of their experiments. Whatever the case, even the most cursory glance at her materials list confirms her ignorance. Item one is,

"Fifty to 100 feet of straded [sic] insulated wire (for use as an antenna)..."

Yeah, sure.

It's obvious that all Whatley did was perform a copy-reword-paste job on the instructions from a DIY kit, since she makes frequent reference to parts with very specific configurations. By that, we mean her instructions for connecting the ferrite coil:

"Solder the ferrite loop to the variable capacitor. Only solder the ferrite wire that is painted black... Solder the unpainted wire of the ferrite loop to the variable capacitor's right lead... Take note of the red-painted wire of the ferrite coil. Use an alligator clip to attach it to the antenna wire...Use the remaining alligator clip lead to attach the green-painted wire of the ferrite coil to a good ground."

Gee, Tiesha, what if your readers don't have a ferrite loop with red, black, bare, and green wires? What would they do then? And what about that "piezoelectric wire" you wanted people to solder? Does that have something to do with the earphone you mentioned in the materials list? We sure have to wonder what the content editor was doing while all this floundering was going on... For yet one more of her many freelance contributions to eHow's continuing program for the stupidification of the internet, we do hereby award the Antisocial Network's Dumbass of the Day to Tiesha Whatley... again.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_2313403_build-fm-radio.html

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