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.
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.
integration in the car’s system seem unecessary.
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.)
That is a great line. Did you coin it?
* 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.
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.