AM radio going away

I was visiting Denver recently and where I was staying I, and seemingly everyone else couldn't hardly get a cellphone signal. I had to go outside to make phone calls or receive text messages.

They already have in other countries/continents, at least with AM broadcasting. Of course that makes all older receivers obsolete, regardless if they're car stereos or household radios or portable radios.

You could add to your list

• FRS/GMRS
• MURS
• Amateur radio

Of course Amateur radio is already both digital and analog and also depends on what other people do in other countries.

Also, keep in mind that just because it's digital doesn't mean it's no longer AM or FM. You can have CW (continuous wave) modulation with digital (that is, a single frequency that's turned on and off), but the bandwith isn't great. With digital over AM, FM or SSB you can get more data sent over.

 

Right. Thank you for that.

And thanks for this. I knew I had heard of HD Radio, but I didn't know what it was.

Honestly, it sounds like this, or Sirius-XM, would be better for us in Australia. DAB is fine for the big State capitals (Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and maybe Perth and Adelaide at a push) and it's great in much of Europe, but it just doesn't have the range. Small urban centres (places like Dubbo or Bendigo Broken Hill) have State-funded AM and FM stations: the AM can reach farmers maybe a couple of hundred km out of town. But when I'm driving from Dubbo to Broken Hill, I have no radio signal (and indeed no mobile phone signal) for a good five hours of my seven-hour drive. I have to pre-download stuff to listen to. Satellite would work in that environment.

Hills are another issue. When we lived in HK, most of the radio was AM. There were FM stations, but you could only hear them in Southern Kowloon and Northern HK Island and bits of Eastern Lantau: the mountains got in the way for everyone else. AM could deal with the mountains, but FM couldn't.

 

Well, other than that they're all sitting at home giggling and eating pizza...

 

...and that's a pretty big deal in terms of power consumption. AM stations use heaps of electricity to do what they do with the reach and reliability they are best remembered for.

I like experimenting with radio toys and none of that stuff has ever seemed to be of any use in situations when my phone or home internet didn't work. I mean, they provided fun distractions but zero actual utility.

 

Yep! That's because AM, which is MF, can ride on a ground wave that keeps going whether there are hills or mountains.

FM, which is VHF, is line-of-sight. The same with cellphones, which are on UHF frequencies. Those are also line-of-sight, so require there to be a cellphone tower on the top of every hill for complete coverage.

FRS and GMRS are UHF line-of-sight that can be useful for talking to someone close by but not for transmitting outside of an affected area. Of course, if you know where the other person is, you might just as well as walk over to their home to see if they're ok.

Amateur radio has historically came to the rescue in disaster areas that also have lost phone service. Amateur radio lets you talk on HF (aka shortwave) that can let you communicate well out of your area. I've talked to people in both California and New York at the same time. You can also connect to phone, text and email services via amateur radio. So even if your area all internet and such is down you can hit a node outside of your affected area hundreds or thousands of miles away and still talk to people who don't even have amateur radio. And unlike cellphone or satellite phones you have to learn how to it works with Amateur radio giving you, not only the knowhow of what can help make a signal travel farther, but also several options for doing so, unlike cellphone and satellite phone that have one option: try it and if it doesn't work then oh well.

 

If AM is essential, you don't need the rest of the car, and I say this as a person who HAS more than one emergency radio and who carries more than one item prefixed by EDC....or 'Every Day Carry.'

Quick poll....
HOW many people in this forum still have a throw-back, old-school, copper-fed TELEphone?

Probably not that many.
Maybe not even one.
Glass is regulated quite differently than copper, which is to say that in many of our 52 laboratories of democracies, it's NOT regulated as far as the traffic is concerned.
That's the thing.
There are libraries upon libraries of laws concerning mail fraud and wire fraud.
Those are terms used in the law to describe the use of telecommunications.

INTERNET is a different thing.

So...I worked on one of the first long-haul fiber routes in this part of the country.
It had 12 strands.
Back in the early 80's it was the GLASS that was the expensive part.
Now?
It's labor and fees that are the expensive part and contractors are routinely burying, boring, or stringing 288-strand high density fibers into single neighborhoods.
The thing about fiber-optic cable is that one piece of glass can carry one internet circuit for one house, or it can be used in a Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing circuit - where you're hauling enough traffic to satisfy a medium sized city.

Terra-bit stuff.
Same glass.

SO...who installs it?...who maintains it?
If you have a megalomaniacal centi-bllionaire that is lofting internet satellites into LEO by the thousands, who wants to keep a bunch of union-waged telecom techs around maintaining fiber routes and repairing transmission equipment - and this is AFTER you pay the install fees and labour, permits and ROW costs.

Regulation breeds innovation, which obviates.....regulation.

If you're part of a 1500 person community whose digital infrastructure needs 'hardening' then perhaps an old-school "co-op" might serve - or?
Just stick a crow-bar in your wallet and get a Starlink.

Just yesterday, we contacted our electric provider (a co-op) to reprogramme the power meter that serves our rural 5-acres out in the county.
This is as old as America itself.
200 years ago communities would band together to dig a community well....or build silos, or a courthouse.

What was old is new again.
Today it's internet.
Tomorrow it might be power....AGAIN.

Innovation is disruptive.
That's the whole point of innovating.

 

My house was apparently built by the local phone engineering guy, some old tip & ringer. He strung 25-pair trunks through the house as if to wire it like a Manhattan office complex. As you might guess, only ever terminated a few branches.

I do have two real telephones on one fake circuit, one of those SIP gadgets to make them into IP phones with a real public number and a bill and everything. Not getting much use anymore and I'll probably just convert them to a point to point intercom.

One of the phones is a 30 year old payphone, restored right before I bought it at auction. It gets a lot of attention at cookouts.

Two years ago a delivery truck swept the actual copper lines off the side of the house, and I don't imagine anyone will ever put them back.

 

When my daughter was a pre-teen (in the mid 90s) we actually still had coin phones in service and I threatened to place one in our home as a hall-hanger/piggy bank.

Sadly, there's nothing left to connect them to except the sheetrock anchors.

We still have a few copper IP customers and although I have never been a customer facing employee, I still wear the uniform.
I always advise our DSL customers to be absolutely positive that they want to disconnect their service before placing the order because Big Bell will most happily disconnect you and never ever re-establish it!

Ah....the old Ringdown circuit. We used to call them 'hoot-n-holler lines.'
Good stuff!

You might consider keeping the IP phones ESPECIALLY if your home and internet provider are different..

Cell towers fail sometimes.

NOPE!

Last November I was on our county election arbitration board, and coming straight from work I was still in a bell uniform. One of the contractors renovating the courthouse was trying to figure out what to do with a VERY old telecom cable serving that part of the building that was connected directly to one of my central offices a few hundred years away.
It was installed for reasons looong forgotten but probably having to do with the old county jail...which was deleted two renovations ago.
Happily I was able to assure him that he was free to scrap the cable and anything in the building it was attached to.
Win win for everybody.
The copper got to be recycled and the contractor was relieved of a roadblock.
point to point intercom.
[/QUOTE]

 

Before we bought the house, our last apartment was served by a DSL circuit. The company side of the de-marc was the oldest I'd ever seen. I didn't save a picture but it was basically 10AWG in cloth insulation going through a softball-sized fuse/lightning arrester that looked positively Victorian. The DSL guy didn't want to deal with it. He said if it had already been terminated to a modular jack he would complete the installation, but as "studs and nuts" he was out.

So I told him to make sure his work truck was parked okay and come back to make a final decision. When he got back there was a modular jack wired onto the studs.

When they turned up the circuit everyone was doubtful, but it wound up carrying a 7/512 circuit for about 5 years while I was there. Maybe two days of downtime in that run, it was remarkably good.

 

I still have copper and DSL here.

About every year and a half, my phone'll stop working, and I'll make the report and somebody comes and climbs the pole and generally fixes a break on one side of the pair, and the phone works again. I'm not sure just what keeps breaking up there or why they can't make it stop, but that's what they generally tell me happened.

The funny thing is, while the pair is half-disconnected, my DSL never quits. I usually use it to make the report.

 

I miss that level of reliability. When we lose electricity, we lose internet about two hours later- the battery endurance of the UPS in whichever stump or polebox contains the media converter that gets our street's copper broadband cable onto glass.

That also usually means losing our mobile phones- we were given a microcell transceiver to boost the carrier signal here. Of course, that needs a live internet circuit...

 

We had a copper line until you know who cancelled it a few years ago

 

Mine is still in regular use, but not in my own house. Unplugged here 2.5 years ago after the associated ADSL became unservicable, and the provider's advertised gigabit glass upgrade didn't actually reach my street, which was not discovered/disclosed until just before the installation appointment. Bequeathed shortly thereafter to a nearby friend who needed a replacement for her landline equipment, and still in use as of last month. She actually uses the cordless handset, but on my last visit, the corded handset was still plugged in too, in a different room.

We still have our legacy landline number, which was easily transferred to a mobile device.

 

Copper was nice during storms that took out cable and cell towers

 

US has about 4000 licensed AM broadcast stations. Hardware inertia. Probably easily convertible to digital format but less so in moving to much higher frequencies.

 

There's emergency use and there's also regular use. If the only reason people use it is for emergencies, then the technology will die as there's no profittable reason to keep it going.

Personally I haven't found anything that replaces broadcast radio for me anyhow. I'd like something that's audible, easy to get to and not only transmits music for entertainment purposes but also gives some information about the area I live in such as weather and upcoming events. I also prefer something that doesn't take a great deal of time figuring out what I need to download and how to do so for the road up ahead.

That's just great (sarcasm)! Now I'll need to drive around with a Starlink antenna on my car to get any music or news. And we call that progress?!

 

I still use the AM radio in the car tuned to a quiet band to detect and monitor lightning when I'm driving to work. The next few months here in Arizona we will have (or expect anyway) a visit from the Southwest Monsoon. My cell phone is off when I'm driving. The radar app on my phone has lightning strikes, so I could know where the lightning is and even an approximate strike density. Not worth the additional distraction. So, while driving and watching the clouds build I listen for the initial in-cloud streamers and sizzles followed by the higher energy cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground strikes. If it is dark enough, I can get a visual reference along with the audible. Back in my military days I would bring my AM/SW pocket radio out to field exercises and use the somewhat directional capabilities of the ferrite antenna to locate storm direction. Knowing what the storm motion would be for that particular day helped tremendously in forecasting the weather.

 

What I don't get is why they can't build something more useful into the infotainment systems. Lightning distance, intensity and direction would be helpful.

And if they're going to have us connected to the internet anyway, I would like road conditions and weather forcast for my route please.

My experience is the two times we got into some pretty bad hail, once about 8 hours from home when it completely shattered my windshield and broke one of my mirrors and we about got air lifted from a tornado, we had tried to get weather on our cell phones to see what this storm was that we could see brewing around us. But we couldn't get any signal with internet, so we didn't know until it was too late. I also couldn't find any weather on the radio either.

 

I would guess that they don't want the liability of one not going off when it ought to.

You can get portable purpose-made self-contained lightning detectors.

 

Cars could add the NOAA weather radio frequencies to FM without much upgrade cost. Whether or not they delete your AM band.