Re: [PLUG] AM bye bye

["Keith C. Perry via plug" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

I always find discussions like this interesting.

Dropping AM is one thing.  Dropping FM or FM-HD (which is pretty good in terms of quality) is something else.  Personally, I'm for having choice.  Sometimes I listen to Drexel's station (Saturday afternoon / evening is all Reggae and other Caribbean music- kept me from being homesick while in undergrad) or WJJZ (which is now 106.1 HD2).  I also have SirusXM in car and Android Auto for app things.

I use them all and I want that choice.

What I don't want to see is everything forced into some crappy app (free or paid) designed by someone who most likely knows nothing about interface design or understands why knobs and buttons are still a thing.  AM and FM receivers are not expensive or complicated to make.  That tends to make them more durable from a service delivery point of view so removing any traditional radio functions doesn't make sense to me.  Clearly there is still plenty of radio content out there.

For what its worth, broadcast TV seems to be dying quicker and we see that mess that has created with everyone wanting you pay for their "plus" network for the 1 or 2 shows you care about.  We should not want to do anything remotely similar to that in radio.



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----- Original Message -----
From: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
Sent: Friday, July 8, 2022 6:46:40 PM
Subject: Re: [PLUG] AM bye bye

On Fri, Jul 08, 2022 at 03:48:25PM -0400, Rich Freeman via plug wrote:
> 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.

Two things I thought of while reading this discussion:

* Maybe the licenses are cheaper than FM since AM is considered such a
  backwater these days.

* Even if the transmitters are more expensive, that's at least partly
  countered by the fact that you can broadcast to a much wider
  audience than FM.

Walt
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