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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

by 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.

by ajross 4y ago

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.