43 ms·

Is AM radio dead?

• jsonne 4y ago
  I'm the founder of an audio ads startup. To put things in perspective the global radio market for ad dollars is ~$35 billion to $40 billion depending on who you ask. All of podcasting is $2 billion. To be clear the shift to all digital is happening but am/fm radio has a long ways to go before being irrelevant and this shift will likely take a few more decades. Don't sleep on traditional media.
  • polishdude20 4y ago
    I think the shift away from radio is being helped by the overabundance of ads on that platform.
    • SCNP 4y ago
      And the lack of ability to just skip past them.
  • 369548684892826 4y ago
    Where does DAB radio fit into this? What you're talking about is more about on-demand vs live, rather than analog vs digital isn't it?
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    > To put things in perspective the global radio market for ad dollars is ~$35 billion to $40 billion depending on who you ask. Others say $25 billion globally for terrestrial/OTA and satellite combined, and those physical mediums appear to be a shrinking slice of that. You can see the industry scrambling to redefine all live-streaming audio as "radio" as radio-the-medium evaporates.
• daveslash 4y ago
  Invoking Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." AM may have it's technical limitations, specifically when compared to FM, but as a medium it's not dead and I doubt it's about to be anytime soon. It's still very popular amongst political talk, at least here in the U.S. Edit: spelling
  • Mattasher 4y ago
    That may be true, but as anecdota I had a show on one of those talk stations just a year ago. They broadcast on 2 frequencies on the FM dial, covering a wide geographic range.
  • WaitWaitWha 4y ago
    In my experience, talk and even music on AM radio in Africa is used more then FM. I believe this is because the cost associated with AM equipment costs, and the distances AM can cover. I can get an AM signal in the middle of nowhere with a diode and a bunch of wires.
• danjoredd 4y ago
  There are actually a few AM stations in my area. Now, if my car radio still worked, I would totally listen to them because when it DID work, there was a lot of good local news and personalities on there. Did my heart good to hear opinions on current events in my area from people actually effected by it instead of an outsider from a completely different city's opinion on it all.
• stronglikedan 4y ago
  Not at all. And when they simultaneously try to broadcast AM content on FM bands, it sounds like crap. It's arguably where the majority of any given marketing budget goes, probably only edged out by FM, but maybe not.
• raspyberr 4y ago
  I really dislike this type of usage of the word "dead". There's not a general consensus on what it means. Does it mean unpopular, not as popular as it once was, literally unusable and inaccessible, or some subtle variation?
• quartz 4y ago
  I seriously considered buying an AM radio station a few years ago. You can get a fully operational station and the land it's on for under $200k in pretty populated areas. Something about just broadcasting whatever you want into a protected frequency band for anyone with an antenna to hear seems really cool.
  • 112233 4y ago
    How much electricity does an AM station burn?
    • forinti 4y ago
      That and content, unless you are going to broadcast only your own stuff.
      • JKCalhoun 4y ago
        I would be surprised if you could not find plenty of podcasts happy to be slotted into your schedule for no fee whatsoever.
        • Scoundreller 4y ago
          Basically an NPR clone
  • daveguy 4y ago
    Does that include licensing of the frequency or just the infrastructure? Even if it includes some duration of the license, I expect there are still regulations and red tape to maintain that license. And regulations about what you can broadcast.
    • quartz 4y ago
      Oh sure, the list of FCC rules is seemingly endless... but it's still a pretty wide margin of media and speech permitted especially on the "talk radio" side of things.
• 112233 4y ago
  OTOH, CB radio has been lately getting harmonised and deregulated all over, and AM is one of the legal modulations (along with FM and SSB). So a lot of opportunity to enjoy "warm AM sound" with your neighbors, even if the cell goes down. [edit] they even have portable ones! (look up "Randy", no SSB though). And with a half decent SDR you can record the whole 40 channels at once, to see if there is anything worth joining in.
• reaperducer 4y ago
  AM radio is no different than any other radio: If the content is good, people will listen. It's worth noting that for decades, FM was considered a graveyard of talk programming, with occasional classical mixed in. Today, the situation has been reversed. In cities where there is enough money to produce good content, AM radio does well. In smaller places, where there isn't enough money available to create good content, AM stations are very often relegated to satellite- and internet-fed formats. The most recent Chicago ratings I can quickly find¹ (June, 2022) show AM doing well, with AM stations ranking #5, #11, #23, #25 and #27 in a market of over 50 stations. But even in small places, while the FMs will dominate all day long, a good AM or three will dominate the morning drive when they present local programming. Electric cars are starting to be a problem for AM radio, which is why so many now have FM translators, and free internet streams. But AM will have a place on the air for a very long time to come. /I've worked for about a dozen different AM stations in my lifetime. ¹ https://robertfeder.dailyherald.com/2022/06/13/chicago-radio-ratings-eve-retirement-bob-stroud-leads-drive-no-1/ https://robertfeder.dailyherald.com/2022/06/13/chicago-radio...
  • adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    the problem with AM is quality. You can't put music down it which really limits your options.
    • floren 4y ago
      Music went out over AM for decades just fine; what band do you think people were listening to back in the pre-TV days of the big console radio? I'll occasionally find a decent AM music station even these days, and when it's not being overwhelmed by all the modern RF noise, it sounds just fine.
      • Kon-Peki 4y ago
        The OP listed some AM stations that were near the top of the rating in the Chicago market. I looked at the list and the top two AM stations were no surprise: WBBM and WGN. It's not really a good idea to look at these two stations to get an idea of the health of the entire AM market. These two are giant class A clear channel stations that date back to the 1920s and the origination of AM radio licenses. Being in the center of the continent they can do omnidirectional broadcasting without "wasting" power like a station on the coast would. They're among the few that can still afford to be "local" station with very little syndicated content (and broadcast a lot of sports to vast swaths of the US and Canada that have no local professional sports team), and they'll probably be among the last of the AM stations to shut down.
• CharlesW 4y ago
  I've never listened to AM radio on purpose, and I'm not young. From what I've heard, it's a content desert that consists primarily of religious/crackpot programming. As fewer and fewer new cars support AM¹, the writing is on the wall, and there should be concrete plans to reallocate that spectrum for something more useful. ¹ https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-why-some-automakers-tune-out-am-radios-in-new-cars https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-why-some-automakers-tune...
  • daveslash 4y ago
    The only time that I've actively listened to AM purposefully (other than curiously "just to see what's there") is AM 1610. [0]. 1610 is often used in the US for Visitor Information -- short 3-10 minute recordings on automated loop [1]. I find them useful when visiting a new park for the first time, and before I stop in the visitor center. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1610_AM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1610_AM [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_information_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_information_stati... [2] Yellowstone National Park 1610 recording. https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=E4A26B7F-1DD8-B71B-0B125D0DBA967A17 https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=E4A26B7F-1DD8-B7...
    • CharlesW 4y ago
      This is a great use of radio, thanks for pointing it out.
    • generj 4y ago
      As a kid, my parents got me a cheap AM transmitter toy that broadcast on 1610. Cutting edge tech in the early aughts, it ran on AA batteries and had a tape player, a microphone, and an aux in. My broadcasts made it across the cul-de-sac from my room. It was immensely enjoyable.
      • smegger001 4y ago
        I was given one of those too, i think i still have it in a box somewhere. spent a lot of time playing dj with it.
• MBCook 4y ago
  Something I don’t see mentioned: Some (many?) new cars don’t have AM radios. And since people in cars seems to be a huge chunk of AM/FM radio listenership that’s a very big problem for AM stations. I know the Mustang Mach-E removed it in the newer models.
  • WorldMaker 4y ago
    The article also mentions that Tesla cars dropped AM support by default and now sell a $500 upgrade to the radio just to get AM radio back.
    • jdofaz 4y ago
      That is not correct, you cannot add AM. The radio fee is for people who upgraded their computer hardware and want a new radio that is compatible with the new computer. The new radio does not have AM.
• tasty_freeze 4y ago
  It is dead to me and has been for decades. Once in a while I'll put on the AM band when driving and there is nothing for me. - hispanic music -- i don't speak spanish and not growing up with it, I have no connection - conservative talk radio -- as a liberal, I find it more terrifying than anything. hosts and callers will declare that liberals think this or that, or that we are trying to do this or that, things that I and none of my liberal friends would identify with. I was surprised to find out that liberals hate freedom and want to force our kids into being gay. I guess I'm way behind the curve. - biblical literalism - (edit) I forgot sports. does nothing for me.
• ssharp 4y ago
  It's certainly 99% dead for me personally but based on the ad dollars still flowing in, I'm assuming there is a still a big audience, even if it's on the decline. What's more surprising to me at this point is Sirius. I just don't understand how this is still a $22 billion dollar company, doing $9 billion in revenue and is still growing revenue. I don't see where the value is. I haven't subscribed in almost a decade but when I left, the audio quality was really bad -- terrible digital compression artifacts -- and there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming that couldn't be had with a streaming service like Spotify. Maybe it's all Stern and sports content that's driving revenue or is there still a big legion of people who actually subscribe for the music?
  • vel0city 4y ago
    Another thing that Sirius does that a lot of people aren't talking about is their data services. Having updated weather and fish maps live while you're offshore is pretty handy and satellite internet connections can be very pricey.
    • yetanotherloser 4y ago
      ...you don't need a (relatively) expensive single sideband set and radio-nerd tendencies to pick up weather data offshore where you live? That is pretty great if so. Would that there were more of it.
      • vel0city 4y ago
        I'm a little confused about your comment. This is stuff like fishing recommendations by species, sea surface heights, temperature contors, 30m deep temperature condors, plankton concentrations, weather radar, storm tracks, wave heights, and more and then integrated into common Garmin, Raymarine, Lowrance, Simrad, and other equipment that many boats would already have. All of that data constantly updated and refreshed live even when you're miles out to sea and can't pick up common line of sight style transmissions. Its not just a METAR weather report from an airport kinda near the shore.
• TheRealPomax 4y ago
  One of the few instances where the title being a question actually makes sense.
• hellotomyrars 4y ago
  AM is here to stay for at least a few more decades. In the US it’s a lot more scarce to find AM broadcasts that aren’t either political or religious (often extremely so) because of the market for renting airtime and the longer reach than FM. But AM is still bread and butter for South/Central America and Africa. Not sure how much it is used in Southeast Asia but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was still very popular there too. Eventually it’ll be gone due to the inevitable March of technology, but it has plenty of life left in it.
• at_a_remove 4y ago
  Well, he's in St. Louis and it isn't doing well there. 1430 AM ("The Crazy Q") was the last bastion of oldies in the 50s, early 60s sense. Its license, as well as a few others, were held by a man who was a convicted felon and apparently that's a no-no. Anyway, it folded and that was that. I dig around and there's just not much else I can find on the AM band aside from talk, some kind of Catholic radio, sports ...
• user3939382 4y ago
  One of my hobbies is listening to Yankees games on my old wooden tube radio from the 20s. It's alive for me!
• ajross 4y ago
  I want to hear the technical side here. So, sure, AM radio is fading. But audio content delivery is alive and very active. So in practice everyone will just move over to podcasts and it'll be fine. But what happens with the spectrum if we just turn it off? The ~1MHz band is basically useless to digital transmission. There's not enough (literal) bandwidth to put anything modern on it, and the transmission characteristics lack the ionospheric reflections of short wave, so it's only a to-the-horizon kind of thing anyway. So do we just turn it off? Is there anything useful to do with it? Or is there interesting astronomy we could do without the interference? Maybe the reason AM radio continues limping along is that there really aren't any takers and this is just junk spectrum?
  • WorldMaker 4y ago
    1 MHz doesn't give a lot of room for frequency hopping and frequency modulation, but that doesn't stop it from being useful for digital transmission. You can still transmit zeroes and ones with amplitude modulation. (The hybrid HD radio tried that, though few Americans bought into that.) The biggest problem with that from micro-usage of the spectrum by personal devices is interference and error correction, but we're doing a veritable ton with Bluetooth today in one of the noisiest and easily interfered with bands in current regulation so there's certainly ideas out there to try. That said, there's also probably nothing wrong with leaving spectrum quiet. We don't need to fill every band possible of the electromagnetic spectrum with digital noise, despite how hungry our devices seem for additional bandwidth.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    > So in practice everyone will just move over to podcasts and it'll be fine. Podcasts and radio are very different mediums. I don't think one adequately replaces the other.
  • outworlder 4y ago
    Not all applications require a lot of bandwidth.
• lormayna 4y ago
  Let's hope that DRM (https://www.drm.org/ https://www.drm.org/) will replace AM. At the moment, the big issue is the lack of cheap receivers.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    I dunno. The disaster that was the switch to digital TV broadcasting makes me leery of this.
  • Johnythree 4y ago
    I have a dozen or so DRM channels programmed into my SDR. Even a couple of MW AM ones. And I tune through them every day or two. The problem is that the performance of DRM is terrible. It takes a hugely strong signal before it is free of drop-outs, plus is very intolerant of any interference on the same channel. And of course drop-outs with DRM are very jarring, as they lock up the channel for many seconds. When compared with a conventional AM Transmitter from the same city, at the same power, the AM TX is far more pleasant to listen to.
    • lormayna 4y ago
      Which software are you using to decode DRM?
• krumpet 4y ago
  AM radio is still my go-to for sports. Nothing like summertime and MLB on the radio while I work on a side project in the garage. College football and basketball too. Love those hometown announcers!
• runjake 4y ago
  I would like to see a "national public" satellite radio. Pump the National Weather Service and another channel or few with public domain entertainment on it, to get people to buy them (eg. Eton radios) and chuck them in the closet for a severe weather or disaster event. I understand the science decently, but I don't understand the economic feasibility. I assume if it were feasible, it would have been done by now. But it seems like something that will become more economically feasible in the near future as space transport progresses.
• nightowl_games 4y ago
  In rural Saskatchewan, where I am from, farmers listen to AM radio literally all day long because they don't get good FM reception. It's too sparse and the demographic is too non-technical to even know what Spotify is.
• TheAdamist 4y ago
  My city has a newsradio AM station that's still doing well and lots of people listen for the traffic reports, but they started simulcasting on FM as well recently to futureproof themselves. The FM signal has far better sound quality of course but thats not really necessary for news reports. But the AM signal can frequently be heard when the FM is completely lost to interference. I dont know of any other big am stations, my car has separate presets per band, so newsradio is permanently on for the AM signal and their FM is frequently on the fm preset.
• BeetleB 4y ago
  > On the other, companies like Tesla stopped shipping AM radio entirely, and if you want to add it on, they'll gladly retrofit your EV for $500. Reason #27 for not buying a Tesla. When you're on the highway and see the flashing lights saying "Tune to 520 AM for adverse road conditions" what are you going to do?
  • jdminhbg 4y ago
    > When you're on the highway and see the flashing lights saying "Tune to 520 AM for adverse road conditions" what are you going to do? Look at Waze to see what's actually happening, like I always do.
    • BeetleB 4y ago
      Usually these signs are on interstates in the middle of nowhere (e.g. mountain/forest/desert). It's not unusual not to have a signal. And frankly, even if you did have a signal, it's not likely Waze will be of much help. There are often few travelers on that road, and chances are none of them is using Waze.
      • Scoundreller 4y ago
        How do the signs get the updates? Could be satellite but it’s probably 3G/LTE unless someone is manually setting it, but then it’s probably made it’s way into Waze when it was last online.
  • buildsjets 4y ago
    The same thing I've done when I've seen such a sign at any time in the past 52 years. Completely ignore it.
    • BeetleB 4y ago
      Let me give you a real scenario. I was entering a hilly/mountainous region, and the sign said "Tune in to AM 520 for rock slide information when lights are flashing" and the lights were flashing. You're just going to ignore that?
• jsz0 4y ago
  Someone started an AM radio station in my small town which has managed to survive for 7+ years now so there must be a workable business model there. They focus on hyper-local news & sports coverage that you just can't get anywhere else. The really clever thing they did was to use the launch of the radio station and broadcast location downtown as advertisement for their streaming app. They got a lot of local news coverage and public interest simply by doing something unusual like starting a new AM radio station in a tiny town. They still do AM but I believe the vast majority of their listeners stream. Super clever because someone like my Dad would never know a streaming station existed but he knows they exist because he can drive by the studio and see them broadcasting through the window.
  • K7PJP 4y ago
    What's the station's call? I’m always curious about these small broadcasters. I believe there's still a lot of potential left in terrestrial radio. The domination of the airwaves by private equity, however, is only going to squeeze it to death.
    • jsz0 4y ago
      https://www.snsnonline.com https://www.snsnonline.com
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  I would love to see AM radio opened up to private citizens. Take podcasting and move it to AM radio, where a person can pay or subscribe to a frequency and broadcast on it. Not so much as a corporation but something easier, cheaper, and more accessible to average citizens. Maybe that's a recipe for disaster but it's an idea..
  • msla 4y ago
    The problem is the FCC. Here's the handbook for KFGM, the local community radio station in Missoula, MT: https://www.1015kfgm.org/_files/ugd/7578a3_dcafddc8fa53435d93d0d3bef48eaad3.pdf https://www.1015kfgm.org/_files/ugd/7578a3_dcafddc8fa53435d9... And the relevant quote: > U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens explained the attitude of the FCC, in his opinion, in a 1978 decision on George Carlin's famous "Filthy Language" piece about the seven dirty words: > “Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home, where the individual's right to be let alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder.” The handbook goes on in detail about what the station will accept and what it won't, but the point is simple: The airwaves are not as free as the Internet, and giving the broadcast booth to the average person is legally dangerous to the station. Getting the average person to understand copyright is one thing, especially since most of the oiks insist it's about plagiarism and attribution, but allowing someone who thinks Carlin's Seven Words are a good starting point to broadcast without a filter is going to get the station shut down.
• rswerve 4y ago
  Tesla is singled out in the article, but there's a general problem of interference with AM radio in electric vehicles--which seems like the biggest challenge for AM. There are some legislative rumblings to do something about it. https://jalopnik.com/u-s-sen-ed-markey-really-really-wants-automakers-to-1849876535 https://jalopnik.com/u-s-sen-ed-markey-really-really-wants-a...
  • jdofaz 4y ago
    Tesla does include HD-Radio on their FM tuner, in Phoenix the most popular AM stations are available on one of the HD radio sub-channels.
• ridgeguy 4y ago
  AM radio helped kindle my lifelong interest in technology and music. Grew up in Alaska in the '50s. When I was 8, my Dad bagged me some old headphones, wire, a variable capacitor and one of those new-fangled 'diode detectors' from a friend at Elmendorf Air Base. Much coil winding and fiddling later, I was able to hear KOMA in Oklahoma, a great rock station. KOMA Klimbers! Nowdays, I find AM content distasteful in the extreme, hardly ever listen. But fond memories of an early influence.
• D13Fd 4y ago
  I'm no expert, but it seems like that mid-frequency part of the spectrum could be put to much better uses.
• LinAGKar 4y ago
  Is AM radio a US-only thing? Because I've never heard anything broadcast on AM here is Sweden.
  • 112233 4y ago
    Shortwave on plain consumer radios is AM. A lot of stations there, a lot of them from China.
  • kypro 4y ago
    We have it in the UK. The BBC still broadcast on it (at least they did last time I tuned in). I believe there are some sports stations who use it too. My dad would listen to cricket on it in the car all the time when I was a kid.
  • xxr 4y ago
    Not US-only, but it appears that Sweden is indeed one of the countries that no longer supports it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_wave#Use_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_wave#Use_in_Europe
  • Centrino 4y ago
    AM radio (called "medium wave radio" in Europe) is still used in Eastern Europe, the UK, Spain etc. The last AM broadcasts in Sweden stopped in 2010, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B6lvesborg_medium_wave_transmitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B6lvesborg_medium_wave_tr... For a full list of AM radio stations in ITU region 1, see https://www.mwlist.org/mwlist_quick_and_easy.php https://www.mwlist.org/mwlist_quick_and_easy.php
• spike021 4y ago
  I still listen to baseball on the radio. Although I'll mention that nowadays it's also streaming online. So I really only use it with AM radio in the car.
• jhallenworld 4y ago
  So in Boston (which is the No. 10 radio market), https://ratings.radio-online.com/content/arb013 https://ratings.radio-online.com/content/arb013 WBZ 1030 AM (news radio) hovers around no. 5. They transmit on HD radio also (HD 2 on 107.9 FM), but the range is limited compared with AM. RKO 680 AM (local right wing talk radio) is also near the top. Conclusion: AM is not dead
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  AM is not dead, if you've ever lived or visited outside of the big metropolitan areas. It's normal to have a radio on the kitchen counter tuned to the local station, for gossip, local news, talk, and ads that are actually relevant to you. .. and of course, baseball.
  • walthamstow 4y ago
    Is AM a genre of radio or a transmission method, or both? This kitchen radio is common too in the UK but the radio would be FM at the least, more likely DAB these days. BBC Radio 4 or '5 Live' nationally and the BBC have dozens of local radio stations all over the country. All talk, no music.
    • svachalek 4y ago
      Kind of both. It's a transmission method (amplitude modulation) that's very lo-fi which leads to it rarely being used for music, which dominates other radio. So it ends up being talk shows, sports, news, traffic reports, etc.
      • bityard 4y ago
        "very lo-fi" is pretty relative... FM offered higher quality audio, but that came mostly from the fact that it was not as prone to interference. (And yes, it was stereo instead of mono, but I think stereo AM became a thing eventually.) Other than that, if the station you were listening to was not far away, there wasn't really any difference in perceptible quality _if_ you had a decent receiver and antenna, which most people didn't. It was cheaper and easier to make an FM radio that sounded good compared to AM. If you tool around the HF ham bands at night, sometimes you will catch a couple of hams conversing in AM near the top of 40 meters. The ones that have spent some time tweaking their audio and transmitter sound like they're sitting right next to you. Very crisp and clear, especially next to single side-band!
    • DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      One leads from the other: the nature (transmission range, operational costs, and quality… or lack there-of) of AM radio in North America led it into rural-focused, talk-only (and eventually “conservative”) programming - and sports (just like how BBC Radio 5 is also AM, not FM).
• Kajayacht 4y ago
  I listen to political talk radio on AM, even though it simulcasts on FM, all the time for a few reasons. 1. Signal strength is much more consistent and further reaching. 2. I don't have to worry about my wife changing the station on the AM radio in the car. The FM radio could be set anywhere, but when I'm driving I just change it to AM and there's my station. 3. There's a "je ne sais pas" factor in the fuzziness and softness of the audio that I find pleasant and less harsh than what you get with talk radio on FM. Maybe for the same reason people like the sound of vinyl records, though I'm not into vinyl.
  • gwd 4y ago
    > "je ne sais pas" "Je ne sais quoi", perhaps? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/je_ne_sais_quoi https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/je_ne_sais_quoi "Je ne sais quoi" means "I don't know what"; "Je ne sais pas" just means "I don't know".
    • andrewmcwatters 4y ago
      It's funny you mention this, because it's effectively the same thing, mais si tu parles français, tu pourrais finir par dire l'un ou l'autre.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • taftster 4y ago
    re: #3 I agree with you. There's something about the aesthetics of AM radio that favors talk radio. In a former life, I would listen to a lot of political talk radio (from a few major brands), and switching over to listen to them in FM just wasn't the same. I preferred listening on AM. There's also something about the sound of AM that is somehow nostalgic and reminds me of taking long road trips cross-country in lowly populated west or mid-west states with my grandparents. The "reach" of an AM station somehow connects with me and the impression on me will unfortunately die with my generation; at least, I know my kids have no consideration for AM radio, or radio at all for that matter.
• caned 4y ago
  It's not dead for baseball fans in the NYC Metro area!
  • naet 4y ago
    I was gonna say baseball, keeps at least a few people in their surrounding areas tuned into AM (Oakland As for me). Probably won't last forever but it's still damn satisfying to be able to catch the game over the local airwaves.
• rfmoz 4y ago
  Like shortwave broadcasting, AM have their place nowadays, it brings a comunication service to their target. It's true that it isn't as popular as before, but take a look to the postal service and their letters. Who writes a letter today? but you can do it without problem if you want.
• oneplane 4y ago
  It is mostly dead here in Western Europe for over a decade now, I'm assuming a mix of relatively high cost, yet almost no relevance.
• euroderf 4y ago
  FWIW.. IIRC in the 70s Syracuse NY was known for having a prog rock station that actually broadcast on the AM band.
• djhworld 4y ago
  The article/video mentions Tesla - curious to know if other EVs have omitted the AM radio from the car, or have worked around the inteference issues
  • vel0city 4y ago
    Apparently Ford is starting to remove them from their EVs due to struggles related to interference. I don't listen to AM that much in my EV (Mach E) but the few times I have tried it seemed to work acceptably.
  • simplyaccont 4y ago
    it's gone from Volvo and I think some other cars as well (like BMW, Audi, etc)
    • rsync 4y ago
      One of our cars is a 2023 Audi e-tron and it has no AM radio. My immediate question was, was it harder and more expensive to specify a radio module/part with FM, but not AM ? It seems like a design flex and not an actual cost or UI affordance, etc. It is annoying because sports broadcasts in the Bay Area are typically on AM.
      • Johnythree 4y ago
        The problem isn't in fitting an AM radio, but in suppressing the Electromagnetic interference from the Electric motors and circuity. Hopefully the FCC will wake up and insist that they fix the interference, and not just hide it by not fitting an AM radio.
  • outworlder 4y ago
    Nissan Leaf here. AM radio works fine. Given that Tesla will add it for a fee(and older Teslas had it), I presume its removal is not technology-related.
    • jdofaz 4y ago
• colordrops 4y ago
  It will be once all cars are EV. The noise generated by the motors will make it infeasible.
  • outworlder 4y ago
    It's not infeasible (Tesla vehicles used to have AM radios). My EV has an AM radio. It works.
  • Johnythree 4y ago
    Well, yes, but only if the FCC doesn't insist on them meeting standard EM interference rules.
• jmbwell 4y ago
  > But as more and more radio stations in the US are controlled by ever fewer radio conglomerates This is what's underlying it all. Following deregulation, fewer hands gained control of more outlets nationwide, homogenizing for maximum margin on advertising to the markets with the broadest reach. Top-40, country, r&b, at-work, alternative, and at best some market segmentation in parts of the country with significant ethnic demographics. Advertisers mainly want to pick from this menu, and AM wasn't on it, with the exception of nationally syndicated talk and regional news and sports. That put AM in a down-market position, which put it at lower revenues, which made profitability a bigger struggle, which is a big sign pointing to the "niche" door of relative commercial obscurity. The technical aspects are a factor in terms of appealing to listeners and thus advertisers, but the decisions are made entirely on commercial grounds.
  • AlbertCory 4y ago
    On FM, though, the frequencies from the bottom to 92 MHz are reserved for non-profit stations. You can find the local NPR affiliates there, but also college stations and lots of weird & wonderful one-offs. Like KKUP around here: https://kkup.org/ https://kkup.org/
    • jmbwell 4y ago
      Or religious stations, which operate as commercial in all but name. Non-profits and education and weird one-offs (I’ve worked for more than one) struggle to get by independently and are largely subsidized by some larger entity with actual cash flow. Maintaining the licenses and broadcast equipment is no small cost. But yes you’re correct, not all stations are Channels that are Clear or patronized by Snt. Clarity.
      • AlbertCory 4y ago
        Or religious stations. KKUP, which I actually volunteered at once, is 100% listener-funded. I just heard a song on there that I haven't heard in forever, this morning: Working Class Hero (John Lennon).
      • 4y ago
• supernova87a 4y ago
  I have been curious about why AM stations exhibit the demographic effect you see (in terms of programming, station ownership, etc). Is it because of something to do with the licensing of the spectrum, and the cost of buying that? Or because of the restrictions around broadcasting (content and distance) of any given station? Or the cost of equipment to operate? So interesting that something about how the domain operates that creates a different dynamic of what you hear on the radio in AM vs. FM.
  • danielodievich 4y ago
    The Divided Dial from On The Media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial would be a fantastic - if somewhat lengthy - answer to your question.
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      A strong second to that recommendation. Excellent series. I'll also note that there are transcripts for all five, er, six, episodes, if that's your jam.
      • supernova87a 4y ago
        Thanks!
    • supernova87a 4y ago
      Thanks!
• lambic 4y ago
  I happened to listen to this podcast this morning which has some interesting things to say about this topic: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-divided-dial/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-divided-dial/
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  In upstate NY you might think so. The only channel you can really count on during the day is the one that used to have the Rush Limbaugh Show. Around sunset though the atmosphere changes and there is a short time you get DX and can hear Bloomberg radio talking about the stock market being about to open in Hong Kong and then hear it fighting with the "Black Information Network" in Detroit.
• askvictor 4y ago
  I was on a multi-day hike (Tasmania, Australia) some years ago, where we would need to know if snow was falling further ahead, as the pass would be difficult in snow, so we would need to turn back in that case; it would be easier to turn back well before reaching the pass. I packed an AM radio to listen to the weather forecast in the morning; before sunrise, the ionosphere reflects AM waves, so the distance of the signal is greatly enhanced (the hike was in a mountainous area and had no straight-line to any radio towers). In fact, I couldn't get the local radio station's reception, but did get reception for heaps of other stations, one of them over 2000km away; I almost wonder if the local station was being drowned out by distant ones (or more likely the ionosphere reflection is better a shallow angles)
  • chrononaut 4y ago
    While OP is (was) in Australia, for those reading in the US that are interested in something similar, you're better off bringing an FM radio with you that can receive to the NOAA weather radio frequencies, and simply tune to the frequency / channel for your region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_Weather_Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_Weather_Radio
    • askvictor 4y ago
      How does this handle situations where you haven't got 'line of sight' (or rather, an unobstructed path) to the transmitter (e.g. when you're nestled in between some mountains)?
      • jeramey 4y ago
        VHF (FM radio in the US is in the VHF band) propagation can definitely change at different times of day. One of my favorite activities in the summer is to go get lost in the Cascades, and when the sun goes down, settle in to a hammock with a little multi-band radio to see what I can pick up. As the evening wears on, I can typically start to receive FM radio stations in Canada several hundred kilometers away. Once the sun has risen again, I can no longer tune those stations no matter how much I fiddle with antenna orientation. NOAA weather bands also become easier to tune clearly at night. As to why VHF frequencies seem to propagate better at night, I could only speculate, but they do seem to—at least on occasion.
• albeebe1 4y ago
  It's alive and well in my car when it comes to news. AM 1030 WBZ
• User23 4y ago
  Not at all. AM radio is where I get all my great financial tips on Gold, REITs, and vitamin supplements! More seriously, the clear-channel license holders are still a big deal. It's pretty amazing to be able to cover half the country from one transmitter. WSM out of Nashville is still relevant for example.
• JohnFen 4y ago
  I sure hope it isn't dead. I listen to it every day.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  All I listen to is AM radio, so if it's dead then maybe I am a zombie.
• jossclimb 4y ago
  Not when you're at everest base camp and listening to the BBC world service.
• vel0city 4y ago
  I've heard the comment of HD Radio being a failure multiple times. Personally, it doesn't seem to be true to me, as the majority of my radio listening happens on receivers with HD Radio on stations with HD Radio. I didn't even go out of my way to make sure I bought just the right trim of a car with HD Radio or an AV receiver with HD Radio, it just had it. Most of the radio stations in my market offer HD Radio and several have multiple subchannels. A few of my go-to stations are HD Radio subchannels as those often are operated with minimal to no advertisements (usually just self promotion and station ID). I realize HD Radio is pretty much US-only, but am I seemingly the only one actually using HD Radio?
  • vermilingua 4y ago
    Is HD Radio equivalent to DAB+? If so, it’s alive and well in Australia (insofar as radio is alive and well)
    • petepete 4y ago
      In the UK, FM often sounds better than DAB. I know that in theory DAB offers superior quality but it's compressed so multiple stations are broadcast on the same frequency.
    • vel0city 4y ago
      Yes, HD Radio is what the US went with instead of DAB/DAB+.
      • geerlingguy 4y ago
        Though transmitter and receiver hardware is entirely incompatible, so an imported car or radio from the EU/Australia would not be able to tune in any HD Radio signals. Even today, not all brand new cars and replacement head units include HD Radio tuners—many are still analog AM/FM only. Pair that with most cars and trucks on the road not being brand new, and market penetration is very low outside of people who bought the right new cars in the past few years. Many (but not most—yet) stations which launched HD signals in the past decade have since switched them off to give more bandwidth back to the analog signal, and to avoid ongoing HD licensing fees.
• alerighi 4y ago
  AM radio is long gone in Europe, in Italy the last stations did shut down years ago. The audio quality of AM is too low for any practical use, and didn't evolve in the years, such as implement stereo transmissions. FM is much better, it can provide decent quality with stereo sound. Even FM will not probably be still around for much longer, even if I'm not in favour to the transition to DAB radio since I like vintage Hi-Fi systems in the end it will be abandoned, transmitting with digital is much cheaper since you need less power for a similar coverage and you can multiplex more stations in a single frequency.
  • kgwgk 4y ago
    > AM radio is long gone in Europe Still alive in Spain.
  • rpep 4y ago
    In the U.K. it’s still used to broadcast some national BBC stations (BBC R5 Live, BBC Asian Network) that aren’t available on FM and in some more areas it’s used to broadcast stations that are also on FM (BBC R4). They still also operate some LW! https://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/help-guides/fmmwlw-radio/fm-and-am-radio-frequencies https://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/help-guides/fmmwlw-radio/fm-... Until two weeks ago I used to listen to Absolute Radio in my car over MW but they shut it down.
  • parasubvert 4y ago
    AM is everywhere in North America. News/sports/traffic/weather in particular. So it is still practical. AM Stereo even was thing since the late 80s, just required a receiver.
  • Johnythree 4y ago
    The issue about AM being low quality is a bit misleading... In Europe the audio bandwidth of AM is almost the same as FM, especially with the BBC stations. And likewise in Australia, the gov ABC stations still transmit high quality audio on AM BC. The problem is that most cheap radios were designed for the USA market, where most AM channels broadcast talk shows, and so their receivers are fitted with narrow IF filters. The proof of this of course is to listen to any decent radio which has a narrow/wide switch. Back in the day, the hobbyist magazines would often publish designs for HiFi AM receivers. And many of the modern SDR receivers have a selection of IF filters which can sound quite amazing on AM. There are even a few stations still transmitting Stereo AM, and most of those sound as good as FM on a decent receiver.
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  The "Divided Dial" series (six parts) from WNYC's On the Media does an excellent job of detailing how and why radio in general (both AM & FM bands in the US) has come to be both so concentrated (in ownership) and divided (in content and audience). Both ... portend poorly. The full series, with both audio and transcripts, is here: <https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial> Doc Searls, an old radio hand himself, often writes about the topic, though concentrating more on infrastructure than business or culture: <https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/category/broadcasting/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/category/broadcasting/> I'd argue that AM radio, much as with FM and over-the-air television, is fading fast, especially in urban regions in which broadband Internet and cable programming offer far more attractive options. For myself, I find I'm listening to podcasts far more than informational radio (though I'll listen to some music programming) over the air --- it's convenient, and has very little advertising. Less than the nominally noncommercial public broadcasting alternative. But in rural regions, where markets are sparse, AM's range still pulls in what few people there are, and motivated and ideological ownership often drives content, radio remains a potent force. The OTM series gives strong insights into those dynamics. (The series was mentioned downthread by danielodievich: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34602095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34602095>)
• skedaddle 4y ago
  I've been listening to AM broadcasts a lot over the last few months. I can get good reception from 2-3 local stations on my crystal set. One gives me state and national news, interviews, the weather; useful stuff. From the other I've learned a lot about aliens, nutrition, debt and debt consolidation, Gray Man, World War III, psychedelic drugs, skinwalkers, Christian dating situations (ex: non-abstinent partners), the holiday/inflation deals on Smith & Wesson steel, various troubling situations involving Biden and his son... What else. I don't know, I learn so much from my radio that it's hard to keep track! And it's so much more engaging than your typically maybe-just-as-sane Netflix documentary with its jarring interview style. The AM hosts actually let their guests talk, uninterrupted, and at length, so you can hear what their points are in the way that they meant to say it. The other night a caller phoned into this expert cryptozoological guy they were interviewing and related how a canid, "too big to be a dog but too small to be a wolf", planted itself on the road in front of his truck before morphing into a woman before him (at night!). And he and this doctor they had as a guest were able to work through the experience on the spot; it wasn't some high production story that cut back and forth through irrelevant fancy stuff for 20 minutes before finally explaining what the guy saw. I'm only partly being tongue in cheek... This is how "information diet" + learn more about radio new years resolutions have been working out for me. All this crazy stuff has replaced the social media and news/opinion drama I would get wrapped up on before. It's free, actually enjoyable (because of the radio projects, not the broadcasts), mildly to thoroughly amusing (because of the broadcasts), and the insanity is gone as soon as I take the headset off. It should get better soon as well. I'm going to build an FM receiver next, and I hear they still play music on those channels!
• DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  The BBC World Service shortwave broadcast [0] is still one of the few (safe) ways people can get outside news while living in war-torn regions and totalitarian regimes across Africa, Middle east, and Asia. People arguing about Audio quality are missing the point of AM: Robustness in adversity. Receivers are easy to put together and repair, transmission travels long distances beyond enemies/oppressors and unlike online access nobody can intercept your traffic or estimate your location. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2x9tqt6mc05vB2S37j8MWMJ/global-short-wave-frequencies https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2x9tqt6mc05vB2S37j...
  • sn_master 4y ago
    BBC Arabic was just discontinued last week. FTA: The move came as part of cost-cutting measures under which the news service is also ending its radio programming in 10 other languages, including Persian, Chinese and Hindi. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/business/media/bbc-arabic-radio-end.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/business/media/bbc-arabic...
    • glaucon 4y ago
      Having discontinued most of the over the air broadcasts to Eastern Europe they turned them back on pretty quickly starting in February last year - I've no doubt that once Ukraine is finished the Foreign Office will be nagging to withdraw the funding again. So stupid, it's a lot of soft power for peanuts. Probably the suits are saying "but what about the internet" but the people you want to reach are the people whose internet is likely to be turned off when you want to talk to them.
      • jhoechtl 4y ago
        You might have missed that Broadcast onto Ukrain territory / Central and eastern Europe in general has been turned off again.
    • aeontech 4y ago
      That's tragic and shortsighted... for whatever faults BBC coverage might have, those 39M listeners it was reaching will now no longer have these alternate perspectives easily available to them relative to the other media in their countries. Less information is always a loss. And even if we ignore any altruistic motivations, it's a loss of soft power for the British / Western operations.
• tony-allan 4y ago
  I live in Australia and when I go on a decent road trip its interesting when you lose mobile phone coverage, then FM radio coverage leaving just AM radio. In summer you can drive along just listening to news and sport coverage (Cricket). In the country it is the primary source of news and emergency information. During flooding and bushfires most other forms of communication are not available especially during prolonged power outages. Of course, if you go outside the AM coverage area you lose that as well but that's a different story.
  • jon_adler 4y ago
    My uncle, a dedicated ham, worked his entire career in radio. Now he makes some nice pocket money in retirement keeping some old rural AM stations running because no one else really understands how they work.
• walrus01 4y ago
  AM radio has one value for me, if you live in a city with a 50kW station that has traffic announcements every 10 minutes on major screw-up areas/bottlenecks (bridges, tunnels, etc), you can sometimes get around even more efficiently than using google maps to drive with. And by truly not taking your eyes off the road to look at screens of any devices to know where the traffic problems are.
• yyyk 4y ago
  Cars are rather important for radio listenership. So when AV cars finally arrive, the effect on radio should be large - former drivers would be more able to consume different forms of entertainment in the car, and I don't think many would remain with radio only.
• rmason 4y ago
  All I listen to is AM radio in the car. If you're like me and your musical tastes are outside the mainstream then FM radio is useless. Unless you're in a big city or anywhere in Louisiana then quite simply you're not going to find any blues or Cajun music and probably little if any jazz. Tesla ships without AM radio for technical reasons. The electric motors in EV's generate electromagnetic interference that interferes with the AM band. Ford EV's do have AM radio standard however.
  • freetime2 4y ago
    > If you're like me and your musical tastes are outside the mainstream then FM radio is useless If you're after a personalized experience, wouldn't a smart phone and bluetooth (or carplay, etc.) be the way to go?
  • MBCook 4y ago
    > Ford EV's do have AM radio standard however. Had? My ‘21 has it but I’ve seen complaints from people with newer models that don’t have it. But that could easily be due to some kind of parts shortage issues too. Hard to say these days.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tomohawk 4y ago
  AM radio transmission relies a lot on the characteristics of the earth where the antenna is. In St Louis, you need less land to site your antenna than the east coast. A few years ago, one of the big AM broadcasters on the east coast sold their 75 acres of now prime real estate that they bought many decades ago for their antennas. The price was around $1M per acre.
• purpleblue 4y ago
  I just discovered last week that Teslas don't have AM radio. I was trying to get the 49ers game as we were driving and I couldn't find the button for AM radio to listen to the broadcast, so I got my wife to search for me. She eventually found a link that said that because of the noise from the motor, AM radio wouldn't work so they removed it entirely. I was a bit shocked but I guess that's just how it is.
• CrLf 4y ago
  I live in Portugal. I haven’t tuned an AM radio station in more than 20 years. And at the time there were already few stations, and the ones remaining were just a replica of what they also broadcasted over FM. I understand that AM still has a place in long range broadcasting to regions of the world where other ways of spreading information may be blocked, but I honestly thought AM had been mostly dead for decades…
• twmiller 4y ago
  I pulled an old Kenwood HF transceiver my dad had given me about 10 years off of a shelf in the garage about a week ago. While I was digging around for the various pieces of it (long story short, it was broken, started repairing it, got overwhelmed, boxed it for a decade) I found a USB SDR in another box. I hooked up the SDR and checked out the FM broadcast band from the basement. The online radio guide showed that there were about 80 FM stations within 60 miles. In the basement, I could pick up about 35 of them. 1/5 were Christian stations. 2/5 were country (and/or western) stations, and the other 2/5th were interesting. A couple of 'adult album alternative' stations, a couple of Spanish stations, a few classic rock, a classic hip-hop, etc. Once I got the transceiver repaired and functioning, I checked out the AM band on the Kenwood with a endfed shortwave antenna strung up in the back yard. between the local stations and the ones coming out of Denver, I think I could pick up about 20 of them with reasonable fidelity. They were, without exception, all talk. Some religion, some sports, a LOT of politics. Shortwave, which is arguably more dead than AM, seems to at least have more interesting content on it. (Still a lot of christian content, but also some propaganda / government news stations and some cool music coming across in languages I don't understand.). Radio, as a hobby, requires a lot of poking around looking for signal these days.
• systems_glitch 4y ago
  With 50,000 W of power, we go by faster miles an hour. AM is where the really green student DJs get to train, because if you screw it up, there's no one there to hear you :P At least during the daytime. You can pick up a lot of distant stuff at night. Shortwave, on the other hand, is alive and well. You can find some really nifty stuff out there. Everyone ought to own something like the old Realistic DX-350 and scan the bands now and then.
  • K7PJP 4y ago
    > With 50,000 W of power, we go by faster miles an hour. With the radio on! https://youtu.be/6ZWoJ8_75Mo https://youtu.be/6ZWoJ8_75Mo > Shortwave, on the other hand, is alive and well. You can find some really nifty stuff out there. Everyone ought to own something like the old Realistic DX-350 and scan the bands now and then. The current model Tecsun PL-330 supports SSB, and is a champion portable receiver. Contemporary SW radios offer amazing performance at a low price. I wish there were more to listen to, though.
    • systems_glitch 4y ago
      Nice! How long does it last on a charge? That's one of the main advantages of the DX-350 over later Realistic digital tuned models, runs forever on a set of 4x AA batteries. There's still some interesting stuff out there, I found a program called "Alt Universe Top 40" sandwiched in between the usual religion programs on WRMI. Good enough to bother tuning in every week, and they upload to Mixcloud too so you can still listen if conditions are poor. They also send QSL cards :P
      • Johnythree 4y ago
        The various little radios based on the new Silicon Labs chips (Si4735 and similar) have an amazingly low current draw.
        • systems_glitch 4y ago
          Not surprising to see something else good from Si Labs!
• Spooky23 4y ago
  I suspect there’s some sort of weird money cleaning operation with AM radio. The crazy talk people are pretty toxic for normal advertisers, and it’s dominated by weird supplements and other weird stuff. Plus, all of the hosts say the same thing, all of the time.
• funstuff007 4y ago
  Recent vintage Porsche 911s only have FM. anti-flex.
• tmm84 4y ago
  Having grown up in the USA, I was never into AM even though my father was. He would find the most nails on a chalkboard stuff on the dial and leave it there. Probably not the best impression of a medium. Fast forward and now I live in Japan. My first job required a long ride by car to deliver/pick up supplies then do manual labor. Like most manual labor jobs there was a radio on all the time and it was the oldest worker (in his 70s) who got to set the station. I listened to hours of AM radio in Japanese. Baseball games (they feel more alive over AM than in person oddly enough), news, shopping (yes, shopping channel like advertising by radio), stand-up/comedy routines and the odd oldie track from the 70s or earlier that sounded even more nostalgic due to it being on AM. This is what finally gave me a love for what it had to offer. It may be a dead format in the west but in Japan it seems to still kick around.
  • Scoundreller 4y ago
    > it was the oldest worker (in his 70s) who got to set the station. Is this (oldest worker's choice) a Japan thing, or just a thing at that worksite?
    • naet 4y ago
      Probably not a universal rule that the oldest chooses the radio station, but Japan used to have a strong culture of age based seniority and social hierarchy. A traditional Japanese introduction involves a slight verbal dance around sharing your age and profession, so the meeting parties can determine their relative social status and what type of honorific language may be appropriate for each to use. I think seniority has become a bit less of a factor especially for younger generations who are starting to ease away from some of the more rigid hierarchies.
• kyrra 4y ago
  Funny that I saw a similar piece in WSJ commentary section 2 days ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/sadness-and-static-as-am-stations-fade-electric-car-airwaves-radio-host-ufo-media-auto-drive-soundtrack-11675023531 https://www.wsj.com/articles/sadness-and-static-as-am-statio... https://archive.is/xTwGc https://archive.is/xTwGc
• pseingatl 4y ago
  How could I possibly get the latest news about Fidel (his death hasn't stopped it) without Miami Cuban AM radio?
• koala_man 4y ago
  > constantly push listeners to download an app to 'listen anywhere.' I remember wondering how on earth iHeartRadio managed to integrate with so many small, local radio stations. As an IT consultant it was a struggle to get a small shop to keep as much as an API up. Turned out they simply bought up all the stations.
• stuntkite 4y ago
  I once got a part time job as an overnight engineer for a collection of faith based radio stations. Wild stuff. 5 FM stations. One of them, the latin station was the largest FM station in the market. 3 AM stations. Two rebroadcast the FM and one was an AM station to itself. I know a bit about radio, but one of the most surprising things to me was why they had to have me there and paid me so little. I would be the ONLY person in the building overnight and on holidays. Sure I was there to "engineer" a couple shows that were put on by weirdos who paid to have a show on the late night air that broadcast to shut ins and prisoners. But the real reason was AM radio. The sun sets at a different time, every day. The FCC requires a person to be at the helm at sunset to manually lower the power of the AM stations and write in the log book that they did that. If you don't lower the AM power at sunset, your signal will bounce around the world over and over echoing and causing all sorts of interference. Terrestrial radio as it is controlled and broadcast might be "dead" but EM waves are not a product. They are real estate. No one can actually stop you from sending some electrons around in a circle in a little box other than social norms. I think about this constantly, still. Go take a look at CrowdSupply[0] and the products that are shipping now that stick together a bunch of SDR chips to some high throughput and think about what you can do with that and some consumer GPUs. I think in the next couple years the way we use radio is going to change in ways that will really surprise us. There is definitely a meta resonance radio space that our current systems (as far as I'm aware) are not operating in and it's weird and exciting. Also, Jeff is a freaking treasure and is doing some of the best tech communication out there. I'm so happy that he's back from his procedure and releasing new stuff. I should buy some of his merch or something. We all should. [0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/fairwaves/xync https://www.crowdsupply.com/fairwaves/xync
• canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
• jxdxbx 4y ago
  Someone I spoke to once said that the frequencies that AM uses aren't all that useful for many other kinds of services.
  • Johnythree 4y ago
    Yes, the Medium Wave AM band is quite narrow and wouldn't fit a single TV station, or a useful amount of Internet. That said however, there are lots of other systems which could fit in the MW AM band.
• listenfaster 4y ago
  Great discussion. I listen actively to AM in the car and when I’m camping. We’re moving to the Olympic peninsula from Seattle this year, and I’m so excited to start pulling in Canadian AM stations - many stations from Victoria and Vancouver are audible, and it’s not just talk - there are multiple Asian cultures broadcasting music, in particular I revisit one station playing Bollywood and what sounds like devotional music from india, depending on the hour. Anyone curious about listening can get up and running with the cheap portables mentioned on other threads here. I’d add that I event;y bought and rtl-sdr dongle [0] and mla-30 active loop antenna, attached it to a small spot on my roof, and am pulling some distant things in without interference. Getting that loop antenna up 25 ft off the ground was especially helpful. [1] If you want to listen, my xp is getting a decent antenna established is key. Another way for the curious to start listening without equipment is one of the many web-based SDR (software defined radio) sites, like this one [2] [0] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/ [1] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/reviews-of-the-low-cost-mla-30-wide-band-hf-magnetic-loop-antenna/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/reviews-of-the-low-cost-mla-30-wide-... [2] http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
• clericbob 4y ago
  Until the FCC declares AM broadcast illegal (and likely for some time after, as pirate radio stations will attempt to fill the dead air out of sheer contrarianism), there will always be users of the AM band. Hell, as popularity wanes, I'll bet that broadcasting expenses will go way down, so we could very well see a renaisseance in the next couple decades as community groups take to it as a new-old means of distribution. The existence of simulcast doesn't make the AM broadcast any less real. It just broadens the listener scope.