Re: [PLUG] AM bye bye

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2022 at 2:13 PM jeffv via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> On 7/8/22 13:54, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:
>
> > Interesting! I hadn’t heard that Europe was phasing out AM radio. But
> > what do you have against FM?
>
> AM is highly susceptible to noise and dropouts - nature of the beast.
>

Yeah, my car lacks an AM receiver for this reason.

That said, I am not sure I agree with one statement in that article:
that AM is "cheaper" to transmit.  I guess that would depend on how
you're measuring it, but I'd think an FM transmitter itself would be
cheaper to operate, if only because it doesn't need a gigantic antenna
to cover the MF bands.  Obviously AM was invented first, but I'd think
that the amplifiers/modulation/etc wouldn't be the bottleneck these
days.  That said if you want to cover the same area in both bands one
tower gets you a lot more with AM, so if you're comparing one AM tower
to a whole bunch of FM ones that might be another matter.

Then again, maybe the AM transmitters really are cheaper.  I couldn't
find any substantiating info in the text version of that article or
the one it linked.

One area I haven't seen any talk of phasing out AM is in air traffic
control, but that operates in the VHF band so everything is much more
compact (obviously useful on aircraft).  It is mainly used there
because it is more obvious when multiple stations are stepping on each
other which makes it more clear that somebody might not have heard an
urgent instruction.  I'd think that you could come up with a digital
mode that would improve on that substantially but I guess AM is good
enough and nobody wants to change it.

Oh, and I'll second the idea that broadcast radio is of limited use
outside of emergencies/etc.  I almost never use the FM tuner in my
car.  I get traffic info on the map and the navigation already takes
it into account, so having somebody read it to me is less useful.

-- 
Rich
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug