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The US is pretty large, and has large areas without reliable cellular or wired Internet connections. Public radio ensures accessibility in those areas.
by woodruffw 1y ago
The US is pretty large, and has large areas without reliable cellular or wired Internet connections. Public radio ensures accessibility in those areas.
- almosthere 1y agoI wonder if we should just pass a bill that requires Starlink or Amazon Leo to use 0.5% of their bandwidth for low quality (but higher than radio) free access to Inet Radio streams in some special way. Then start building out the infra in vehicles.
- woodruffw 1y agoThere are plenty of places in the US that don't have reliable satellite access either (not because of orbital coverage, but because of geographic features like mountains/deep valleys). (And these aren't remote/unpopulated areas: you can find plenty of satellite dead zones 2-3 hours outside of NYC in the Catskills.)
- MostlyStable 1y agoHonestly curious: how many of those satellite dead-zones have good radio coverage? In my various times driving places, I've often lost radio signal in a sufficiently remote place where I 100% would have had satellite coverage. Those same features that can block satellite will also block (some kinds of) radio, if you don't have a broadcast tower at the top of the ridge or something. Yes, I agree that satellite coverage is not 100%. But neither is radio.
- woodruffw 1y agoIt's definitely a mixed bag, but the areas I'm thinking of have decent FM radio coverage (from local stations that affiliate with public radio). AM coverage tends to be good regardless. I've had the same experience as you around remote places, but those places were generally the flat-and-desolate kind :-)
- slumberlust 1y agoMost towns have the repeater(s). They are cheap and easy to maintain.
- xp84 1y agoI think the idea is that the sats relay a signal to radio stations including remote ones. It's the radio stations who are in charge of situating their reception equipment where it can see the sat, and also for figuring out how to best broadcast to their served area (e.g. AM and/or FM? Tower height, power, setting up some translator stations on a different frequency to serve outlying areas, giving the feed to local cable systems to be sent with TV service, etc.)
- mrandish 1y ago> because of geographic features like mountains/deep valleys I remember this being quite an issue trying to target geosync broadcast satellites like DirectTV/Dish. Even being in the shadow of a relatively small hill could block access if your location and local topology happened to create an unfortunate alignment. I've naively assumed Starlink's rotating constellation of thousands of LEO satellites reduces how often this is an issue - but maybe it doesn't?
- iso1631 1y agoStarlink has other issues. I have locations in London I can get to specific geostationary satellites, but can't use starlink there as there isn't much sky coverage
- kulahan 1y agoSeems like a really expensive solution to an already-solved problem.
- fckgw 1y agoOr we just continue to use the infrastructure that we already have and works?
- almosthere 1y agoBecause... it does not work, I want 100% access to any audio stream. I get garbled crap on terrestrial.
- jtbayly 1y agoThis doesn't answer the question. Why not use the internet to get the radio to those stations?