Which was simultaneously a) completely harmless or b) who cares about old and immunocompromised people. I demand my Constitutional right to all-you-can-eat dine-in ribs.
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The Future - AM + Streaming only (no FM & HD)
- Thread starter kfbkfb
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That is actually a hill I would die on, too.
Moore County NC had no power for days and people couldn't get information because they didn't have a way to charge cell phones.,
Kind of interesting how that case seems to have disappeared into a memory hole
Or... a brute force type of thing could be done...use drones/small airplanes to drop many AM/FM battery powered radios into affected areas and develop some sort of portable, fairly easy to assemble AM transmitter for FEMA (set up in a nearby unaffected area - possibly run with a diesel generator), maybe just a 10kW AM signal to provide emergency info.
Kirk Bayne
Kirk Bayne
Can I have some of what you're smoking? You're totally off the deep end.
Assuming that they had stocked up on such radios.
Kirk's suggestion reminds me of that old joke about dropping frozen turkeys out of a helicopter.Can I have some of what you're smoking? You're totally off the deep end.
Such technology was used in the Kuwait conflict, where the military airlifted complete radio stations in trailer containers. They just raised a tower, threw some radials on the ground and tuned the antenna and were on the air in about a day. Not efficient as they could not lay a decent ground via plowing radial trenches and raising a taller tower, but it was fast.
Such a transmitter at very low power such as 10 kw has to be really close to the intended listener as a short stick, limited ground and, probably a low conductivity location will not cover very much.
And who has a couple of hundred thousand little battery powered radios sitting around waiting to be dropped in? Add cheap radios to a bad ground system, short tower and hasty installation and you are not going to be very effective.
Before you suggest this kind of impossible/impractical/inefficient sort of thing, why not ask one of the actual braodcast engineers here what workable solutions might exist.
Example: much more practical are airborne FM transmitters flying in a circular pattern over the area. That has been done... even as far back as over 50 years ago for an educational TV station in Indiana. And the military has such gear ready to go... one set was used for a temporary Radio Martí transmitter some years back.... and that one was AM, using a 1000 foot antenna hung from the airplane!
I was thinking that a ground based portable, assembled on site AM transmitter (+ cheap, dropped in AM battery radios) could be OTA all the time (depends only on the power source for the transmitter), aircraft with AM or FM transmitters seem like they would be a higher maintenance, weather dependent option.
I chose 10kW AM because, back in the early 1980s, traveling through Des Moines on I-80, KCs WHB 710 (10kW daytime) was as about as strong as a local AM station on the car radio even though the transmitter was ~200 miles away.
Seems like dropping small AM (maybe + FM) battery radios into affected areas is the key to dealing with this lack of a backup system problem, possibly a nearby existing high power AM station could be required to broadcast mostly emergency info instead of regular programming.
Kirk Bayne
I chose 10kW AM because, back in the early 1980s, traveling through Des Moines on I-80, KCs WHB 710 (10kW daytime) was as about as strong as a local AM station on the car radio even though the transmitter was ~200 miles away.
Seems like dropping small AM (maybe + FM) battery radios into affected areas is the key to dealing with this lack of a backup system problem, possibly a nearby existing high power AM station could be required to broadcast mostly emergency info instead of regular programming.
Kirk Bayne
What do you mean by lack of backup system? The DHS has a plan:
Actually, the Indiana TV operation ran all day, every school day, for several years.
That' was a station with half-wave towers at about 500 feet high and an extensive ground system and tuner.. it would take months to build... and it was in an area with America's best ground conductivity and was on an amazing low frequency
In most of the world now there are no "nearby AM stations". And in much of the US, most of the AMs do not have enough power on a good low frequency to cover a devastated emergency area.
As I said before, "Before you suggest this kind of impossible/impractical/inefficient sort of thing, why not ask one of the actual braodcast engineers here what workable solutions might exist."
What happens when the tower gets destroyed by a hurricane:
WPRK off the air after Hurricane Irma damages antenna - Bungalower
By Jon Busdeker It was bad enough that Hurricane Irma knocked out power across Central Florida, but taking 91.5 WPRK-FM off the air? That’s just cold, Irma. The radio station […]
bungalower.com
True, I remember watching it in elementary school. Might have been the last year of operation
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Kirk. old buddy, old pal, you do realize that there are people who no doubt didn't even turn off Netflix to watch severe weather coverage when tornadoes were bearing down on them, let alone find an AM radio, stand on their head to make an antenna, or any other Rube Goldberg thing you can come up with.
Battery powered AM (&FM?) radios (using AA batteries) could be stockpiled by FEMA, writing on the radios would explain how to use them.
Radios could be dropped and/or passed out at food and water centers, depending on the situation, aircraft based or ground based transmitters could be used.
I'm thinking fairly long term - when all radio and TV stations are off the air and all of the transmitting towers have been dismantled and all communications (point-to-mass and 1:1) use a single national wireless broadband network.
Anyway, considering that software continues to get more and more complex, it could be that a bored teenage hacker could take down part of the power grid and/or the (future) national broadband network for an extended period of time, and giving away emergency radios and maintaining a some means of transmitting to them seems like a necessary expense.
Kirk Bayne
Radios could be dropped and/or passed out at food and water centers, depending on the situation, aircraft based or ground based transmitters could be used.
I'm thinking fairly long term - when all radio and TV stations are off the air and all of the transmitting towers have been dismantled and all communications (point-to-mass and 1:1) use a single national wireless broadband network.
Anyway, considering that software continues to get more and more complex, it could be that a bored teenage hacker could take down part of the power grid and/or the (future) national broadband network for an extended period of time, and giving away emergency radios and maintaining a some means of transmitting to them seems like a necessary expense.
Kirk Bayne
FYI there are lots of competing wireless broadband networks. Not just one. There are also underground fiber services that are competing with the towered systems. I have one in my neighborhood. And because of all the competition and money, there are lots of backups to those systems.
Is there a joke about frozen turkeys? I only know about the WKRP episode with live turkeys(Oh, the humanity)!
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