Maybe your favorite radio station is thousands of miles from where you live.  Or maybe you’d like to listen to that special hometown station when you’re traveling.

An often-overlooked capability of smartphones is listening to live, streaming radio stations.  We’ve sure come a long way since I was a kid tuning in to the Big 89, WLS in Chicago, fading in and out on the AM band.

WunderRadio is a handy piece of software for the iPhone, iPod Touch or Windows Mobile phones from the folks behind my favorite weather website, Weather Underground.  So I had a feeling they would do it right.

WunderRadio brings more than 36,000 radio stations to your phone.  The directory makes it easy to search for stations by location, music genre or programming types such as talk or sports.  Using a phone’s built-in GPS, the program can also locate and play nearby stations.

WunderRadio doesn’t just find stations in the US.  There’s an international selection that covers the globe from London to Tokyo.

Also included is an interface for the tuned.mobi database, which adds to the collection.  By the way, you can also access TUNED.mobi from any mobile browser and listen to the stations without the need for any additional software. WunderRadio and other programs, though, make it easier to navigate through the site and also offer additional stations.

And WunderRadio adds some unique listening with a network of NOAA weather radio stations from the National Weather Service, as well as live scanner traffic for airplanes, police and fire and even railroads.

Sirius and XM satellite-radio feeds are available with a subscription to those services.

The quality varies, depending on your phone’s connection speed and the quality of the stream provided by the radio stations.  But with a good pair of earbuds instead of the tinny-sounding speakers built into smartphones, most radio stations sound surprisingly good.

You could even use a cable or FM transmitter to listen over your car stereo on your morning drive to work.  So instead of ghetting frustrated listening to traffic updates on your local station, you could be tuned in to your favorite comedy team across the country—or the BBC or Radio Budapest.

You can also send Twitter messages to your favorite DJs or stations.

Occasionally, you may find a station in the guide that’s not working.  Streams change or have technical problems, making it difficult to keep the guides completely up to date.

WunderRadio is available for the iPhone or iPod Touch for $6.99.  The price is $14.95 for the Windows Mobile version.  (Anyone care to explain why WM versions of software are usually more expensive?  I’d really like to know.)

Blackberry and Android versions are promised soon.

So, you no longer have to be within 30 or 40 miles of your favorite radio station to listen in.  WunderRadio is an excellent piece of software to bring a world-class collection of entertainment and information to your smartphone.

Stay tuned (subscribe to Practical Travel Gear’s news feed here) for a review on Kinoma Player, another option for Windows Mobile and Palm phones.