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Every now and then I wonder if we're making a mistake with the new tech we're bringing in to replace radio and TV broadcasts. FM/UHF broadcasts scale infinitely

• chrisseaton 9y ago
  > FM/UHF broadcasts scale infinitely! They do for the number of listeners. They don't scale at all for the number of broadcasters.
  • niftich 9y ago
    The spectrum is regulated by governments everywhere, so it doesn't have to. Or, if you prefer, "that ship has sailed" a long time ago, so let's look at what it gives us as it exists now. Technologically effortless dissemination of content from a central source, scaling to infinite receivers with no congestion and no loss of quality. The production of the content itself need not be vertically integrated; individual programs and segments are licensed and syndicated from third-parties. Airwave broadcast has a natural place in the world, ideally by playing popular content that's always in demand. In our rush to go point-to-point, full-duplex, and on-demand, with both cabling and wireless, we have occasionally reimplemented services that are one-to-many simplex on top of lower layers that aren't made for that, whereas airwave broadcast has always fulfilled the same usecase with a different set of tradeoffs.
    • nine_k 9y ago
      Broadcasting is too efficient. There's no way to require individual authorization from receivers, so subscription fees are hard to collect. For free content, ads are not very targeted. It's great for emergency communication, though.
      • niftich 9y ago
        One mechanism to recoup a portion of this cost is a state-run licensing fee that's usually worked into the retail price of receivers [1]. A more elaborate evolution of this, to keep up with advancements in technology, is the blank recording media tax [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
        • nine_k 9y ago
          Sure these measures exist, but they sort of look arbitrary. They lack the self-adjusting nature of pay-per-view or subscription model. I know that BBC is financed (partly?) by the TV tax in UK. But BBC is state-run; private companies have harder time.
• icebraining 9y ago
  The two seem orthogonal - you don't need to use FM/UHF to avoid the Internet, just use whatever protocol you want over the mobile network.
  • Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Assuming there is a network. With enough bandwidth to support audio streaming. And there isn't an aggressive FUP threatening to cut you off. That's a lot of assumptions.
    • icebraining 9y ago
      I'm talking about a protocol to be implemented by the mobile network operators themselves - they control the bandwidth allocation and any FUPs in place. An emergency protocol would likely override all that.
      • Piskvorrr 9y ago
        Well, that's a rather pie-in-the-sky fiction (requiring total cooperation from everybody at once, btw), given that IP-based solutions have already eaten the world. Also, a broadcast radio network is useful outside of emergencies as well. (Not to mention that you're still assuming mobile coverage)
• msla 9y ago
  All broadcasts scale indefinitely. That doesn't mean we need to stick with 1930s-era broadcast standards indefinitely.
• peatmoss 9y ago
  But how would advertisers know when you’re watching / listening? Broadcasts will clearly never work!
  • SteveNuts 9y ago
    Our cellphones are always listening, you could probably get the data right now.
  • Retric 9y ago
    That's one reason radio stations often have contests. Having X number of people call in demonstrates someone is listening.
  • akira2501 9y ago
    Like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_People_Meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_People_Meter
• Dylan16807 9y ago
  > FM/UHF broadcasts scale infinitely! There's something quite beautiful about them, technologically. We could also try to fix/enable multicasting, if we wanted internet broadcasts to scale a hundred times as well, but nobody seems to think it's worth the trouble.
  • jcoffland 9y ago
    ISPs don't want smalltime subscribers to be able to reach huge audiences without paying them for it.
    • raarts 9y ago
      They can block such outbound traffic.
• matthewmcg 9y ago
  Classic stereo, wideband FM broadcast also sounds great when you have a good signal and good production. In theory, the newer HD Radio scheme can provide equivalent or better quality even with marginal signals, but most broadcasters choose to continue regular FM simulcast and subdivide the remaining digital bandwidth across multiple virtual channels. This results in audible compression artifacts on most stations.
  • Aloha 9y ago
    Wideband FM does sound lovely - FM Stereo however, less so - much.. uhh, crappier signal to noise radio, and relatively low channel separation depending on conditions. All told, I generally prefer analog FM to FM HD Radio - though I also listen to AM extensively - and I like how it sounds on a receiver with more than communications grade bandwidth - AM can push upwards of 10 khz - before 1982, it was not uncommon to find stations who ran closer to 15khz though - I've heard test recordings that just sound fantastic.
    • Infernal 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, where does one find test recordings of things like this? And what happened in 1982?
      • akira2501 9y ago
        In 1982 the FCC allowed stations to apply for C-QUAM [1] operation. Don't let the OP fool you, it uses a nearly identical technique to FM stereo and thus has nearly the same limitations and impact on quality of the station. Or he's thinking about 1989 when the FCC actually limited AM bandwidth to 20kHz (10kHz audio). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-QUAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-QUAM
      • fzzzy 9y ago
        https://archive.org/details/schweizerairchecks https://archive.org/details/schweizerairchecks
  • akira2501 9y ago
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• EamonnMR 9y ago
  Forget "will" and try "do." If power to the cell towers is out, you get no emergency info. This used to be a yearly occurrence back when I lived in a more rural area. Just as you keep flashlights around, you've got to keep an AM/FM radio around.
  • niftich 9y ago
    Also, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, weather/emergency radio in the US, run by NOAA, is FM on a different VHF band between 162.4 MHz and 162.55 MHz, which most run-of-the-mill receivers don't tune. To be emergency-prepared in the US, you are wise to own such a weather band radio, a lot of which come with built-in hand-crank dynamos, flashlights, and other features useful in a dicey situation. However, this development does segregate the most useful set of government-run emergency functionality away from ordinary consumer devices and into a special product category.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • nherment 9y ago
      I will venture ahead and point out that 162MHz is within (or close to?) the Marine VHF band. Guessing that historically the need for weather broadcasts was from marine navigation it would make sense that the weather forecast have stayed on these frequencies.
  • chimeracoder 9y ago
    > Forget "will" and try "do." If power to the cell towers is out, you get no emergency info. This used to be a yearly occurrence back when I lived in a more rural area. Or, only five years ago, for me living in downtown Manhattan (when Hurricane Sandy hit). The next morning, all cell service was completely offline (in addition to us having no power).
    • vvanders 9y ago
      In the case of large events they can easily overload cell networks as well. That happened in the Boston Marathon bombing[1]. Thankfully there was already hams running communication for the event and could get messages through when the towers were down. [1] http://www.arrl.org/news/radio-amateurs-provide-communication-support-in-boston-marathon-bombings-updated http://www.arrl.org/news/radio-amateurs-provide-communicatio...
• Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  I agree with you in general. A few observations: Radio broadcast does scale "infinitely" in terms of the number of possible "clients" connected to the "server". It has no limits to the number of possible "connections" - because, of course, it's actually connectionless. It does suffer from severe bandwidth limitations. For emergency communications this is not a problem. FM (or anything above 30 MHz) also has very limited range - line of sight more or less. Frequencies below 30 MHz could and do occasionally reach the antipodes. Also keep in mind there's a network of radio operators that is everywhere, and we are prepared to intervene in case of massive telecom collapse - the HAM radio operators. Emergency messaging should continue to function, at least for a while, even in the context of massive catastrophes.
• alexchamberlain 9y ago
  You can kind of do it with new tech; we’re just not in most cases. For example, consider Fountain Codes over multicast.
• yitchelle 9y ago
  Totally agree with you. One of the beautiful thing about AM is the simplicity of it. The fidelity of the signal may not be as good as RDS, but you can understand the message and take action in an emergency situation. You don't need high speed electronics to decode the data. In fact, you could cobble up a radio that does not need batteries. (1) - http://www.buildcircuit.com/how-to-make-a-batteryless-crystal-set-radio/ http://www.buildcircuit.com/how-to-make-a-batteryless-crysta...
• flukus 9y ago
  > And maybe it's just me, but I always found broadcast to be pretty reliable (or at least consistently unreliable in ways I could predict) - online broadcasts have a tendency to fail/buffer/etc. at totally random intervals. Do you live anywhere that gets regular tropical storms? Broadcast towers are lightning magnets and they regularly go out, usually not for long but I've seen them be down overnight more than once. They also used to degrade a fair bit in electrical storms in the pre digital TV age. It wasn't that long ago that a neighbor mowing the lawn meant that the TV signal would be awful/out. What we need is for our internet and power systems to be more distributed.
• stefanpie 9y ago
  This idea of using FM and UHF radio as a dependable emergency communication system lead me to the idea for my current project im working on which is a redundent mesh network built using radio networks. At least that's where I started. The project is a combination of standard "new" IoT technologies like GSM and Wi-Fi with my own mesh radio system. Only some nodes are GSM enabled all of the nodes use traditional UHF communications. At first I wanted to use different FM radio frequencies with frequency reuse patterns to implement a simple mesh network routing protocol as a proof of concept. But I was still a beginner in RF and I soon relaized that the FM, marine, and air bands have a bunch of FCC regulations making it illegal to transmit data at my goal of at least 500 m (0.5 km) let alone finding a cheap/simple implementation circut or chip for someone new to RF design like I was. This lead to the idea of just using 433 MHz transivers to accomplish the same goal. And lucky, there are tons of simple tranciver boards by various manufacturers with simple interfaces and long ranges even with non ideal antennas. I've gotten a point where I have these small solar powered packages you can just mount anywhere and can last up to 12/14 days on 4 hours of full sunlight charge. I've also reached the stage where I can top worrying about hardware implementations and work more on software such as a nice dashboard, a more thought out routing algorithm (instead of just simple backtracking), and more ideas such as being able to send data back into the network to take certain actions in the physical world such as localized warnings. A more powerful use case I witnessed firsthand would be to use a robust system like this to control water systems such as wastewater and freshwater systems for municipalites in sever weather incidents such as hurricanes. Pump stations can be equipped with backup power but data from these stations and various sensors in the system are interrupted durring sever stroms like hurricane when these systems are most critical and need sensor data to make sure the system keeps running. I see the older technologies as solid foundation for robust networks. Most of these old systems are behind in terms of implementation technology but the foundations of these technologies are very strong. I believe that by integrating the robustness of older technologies with newer systems you can get the befits of new systems and technology but keep the robustness and stability of older systems.