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Comment by RachelF | Hacker News Reader

In some way it is short-sited, as radio is a good backup medium for global communications in case the entire Internet ever goes down.

Vacuum tubes also aren't vulnerable to nuclear weapon electro-magnetic pulses.

However, other than ham radio enthusiasts I guess no one listens to analogue radio anymore.

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This transmitter doesn't really have the range for reliable global communication, it's optimised for covering the UK. For the global communication usecase, there are other networks of military transmitters (DHFCS) that are much better suited for the job, and they aren't being shut down any time soon.

What it did provide was a simple but reliable way to maintain emergency broadcast to general public within Britain. And it probably should have been kept online just for that reason.

Except nobody has a radio any more, certainly not one that receives LF. People have cellphones, and cellphones have a mandatory feature that lets the government display a message on everyone's screen, usually accompanied by loud and scary beeping. That's the new emergency broadcast mechanism. It's not as simple, but at least people actually see it.

Very few radios can pick up long wave now. My car certainly won’t.

Even when they can most people Wouldn’t have a clue to listen to it.

There’s a reason LW isn’t critical national infrastructure.

They still broadcast on FM.

... on a patchwork off different frequencies across the UK due to the poor propagation of VHF

Doesn’t RDS mostly solve that for the most common case where frequency changes becomes an issue (car radios).

Yup, and DAB also still works.

Umm mostly. IMHO DAB is a failure, at least for vehicles.

I listen almost exclusively on dab in the car. It auto fails to FM but it’s rare I go somewhere where that happens.

It’s probably highly variable depending on location and the quality of your radio/antenna. It’s useless where I am.

I got my RTL-SDR to see what I could listen to, and by the time I tuned in, nearly all the short wave stations I could tune to were just broadcasting evangelical religious stuff, or other crazy conspiracy stuff. It's remarkable that these powerful stations spend most of their broadcast day transmitting that content.

Most international broadcasters have left the shortwave band quite some time ago, unfortunately. I think it is still easy to find BBC, China Radio International, Romanian radio, Radio Havana Cuba, but the list is relatively short (compared to 20 years ago).

In the US, WRMI sells its air time to anyone at low prices. It's mostly religious stuff but there are some regular music shows too, I think.

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