Everyone knows that certain technology products are endangered species. Film cameras, for instance. Turntables. Payphones. Odds are pretty good that you haven’t used any of them recently. If you’re young enough, you might never have used them.

I never thought of pocket-sized AM/FM radios–the sort with built-in radios and telescoping antennae–as falling into this category of obviously-doomed products. I assumed that any store that sold electronic gadgets of any sort still stocked them.

But last week, my mother, who I’ve been visiting in Boston, asked for one. And boy, was I surprised by how tough it was to find one for sale locally.

Please don’t reflexively mock mom as a Luddite: She owns an iPhone, a BlackBerry, and a Kindle, and was the first person I knew who owned a laptop computer–way back in 1983 or thereabouts. But she wanted to press one button on an affordable, portable device to hear WBUR, her favorite station. For that, a pocket radio still sounded like the best option.

Now, mom already had a fancy portable radio–an Eton that can run on batteries, solar energy, or hand-cranked power, and which doubles as a flashlight and phone recharger. She asked me to help her with it. It took me ten minutes to figure out how to make it play WBUR, which seemed like a bad sign. That’s why I figured she’d be happier with a simple pocket AM/FM model.

And I thought, not unreasonably, that I’d buy it at RadioShack.

Then my father pointed out that my sister, who’d visited earlier, had bought the Eton at Best Buy–because she couldn’t find a garden-variety radio at RadioShack or Best Buy.

I decided to try again. I went to two nearby RadioShacks.

Once upon a time, RadioShack sold gazillions of radio models.

It feels really silly to go into something called “RadioShack” and ask if it carries radios–especially when the answer is no. (One of the locations, in a mall otherwise dominated by stores such as Aeropostale and Victoria’s Secret, had shelf after shelf of diodes and transistors for sale–I wonder when was the last time anyone bought any of those?–but no radios.)

I also tried two Best Buys, and a Target. None of them had a straightforward pocket radio with a built-in speaker.

All of these stores did have related products of several sorts I wasn’t looking for, such as tabletop iPod docks with built-in radios, clock radios, and weather radios. I also saw more hand-cranked Etons in a variety of sizes–radio apparently being something that people think of as an emergency supply rather than an everyday necessity.

At one Best Buy, I even saw a Walkman with a tape player as well as a built-in radio–a classic gadget I didn’t know was still extant.

But I didn’t want a radio that also did other things, or something else that was also a radio. I wanted a radio.

Over on Twitter, folks had lots of advice, all of it interesting:

@harrymccracken Did you try Frys? Also, if your Mom doesn't mind a used version, Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale might have it.—
Kevin Krewell (@Krewell) February 04, 2012

(I’m sure Fry’s has them, and I love the Weird Stuff Warehouse–but they’re both thousands of miles from Boston.)

@harrymccracken try a drug store. Cvs, Walgreens etc—
victor marks (@vmarks) February 04, 2012

(I checked two CVS locations; no joy.)

@harrymccracken Target sells radios.—
lauralou (@bubbaloucious) February 04, 2012

(No they don’t. Or at least the one I visited didn’t have any plain ol’ AM/FM radios–although it did have Sonos music systems and other surprisingly sophisticated stuff.)

@harrymccracken eBay.—
Cynthia Schames (@CynthiaSchames) February 03, 2012

(Thousands of them, I’m sure, but I wanted one right away.)

@harrymccracken Does get much simpler then the PAL from Tivoli Audio. Mother approved. bit.ly/Ao2ZBA—
Adam Belzycki (@Belzycki) February 03, 2012

(Neat! Also $219.99.)

@harrymccracken Perhaps there's something here at C. Crane? ccrane.com—
Scott (@scottgfx) February 03, 2012

(Looks like it would be a good option if I could wait for it to arrive.)

@harrymccracken something like this? amzn.to/yUKXDp—
chuq von rospach (@chuq) February 03, 2012

(Ditto.)

Eventually, when I was flirting with giving up and ordering online, I decided to make one last stop–at the oldest surviving RadioShack, on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. As RadioShacks go, it’s spacious and fairly well-stocked. If the oldest RadioShack of them all no longer sold radios, it would just be sad.

“Good evening,” a staffer jauntily greeted me when I walked in. “What brings you to the Shack tonight?”

When I told him what I was looking for, he said that yes, yes the store did stock radios. In fact, someone else had been in earlier that day looking for one.

He led me to the very back of the store, where two radios were hanging in blister packs: a $14.99 one with a traditional station indicator, and a $29.99 one with digital tuning. I opted for the former–that’s it up at the top of this post–and bought AA batteries for it. (The clerk somehow convinced me to buy a 36-pack of them.)

Mission finally accomplished.

So why was it so hard to find? It’s tempting to assume that the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad killed the classic pocket radio. But as I think about it, I believe that radios of the sort my mom wanted were archaic long before the age of digital music.

Starting in the 1970s, they were done in by two newer, trendier types of radio: the Walkman (and its imitators) and boom boxes. Both provided high-quality sound than a pocket radio. If you wanted to listen privately, you wanted a Walkman; if you wanted everyone else to hear, you wanted a boom box. But you probably didn’t want a dinky monophonic radio with a tinny built-in speaker.

The excellent site Radio Shack Catalogs chronicles the decline of the pocket radio: In 1960s and 1970s catalogs, there was a major section teeming with ‘em. By 2000, the year before the iPod debuted, the selection had already dwindled down to a few perfunctory options. I just didn’t notice until now.

Radio, obviously, isn’t dead; it remains one of the most mass-market forms of mass media. But outside of cars, I wonder how many people listen to it on a device that’s a radio, and nothing else?

Assuming that the Broadcom chip is indeed inside the next iPhone, I’d still be surprised to see the phone use it for FM transmitting and reception. Even the best FM transmitters I’ve used are pretty fuzzy and crackly under all but optimum circumstances, and I find it hard to believe that Apple would be satisfied. And the time when the ability to listen to FM radio on an Apple device came and went a long time ago–the wealth of Internet radio that’s already available on the iPhone would make FM redundant.

Or so I think. I’m happy to be proven wrong–especially if Apple and Broadcom have figured out a way to do truly decent wireless FM transmitting to a car stereo…

As I wrote when Sirius XM recently raised some of its fees, I was once a hardcore XM fan, and still find much to like in the service–but I have the sneaking feeling that I’ll eventually do my radio listening in the car via my iPhone or another smartphone. And “eventually” may not be all that far away. Especially if the bankruptcy or further aftershocks from the merger impacts any of the programming I’m paying for. (I still can’t figure out why both the pre-merger XM and Sirius carried Harry Shearer’s Le Show…but the combined enterprise doesn’t.)

Meanwhile, satellite radio’s fragile condition would seem to be more evidence that sending satellites into the skies to beam stuff back to earth is so hugely expensive a proposition that it’s hard to turn it into a business. (Earlier examples: Boeing’s short-lived Connexion airplane broadband and Iridium’s satellite phone service.) Although I guess it’s possible that Sirius XM’s woes have less to do with outer space and more to do with money that stayed right here on earth–and went into the pockets of Howard Stern, Martha Stewart, Oprah, and pals.

When the FCC approved Sirius and XM’s merger last year, it was famously based in part on promises of a three-year price freeze for service. That guarantee apparently applied only to the basic $12.95 a month charge, leaving Sirius XM able to jack up other prices associated with its service. With no direct competitor, there’s less pressure to keep prices low for fear the other guy will undercut them.

Well, maybe. Satellite radio is in dire danger of being rendered irrelevant over the next few years by cell phones that stream a bevy of music, news, and talk stations for no cost beyond standard monthly data fees. Already, my iPhone gets Pandora, Last.FM, Slacker, AOL Radio, NPR, and a whole lot more. The company’s betting that locking up exclusive rights to stuff like Howard Stern and major-league sports will keep its services attractive, but that sounds like an expensive proposition for everybody involved.

News about price changes comes a few months after Sirius XM sprung channel changes on its customers without warning, driving some of its most faithful customers bonkers. (Take a look at the comments on the story Ed Oswald wrote at the time.) I’m still getting used to the combined company’s substitution of something called SIRIUSly Sinatra for the old High Standards station I enjoyed, and really, it’s the prospect of the Red Sox in the spring more than anything else that’s keeping me from defecting to the Internet. And the company’s apparent intention to continue with two separate brands with similar-but-not-identical channel lineups is incredibly kludgy; it leaves DJs having to give two channel numbers each time their identify the station they’re on.

I was hooked on XM for years, and would love to see satellite remain a viable, appealing broadcasting option. But Sirius XM is in a tight spot, and while raising rates may help whip its shaky balance sheet into shape, you’ve gotta think that it’ll prompt some longtime customers–especially those who own iPhones–to dump it.

The channel merge is said to be coming next Wednesday–that seems awfully soon if subscribers haven’t been alerted yet–and involves shuffling around of stations, pruning of essentially similar ones (both systems have channels dedicated to the music of particular decades, and availability of some channels that originated on one system on the other system.

A forum post at Digital Radio Central provides an alleged new XM lineup. Among channels I listen to on XM–if I’m reading the list right, and it’s accurate–the 60′s on 6 oldies station will survive, but Soul Street will be replaced by Sirius’s Soul Town, and High Standards (which was originally a Sinatra-themed channel called Frank’s Place) will get the axe for SIRIUSLY Frank.

In other words, XM will start to feel more like Sirius, and I assume that the opposite is also true–Sirius will pick up some of XM’s channels.

Which raises the question: Why bother to maintain two brands and two increasingly-similar-but-not-identical channel lineups, as the combined company has said it plans to do for…the next fifteen years? I’m not entirely sure, since it seems a lot of work for everyone involved.

(I’m also confused by why Sirius continues to use the slogan “The Best Radio on Radio,” which would tend to suggest that its corporate cousin XM is subpar…but hey, I’m easily confused.)

One other thing about that fifteen-year promise of brand separatism: It may be a sign of irrational exuberance on the merged company’s part that it’s planning that far ahead at all. I’ve been a happy XM subscriber for years. But my iPhone 3G is such a slick source of streaming music–thanks to apps such as Pandora and Tuner–that I keep flirting with canceling my XM subscription and simply pumping the iPhone’s audio through my car stereo. It’s mostly XM’s MLB baseball and news stations such as POTUS which have kept me on board. But I have trouble believing that streaming IP-based radio built right into cars won’t trump satellite a long time before 2023 rolls around.

Of course, the content on XM and Sirius could make the leap from satellite to the wireless Internet in the meantime. For now, though, I just hope that the combined company wraps up its channel merge quickly and then leaves things alone for awhile. Like I said, I’m easily confused…

Pandora has done a good job of rallying its legions of fans to support it–I got the following e-mail (after the jump) today from Tim Westergren, the company’s founder:

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora;

Today, thanks to the extraordinary support of many Pandora listeners, we took a giant step forward when the House of Representatives supported Pandora and Internet radio and passed the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008.  Now we need your help so that the Senate will pass it also – and quickly… The finish line is in sight!

After a yearlong negotiation, Pandora, SoundExchange and the RIAA are finally optimistic about reaching an agreement on royalties that would save Pandora and Internet radio.  The legislation would give us the extra time we need to finalize the deal.

Please call your Senators Monday morning starting at 9:00 (Eastern) and ask them to support the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008.

The person who answers the phone in your Senator’s office may ask for the bill number – it’s H.R. 7084 (if they ask for a Senate bill number, you can assure them that in this unusual case, the Senate is actually voting on the House bill number).

Senator Barbara Boxer: (202) 224-3553

Senator Dianne Feinstein: (202) 224-3841

If the phone is busy, please try again until you get through. These calls really do make a difference.

Thanks so much for you ongoing support.

Tim

I don’t pretend to understand the Byzantine world of music rights and licensing. (Side note: When I met with the Slacker folks recently, they told me they’d struck their own deals with music companies and therefore weren’t at risk of being run out of business by the rise in standard licensing fees–I’m not entirely clear on why Pandora couldn’t do something similar.)

But it seems unthinkable that we would end up with licensing costs so high that it’s simply impossible for Web-based radio to work econmically, when licensing fees that online stations could afford would put money in the music industry’s pockets. The folks who own music couldn’t be so pigheaded as to destroy the future of radio, right?

Um, right?