BILLINGS — The man calling the radio station had a cannon to sell — fully functional — but was willing to trade for silver dollars.

Disc jockey Nick Tyler listened to the proposition, madly scribbling the details on a clipboard and notepad: a cannon, yeah, just like the ones in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” yeah. Shoots a ball about the size of a can of corn, got it. He leans into the KGHL microphone as if passing a hot tip into the waiting ear of a close friend, or friends, in this case the 1,500 or so daily listeners of “Tradio.”

“We got a cannon to sell, looking to trade for silver dollars,” Tyler said. His deep voice punctuates the caller’s phone number in such a way that the numerals could practically write themselves into a dusty dashboard. A telephone strobe light blinks in the background. Someone is looking for a lost dog. Someone else desperately needs a jenny donkey capable of guarding goats and stomping coyotes to death.

“Tradio” or shows like it were the eBay before eBay — a place for ordinary folk to sell their wares free of cost. They were Craigslist before free Internet-classified guru Craig Newmark was even born. Even better, host Tyler would argue, “Tradio” has a higher entertainment value.

The shows began to fade from radio dials more than a decade ago as stations became more automated and local programming was viewed as an unnecessary cost. KGHL brought “Tradio” back to Billings in 2005, first in the afternoon before moving it to its current 8:30 a.m. slot.

“Looking for a banding machine with crimping tool,” Tyler continues after station identification. “Got a 1970 two-bedroom mobile home for sale between the Heights and Roundup, needs some work, $1,200. ...” And on the listings go as if the entire contents of a neighborhood swap meet had somehow been molecularized and washed through the atmosphere on KGHL’s 5,000 watts.

And the show seems to work. Cannon maker Steve Schreder got a few calls about his black powder blaster.

“A guy from a machine shop up in the Heights called me and said he lived on five acres and wanted to know if he could hit a target with a cannon,” Schreder said. “I told him he could probably hit a refrigerator or a stove from a couple hundred feet.”

Schreder did get a couple of good leads on silver dollars, however. He started listening to the show a while back on the recommendation of Scary Larry from Scary Larry’s Pawn Shop.

Back on the air, the show is just heating up.

“ ‘Tradio,’ 238-1079, sponsored by Rick Young and Sons Auctioneers, four miles south of Absarokee next to Anipro Arena, ...” Tyler said. “Hello, you’re on ‘Tradio.’ ”

On the radio, Tyler’s confident neighbor-next-door charisma spreads outward like the Montana sky, to the curve of the earth and the maybe just a little beyond, to Glasgow on good day and maybe Sidney, more than 265 miles away. During a commercial break he tells of receiving postcards from radio nerds in Finland who managed to sift “KGHL’s Big Sky Country Legends” from heaven’s radio gravel.

Here on the 10th floor of the Granite building in downtown Billings, Tyler’s actual confines are barely larger than a gas station restroom. The walls are padded with blue, sound absorbing eggshell foam and a mix of pinups that speak to Montana’s lasting communion with AM radio. There’s an autographed poster of ’70s country music legend and Great Falls’ adopted son Charlie Pride. And two giant maroon posters proclaiming that University of Montana basketball can be heard here.

There are two black-and-white photos of Billings radio pioneers on the wall. Well-coifed and dressed in fine wool suits, they look very much like Edward R. Murrow. There are also shots of radio cowboys like Taylor Brown and Baxter Black. Black and Brown, Tyler knows. The other men he does not. They were simply on-air voices in a continuous stream of on-air voices stretching back 80 years at KGHL.

The thought of his picture someday hanging on the wall gives Tyler pause. From his west-facing window he can see Billings Senior High School, the place where he started as a teenage party disc jockey, before taking broadcast lessons from a local trade school. KGHL hired him a short time later. He’s been in the business now 15 years.

“Hello, you’re on ‘Tradio,’” Tyler said.

From the other end of the phone speaks a woman from Ryegate who has an electric wheelchair to sell in Laurel. It has all the bells and whistles and would make a real nice wheelchair for somebody, but the seller is only in town for one day. Call now.

“Hello, you’re on

‘Tradio.’”

The next caller sounds elderly. Her voice quivers with a noticeable frailty. She wants concrete forms for pouring a basement, the 2-foot-by-4-foot kind, she said, and the corner boards, too. It’s the salt-of-the-earth character of the people calling in that makes the show, said Stacy Anderson, who needs a donkey to protect her prized Boer goats.

“It’s just the fact that the people are all down-home ranching people,” Anderson said. “They’re honest people and they got honest prices for things, and they’re not greedy.”

Anderson, who lives between Laurel and Billings, tunes in to “Tradio” at work, where the show goes unnoticed by her urban co-workers.

“I work with a bunch of city people,” Anderson said. “They wouldn’t even know what half that crap was on there.”