Tuesday, 15th March, 2022

Typhoon Radio Star - FM radio for the RS-232
============================================

Some 10-15 years ago I bought on a local flea market something that
looked like an FM radio tuner for the RS-232 / COM port.[1] 
It cost about $0.5, so I took it and soon after forgot about it.
Recently I found it again while searching for something completely
different and decided to finally make it work and talk.

It was harder, than I thought it would be.

Typhoon was a brand of German company Anubis International GmbH and
was quite known in central Europe around the turn of the century as
a manufacturer of speakers, webcams, TV tuners, graphics cards, and
other PC peripherals and components. The brand itself still exists,
but has changed owners several times and has no connection to its own
history.

When I googled the Radio Star, I found just one link - to some old
eBay auction where someone sold it with cables and a floppy with
driver, but that was all. So I googled more for other Typhoon-branded
peripherals and from one photo of the packaging got the URL of Typhoon
website from 2001 and then went straight to archive.org.

Sadly, the website is what websites back then used to be: generated by
a CGI script with long, long URL strings full of parameters, and
archive.org didn't and mostly still doesn't archive these well. I had
to try another approach. I looked at all the archived files and
discovered a pattern:

- there was huge amount of cryptically named ZIP archives
- and there was less huge amount of HTML files (375 exactly) which had
  the word "drivers in the URL and the same cryptical part as the ZIP
  archives.
 
Yes! The latter heap contained product pages with a list of driver
archives for various systems from the first heap. So I opened one
after another, and after about four hours and 161 opened pages I found
a product page for my Radio Star with application working both under 
Windows 3.x and Windows 95.[2][3] 

After that it was all easy.

The FM tuner works. I just had to use an old Nokia headset as I don't
have anything else with a 2.5mm jack capable of reproducing sound.
And I had to use an old personal organizer sync cable as an antenna,
because that is the only other thing I have with a 2.5mm jack. Why did
all this take me so long?

[1] /phlog/posts/2022-03-15_typhoon_radio_star_radio.jpg
[2] /phlog/posts/2022-03-15_typhoon_radio_star_files.png
[3] /phlog/posts/2022-03-15_typhoon_radio_star_software.png
.