Control EMI, Don’t Dump AM Receivers
radioworld.com
radioworld.com
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
So, let me ask for it point blank...what is the point you are wanting to make that I have entirely missed?
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.
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 radio is cool and people like broadcasting and there is an intangible quality to throwing something onto public airwaves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some say in ice.
But I say idiotic bureaucracy.
A bunch of ferrites and shielded motors and cables will help, but only to some extent.
Do you have any sources for this? Would love to learn more, as that seems extremely fast.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35416627
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.
Yep, we've got hurricane routing signs everywhere that also mention what frequency to tune into.
Senator Ed Markey makes (https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_automa...) some better points about it:
> 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.
One of these things is not like the others. When has sports been considered crucial? Are we catering to bookies now?
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.)
integration in the car’s system seem unecessary.
That is a great line. Did you coin it?
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.
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.
I look forward to finally hearing one ... some day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment
> 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.
It may suck for that, but it's the best choice out of a whole bunch of bad alternatives. What would do this better?
A mix of things, some of which already exist.
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.
https://www.weather.gov/nwr&ln_desc=NOAA+Weather+Radio/
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.
That's separate from how well they work in remote areas (but that is getting better over time).
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.
That said with fewer people listening to music on the radio these days, it is becoming more common to find talk radio on FM.
https://ntia.gov/sites/default/files/publications/january_20...
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.
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.
What I don't understand is why FM has been "modernized" by tying it up in proprietary transmission protocols (hd radio).
Could those emergency broadcasts be moved to FM, though? Or is there something about AM that makes it more suitable for emergency broadcasts?
i neeeevvvveeer listen to AM. maybe there’s some value in emergencies, but i had a different radio for that so having it in my car isn’t important.