To listen on most smartphones...

There is a marvelous radio streaming application, available for free, which works on the Blackberry, iPad / iPhone, and Android platforms. It's called TuneIn. With TuneIn's mobile app, you can listen to thousands of radio stations from all over the world (of course, we hope you'll choose ours).

You can download the app using the BlackBerry's App World, iPhone or iPad's App Store, or Android Market. It's completely free of charge, and you need not register or anything.

Once you download the app, just open it, read and heed the bandwidth warning that it presents, and proceed to the home screen. You can tick the checkbox so that TuneIn will never show that bandwidth warning again, if you like.

At the top of the home page, you'll find a search box, where you can type wave 1049 online. You can include the spaces, but you don't have to, and capital letters aren't required, either.

Once you see Wave 1049 Online in the results, just click it! The station will begin playing. You can, then, hit your phone's equivalent of a menu button and select Add to Presets. Now, you can listen anytime by just launching TuneIn, then click My Presets from the home menu, then click the entry for Wave 1049 Online, and Presto!

You can add other stations to your My Presets folder as well, stations from just about anywhere on the planet. May we suggest our sister station, Golden Gate Greats!

Does your car stereo have an Aux jack? If it does, you'll want to stop by Radio Shack or Best Buy or something and pick up a cable to connect your phone to your car stereo, freeing you from the constraints of having to listen to any of the second-rate FM & AM stations that dot the dial around here forever!

If you don't have one, you'll need to get a car charger for your phone while you're at it, because streaming audio on a smartphone will chomp right through your device's charge if you don't plug it in while you're listening. Our reference Blackberry Storm can, with a full charge, stream without charging for about 75 minutes before it starts shutting down non-essential services (like the Internet), useful info if you want to listen while running or biking.

Just so you know, this is an AAC+ stream at 64kbps (kilobits per second), so if you listen to Wave 1049 Online for an hour, you'll burn 28.8 MB (megabytes) of your monthly data allowance with your service provider. This means that you can listen on your device for 69.4 hours before eating-up a 2 GB monthly cap on data, or 173.6 hours if you have a 5 GB cap. Verizon has an online tool that you can check periodically to see how you're doing. Overage is, as of this writing, $10 per GB. AT&T's rates are pretty similar.

This is why TuneIn gives the warning about data usage when you first start using it.

So, if you listen on your smartphone for 2 hours per day, every single day of a 31-day month, you'd rip 1.7856 GB per month, which is still under your 2 GB limit. Note, however, that some stations stream at 128 kbps, which cuts your listen-time in half. Then again, some stations stream at 32 kbps, which doubles your listen-time at the expense of sound quality. YMMV.

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To listen on your computer...

The Computer listen-links at the upper right of all of the pages on this site should suffice for just about everybody listening on a computer running Windows, Mac Os X , or any human-friendly flavor of Linux, such as Ubuntu or Mandriva.  

We have lots of listen-links for a variety of players, but if you are using a Windows version earlier than XP-Home - i.e., Windows 95, 98, NT, Me or 2000, you might have some trouble. All current versions of RealPlayer, WinAmp and Windows Media Player require XP, Vista, or Windows 7. Fortunately, there is a player supported on earlier Windows versions, the KM Player. Click here to download it from cnet (Windows-only). Generally, software downloaded from cnet is considered safe, but it's always a good idea to scan freshly-downloaded software for viruses before installing it.

If you're running any flavor of Mac OS, Windows 7 or a human-friendly Linux, you shouldn't have any problems.

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Internet radios generally have a built-in menu system sorted by geography or format, or both. Try choosing the geographic method. Usually, you'll select a continent, then a country, then a state, then a format. You should find us under Location | North America | United States | Georgia | Alternative.  If this doesn't work, please click here for more information than you can probably stand about Internet radios.