I can’t remember the last time I tuned in to an actual radio station. Back in my teenage years, my parents showed me how to record songs from the radio onto a cassette. Then piracy and MP3s swept in, and radio faded from my life.
It wasn’t until I heard a podcast outro — “This is a podcast from detektor.fm” — that I suddenly wondered: What the heck is FM?
That tiny question led me down a rabbit hole into the world of modulation and carrier waves — the century-old tech quietly powering everything from your phone calls to your Wi-Fi.