It's a moot point in the UK at least, sadly we're binning off even the mighty Radio 4 longwave signal in a year or so as part of the latest round of cost-cutting measures at the BBC. Most of the British stations have already shut down their AM output with Absolute Radio being the latest to pull the plug.
What I'd love to see is the top part of the medium wave band being opened to broadcasting hobbyists along similar lines to radio amateurs on the technical side and internet radio stations (who can get a licence for small-scale music streaming here) on the copyright side. You can hear a few pirates on AM today mostly from the Netherlands but a minority from the UK around and just over the top of MW. If there's no more state nor commercial use of AM I think legitimising these hobbyist stations would be a good use of that spectrum which isn't going to be useful for much else given how full of interference it is anyway. It would be nice from a reducing e-waste angle, not to mention the 'living history' aspect of keeping old radios working. Lots of hobbyist interests could converge here.
There might even be limited mainstream appeal, weirder things have happened with even cassettes getting a limited revival in some circles.
The phrase "sell your own grandmother" is often bandied around without real justification but the current generation of Tories in the British government at the moment really would.
Regardless of the virtues of preserving culture and tradition, from a "purely" analytical (well, heuristical) perspective: What happens when you sell off, i.e. throw away, one too many things? It's the opposite of Lindy.
With regards to the BBC Radio 4 Longwave service going away, I really hope that they've told the Royal Navy about it, otherwise we could end up with the lamest cause for a nuclear apocalypse ever.
>What I'd love to see is the top part of the medium wave band
But why? These are only discoverable by people making "small movies Ellie, small moves". It would be much more beneficial to wannabe pirate radio types to just create a channel via internet. You can still be a pirate by not joining Spotify et al, and just have a set of rogue servers that people can connect to pull the stream. The point of pirate radio was to get music to the masses that regular stations wouldn't broadcast. Why? Because that's where the audience was. If there's no audience, why expend the energy? Go to where the audience is.
maybe, but at the end of the day, the broadcast of the signal is the least significant bit. you can absolutely set up your control room with all of the equipment to create the broadcast, but ultimately, it is all pushed down an output port that goes to the "transmitter". whether that's an actual FM transmitter or a server that broadcasts the signal, it's the same experience.
it sounds like you're tying the entire pirate experience into the concept of broadcasting illegally without a license. while that might be part of it, it was more about doing whatever, saying whatever, playing whatever. being an illegal signal was just trying to get the signal to where the audience was. The audience isn't there any more is the point.
> it is all pushed down an output port that goes to the "transmitter". whether that's an actual FM transmitter or a server that broadcasts the signal, it's the same experience.
But it's not the same experience at all. What happens to the signal in the end is the most important part of the experience.
That said, I think a lot of pirate radio people simulcast over the internet as well. The internet is certainly not able to replace radio for their purposes, though.
> The audience isn't there any more is the point.
Sure it is. Pirate radio stations very rarely drew large audiences anyway. Most of them cover very small geographical areas. I can't imagine the audiences they can draw are much smaller than they drew in the past.
Given that most pirate stations aren't monetized anyway, they don't care if people listen or not. Like with most hobbies, people do it for the process, not the outcome. These are anoraks having fun, trying to build better masts, better transmitters, and just pushing their own skills forward, even if the information isn't necessarily useful for anything else.
Growing up in Liverpool, I've got a lot of appreciation for countercultural pirate stations ala Radio Caroline. Nobody has to listen, they just need to have fun doing it to make it worthwhile.
> It would be much more beneficial to wannabe pirate radio types to just create a channel via internet.
Doesn't that depend on what benefit they're trying to accomplish? Creating a channel via the internet is boring. I imagine pirate radio types want to do something interesting.
But the advantage to having them fill a portion of the AM band is that AM radio is really of fantastic utility when an emergency is happening. In a large disaster, cell and internet service become incredibly unreliable. Being able to broadcast messages over a radio format that is super cheap, easy, and readily available seems like a good thing to me.
Zoom, discord, and the like all suffer from the problem that you have to use Zoom, Discord, and the like. That limits your audience to a particular demographic.
Broadcasting over the airwaves is completely different in just about every way from those services. They don't really allow for the use case of radio.
Because Zoom and Discord are a centralized point of failure. Remember all the times there's been downtime? Radio continues existing, and there's plenty of relay stations to get broadcasts further.
what? it has nothing to do with zoom or discord or whatever social darling you want to talk about next that has nothing to do with the price of tea in china.
Do you have issues with abstract thinking? I am not trying to insult you, but the way you responded to this comment and mine make me immediately suspect you only conceptualize things in concrete terms.
Do you honestly not realize that the person you replied to was referencing that 'why' is a pointless question when the point is non-conformity and not literally asking why people don't just use Zoom or discord?
because zoom and discord has nothing in line with the experience of the anonymous radio signal being tuned in by anonymous listeners. that's the one true thing that separates a OTA broadcast vs even the pirate streaming radio signal i proposed. once it's networked, logs are every where. sure, the broadcaster can turn off logging blah blah, but that's still not the same as tuning in OTA.
social platforms involve invites, permission to join, etc. how that even closely relates is still beyond me and maybe beyond your vaulted abstract thinking skills as well?
This was my point (though apparently I've expressed it in a non-obvious way): even for the the same result (having a voice conversation with someone distant, or listening to some rock music selected by a DJ), the method (a 40 meter ham rag chew instead of a Zoom call, or an AM broadcast band transmission instead of a shoutcast station) matters and colors the experience.
yeah, comparing a social chat platform to an potentially anonymous streaming environment is so not even the same thing i had no way of connecting your dots.
I'm not sure why you are so reluctant to see other points of view or to entertain the fact that you might be missing something that other people are not, but I won't push it.
well, i'm really not sure what this point is that you're harping on, but whatevs.
i'm arguing that the experience of enjoying pirate radio is not solely tied to tuning in a signal via airwaves. pirate radio use airwaves as that's the signal that was available at the time to them. you could be at your house, in your car, or wherever and listen to it. the "it" was the thing though. it was non-rules conforming, it was whatever it wanted to be. people would call each other up, and "tune-in" to the same signal if they were in the same area. (it just so happens at that time, if you were calling someone, you were probably in their area.) now, radio isn't as widely used. instead, we can share the same signal via internet radios. you can still "call" a friend to have a shared experience listening to the same signal at the same time. only now, you are not limited in broadcast range nor local call range. it can be global. tell me what pirate operator would not have accepted a global reach vs whatever their transmitters could reach.
how's that for entertaining a thought exercise? can you keep up, or do you need a minute to stretch and get warmed up still?
Typically, if someone was to use the phrase "I have no idea what the point is" is pretty good context clue that I might need to reiterate what the point really is.
So, let me ask for it point blank...what is the point you are wanting to make that I have entirely missed?
You have already had at least three people try to explain it to you, and you railroaded over them with your manic discourse without even attempting to parse what they wrote. The grandparent is speaking of using the radio bands for a purpose which may have no real audience or utility, but is used because the medium itself is interesting. You are trying to pivet to 'just use the internet' like someone would say to a film lover going to see a classic film in the cinema 'why not watch it on blu-ray'. If you don't get that people like to do things because they are interested in the experience of the medium then I am not sure what else to write. Have a pleasant day.
I'm sorry for being so hard on you yesterday. Your glib tone struck me as condescending and the snarky quip about stretching and 'vaulted analytical whatever' had me really disliking you. I hope that wasn't your intention and if that is the case then I apologize.
I honestly wasn't trying to be combative with the initial reply about concrete thinking. It was so completely obvious to me that the other responder and I were talking about something completely different than you were and it seemed logical that you might be thinking using a different process than everyone else.
I know they're talking about EMI and not radiated emissions but if even a tiny fraction of a fraction of the EMI does get radiated the widespread adoption of electrical vehicles will probably raise the noise floor in the HF bands significantly.
Some of it will be radiated. Electric currents in EV's are typically in the hundreds of amps, and have potential switched by hundreds of volts in hundreds of nanoseconds. That leads to broad band emissions that aren't easy to shield.
A bunch of ferrites and shielded motors and cables will help, but only to some extent.
As someone that doesn’t listen to radio a lot, but when I do it’s FM only what do we loose without AM? This article doesn’t give a single reason to argue why AM should be preserved.
> Broadcast AM radio remains a crucial, cost-free source of news, sports, and weather, and, more importantly, is an essential medium for public safety officials — including the president — to communicate with the public during emergencies,
There are several "clear channel" AM radio stations in the United States - that is, they are guaranteed no interference from FCC assignments to other stations elsewhere in the country, unlike the majority of stations which share the spectrum based on their geographic location. Because of that, they're allowed to broadcast at power levels considerably higher than other stations. This makes clear channel stations incredibly useful in the event of a public emergency (war, natural disaster, etc.).
WBZ is based out of Sen. Markey's home state of Massachusetts - specifically a suburb of Boston - and I've personally been able to pick it up as far away as Erie, Pennsylvania.
>>Broadcast AM radio remains a crucial, cost-free source of news, sports, and weather, and, more importantly, is an essential medium for public safety officials
One of these things is not like the others. When has sports been considered crucial? Are we catering to bookies now?
Sports help bind communities and shape regional narratives.
Whether you are a sports fan or not, I can recommend the documentary series "Welcome to Wrexham" as a fun look into the people and community of sports. (The show is about how while everyone was watching Ted Lasso, Rob McElhenny of It's Always Sunny and Ryan Reynolds of too many movies to name bought the Football Club of Wrexham, a Welsh city.)
I guess we have different definitions of critical. We'll have to agree to disagree on sports being critical. More important to some than others, but hard sell on making it critical. Knowing if there's a tornado coming--critical. Knowing if there's horrendous traffic accident--critical. Local sports team got their arses handed to them--interesting. One of these things is not like the others
If you are only interested in disasters, I suppose, but even then: knowing that there's going to be a sports-related "riot" in local bars and venue-adjacent streets can be pretty critical information that is useful when it is timely. There are definitely cities where you need to know every time there is a local game and roughly what the mood of the crowd is, because crowd physics and mob mentalities. There are "sports-related disasters" in the weather of those cities.
Digging into that document a bit it seems that AM travels further and pass through solid objects more, making it more suitable for emergency broadcasts.
Think less about the preservation of AM and more about the preservation of amateur radio in vehicles. The same EMI effects also make it difficult to operate HF in an electric vehicle. “So what? I’m not a ham and don’t care to be.” Well, consider that it’s the largest allocation of spectrum available for public use—the rest is commercial, government, and public safety. It’s an invisible National Park (international, really) that corporate entities either don’t care about or want to use for their own purposes.
Indeed, my son is studying for his tech license right now; he made several contacts with my dad when we last visited and caught the bug from him (I guess it skipped a generation).
Generally traffic/weather/emergency information, especially less populated regions, and remote regions (e.g., mountains) that get no other kind of signal. Various DOTs have AM radio transmitters for PSAs.
Some reasons most relevant to a lot of HN discussions:
AM is the "child's first electronics kit from Radio Shack" science experiment. "Amplitude Modulation" is a fancy way of saying that it encodes sound mostly the way that sound waves themselves do: louder sounds get more amplitude on the radio wave. AM radio waves are just about the only part of the radio dial where the radio wave looks almost even reasonably similar to the sound wave it encodes. The number of electronics to pick up an AM signal and pass it to a speaker (to build a "radio") are about as minimal as it gets and many generations of children did it as introductions to early electronics hacking. AM Radio is the radio that you could conceivably MacGuyver a radio using common household items if you had to in a pinch. AM Radio is the radio that you could possibly even, if push came to shove, MacGuyver a transmitter for it and expect people (in a short distance at least, unless you've got a lot of power or lucky weather) to be able to hear it.
Some of the laments over the loss of AM radio are a realization at how much the "floor" of electronics science likely rises. Companies want to fill the bandwidth with more digitally encoded signals, signals that need microchips and firmware and software to encode or process. Teaching electronics to children starts to feel harder and more complicated. Electronics starts to feel all the more like the realm of wizards and elite with money and special hacking tools and less something the common person can understand or "touch" with a cheap kit from a supply store just around the corner (or a YouTube video, some electronic junk, and a potato).
A lot of the calls that if AM is to be shutdown more of the bandwidth should be made available to amateur radio come directly from this idea of preserving at least some of the low floor as a sandbox and play space.
At the end of the day AM radio is an extremely inefficient use of that available bandwidth and it probably does make sense "for progress" to use more of it more efficiently than before.
Relatedly, I think that's part of the sad answer to SETI's search against the Fermi Paradox across the sky: it makes a lot of sense to look for natural appearing signals in the sky in the decades where we are blasting human language looking signals at high power in AM radio bands, but it looks like in geological time (much less cosmological time) that period in our "tech tree" was likely ever so much a short glitch before more efficient, more strangely encoded, more noise-looking, more generally encrypted radio communications replaced them.
Consider rereading what I wrote. I'm not arguing against progress, and even directly mentioned progress is probably what we should be doing here, I'm just explaining part of why sometimes progress in cases like this feel like a mixed bag and to some people there is a very palpable sense of "disappointment" or "loss" to be felt here. That disappointment/loss isn't a reason to avoid progress, an argument against progress, but it is something to reflect upon as a culture because it tells us something about what we value and who we were.
I would personally lose because I would no longer have radio when travelling. FM radio programming is not often appealing to me. If I want music, I play my own.
AM typically has at least one or two interesting things to listen to. I value that quite a lot, and will grieve a little if it goes away. There's nothing that can replace it, as near as I can see.
My two main arguments for why it should be preserved are: it's one of the last bastions for programming that actually comes from local communities, and it's indispensable in disaster scenarios.
Usually licensing & equipment costs or being in an area with a saturated market as far as FM is concerned and having to go up against media corporations with 20+ stations under their belt. I don't even live in Texas but there is a ton of weird texas stations I can find on a good night with my old reliable radioshack shortwave radio.
In rural areas with no cell service, AM radio is often the only available form of weather and news. It's also a great form of emergency information broadcasting in the event of a natural disaster.
There might be a silver lining to the slow death of commercial terrestrial radio: Doing away with the polite fiction that commercial terrestrial radio is a valid way to communicate emergency information. Even if the "local" radio stations are active and broadcasting a signal, they're often only local in a way that does not matter when it comes to emergency broadcasts:
> The Minot train derailment occurred just west of Minot, North Dakota, United States, on January 18, 2002, when a Canadian Pacific Railway freight train derailed, spreading ammonia gas across the city, delaying rescue operations. The cause was found to be small fatigue cracks in the rails and joint bars, not detectable by the inspection routines then enforced by Canadian Pacific.
[snip]
> Because it was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home. North Dakota's public radio network, Prairie Public Broadcasting, was notified and did broadcast warnings to citizens.
Public radio succeeded. Commercial radio did not. People have been utterly resistant to learning this lesson. Maybe once commercial radio is dead they'll have no other choice.
Obviously, cell phones can do it. They already do this for a lot of people.
NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards already exists as well, but the receivers should be more widespread. Putting them into cars and TV sets would be a good start, especially with GPS receivers to automatically figure out where they are and, therefore, which alerts to listen to.
Giving more funding to noncommercial radio stations, to guarantee they exist, for one thing, and have people in the booth all the time, for another. America doesn't have an analogue to the BBC so ensuring the local and regional public stations remain usable for this purpose is essential.
> alerts that go out to cell phones probably reach more people than radio.
Only if the disaster is mild enough that cell phones still work. And let's not forget that there are enormous areas of the US where there is no reliable (or any) cell service.
I'm just hoping that for disaster communications, nobody is actually deciding to cut some people off just because there aren't enough of them.
The only solution is multiple solutions. Commercial radio has a threshold of how small a market can be before it isn't worth it any longer, noncommercial radio (including NOAA weather radio stations) can fill in those gaps but require people to have the receivers handy, and more people carry cell phones than radios nowadays but cell service isn't absolutely everywhere. We can improve each of those individual technologies, but no single technology is going to become the only answer.
Republican/conservative talk radio is a huge force in American politics, so there’s a lot of incentive to somehow force manufacturers to include the feature.
FM was more popular for music since it is higher quality, while both work fine for voice, and AM licenses can often transmit further. So it made economic sense for talk radio stations to buy AM licenses instead of FM.
That said with fewer people listening to music on the radio these days, it is becoming more common to find talk radio on FM.
It's pathetic how we're clinging onto this inferior technology. Frequency Modulation was invented to keep the "intelligence" in the signal. I think we forgot that. FM is the solution for EMI and therefore the perfect radio tech for future vehicles (EVs).
Without AM radio, you're going to force me to go full nutter with buying a shortwave radio setup. Without AM, I'll not be able to find my conspiracy theory fear mongering propaganda, nor will I be able to find my supplements and gold/silver investments
I've seen a couple of these articles about how EV makers should add EMI shielding so they can have AM radio, and I notice that all of them steer around the issue of how much it would cost. If it adds $1 to the price of the car, sure, but if it adds $100, no way. We need EVs to be as affordable as possible to spur adoption; adding a bunch of cost for the take of a technology which-- let's be perfectly honest here-- hardly anybody uses, is a terrible tradeoff.
I can think of about 50,000 things we can remove from EVs to make them cheaper. I can't believe out of all the things they put into an EV, removing AM radio is the one thing that will make them cheaper.
Does everybody need all of the infotainment shit? No. But will they make an EV without one? No. Most infotainment setups suck ass, but everybody still wants one so bad. Most factory stereos are total crap, even the branded, "good" ones.
Does everybody need 1200lb-ft of torque? Dual motors? Massaging, heated, seats, and whale penis leather? AWD that you use maybe one time per year, when you should probably stay home anyways?
The manufacturers here are chasing profits, not trying to make affordable cars. They're not going to pull out the AM radio and pass the savings on to you. Nobody ever passes the savings on to you.
> We need EVs to be as affordable as possible to spur adoption
If that's the argument for removing AM, then let's start with all of the other, much more expensive, things that tend to annoy people and that can be removed first. $100 is peanuts.
The electromagnetic sensors under the road for traffic lights also mess with AM reception in my non-electric car. Which in a city is a non-trivial amount of time.
AM travels much farther at lower power levels, especially at night. As such one could cover a wider area with less power when perhaps power is in limited supply.
Do both! Recapture AM spectrum for use cases that aren't wasteful and dead, reduce EMI because harmful interference is a bad thing and limits our future options for using spectrum.
What I'd love to see is the top part of the medium wave band being opened to broadcasting hobbyists along similar lines to radio amateurs on the technical side and internet radio stations (who can get a licence for small-scale music streaming here) on the copyright side. You can hear a few pirates on AM today mostly from the Netherlands but a minority from the UK around and just over the top of MW. If there's no more state nor commercial use of AM I think legitimising these hobbyist stations would be a good use of that spectrum which isn't going to be useful for much else given how full of interference it is anyway. It would be nice from a reducing e-waste angle, not to mention the 'living history' aspect of keeping old radios working. Lots of hobbyist interests could converge here.
There might even be limited mainstream appeal, weirder things have happened with even cassettes getting a limited revival in some circles.