Albert via plug on 9 Jul 2022 04:09:09 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] AM bye bye

I agree, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned emergencies yet. A crank powered radio goes a long way. If the power goes out, good luck getting most people set up with streaming the news in their basement to find out the weather conditions (a common occurrence in the Midwest, where tornadoes are frequent). This is a serious public safety issue. All of the news/weather stations I've ever used were AM.
Additionally, there are many people who don't have broadband Internet who depend on over the air radio. So it's also a matter of access - not everyone has fast Internet access, or even a computer. As has already been pointed out, AM radio has a much farther reach than FM radio does. Many people don't want to pay for TV and nobody wants to pay for radio.
Personally, I listen to a lot of over the air radio, both AM and FM. For me, it's about convenience. I can press a button and flip through presets easily. I can't be bothered to do more work than that. A new oldies station came online in Milwaukee a few years ago and it's a real doozy. Hardly ever any commercials and a great mix of music you don't hear when you self select. These days, I see AM being used mostly for news/talk, and FM mostly for music, which seems fine to me. But I certainly would never consider buying a car without AM radio functionality. That's one of three useful things still left in cars these days (the others being FM radio and the CD player), and to heck with anyone that tries to take that away. 

On 7/8/2022 10:54 PM, Keith C. Perry via plug wrote:

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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Managing Member, DAO Technologies LLC
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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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