It would be a lot better if you kept it up front with you. It is your emergency device. Nothing wrong with that if you have no use for the features a smartphone provides. But it does no good sitting in the trunk, especially if you get into an accident.
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Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
That's like saying airline stewardesses are there to give you a free drink, and not to ensure your safety.
If radio stations are required by law to turn their signals over to DHS, then a radio is by definition part of the DHS apparatus. If it's not, then lets end this charade of requiring radio stations to do EAS tests every month, and just let us play another 10 in row. In fact, let's just shut down the FCC. Get the gummit out of regulating radio completely.
The law has enough options in it that it's not a burden for car makers. I have no sympathy for car makers when I have to fill out FCC forms every year, and we have the FCC threatening license revocation because they don't like our news coverage.
I never once said that they should have to include a radio, but if they DO it's nothing but mean spirted to not enable the DSP chip to receive AM. The cost is zero.
Flight Attendants
It's like the commission set out to destroy AM. They didn't have the balls to enforce the winning AM stereo scheme. They should have made anyone who submitted a system accept the FCCs decision as a condition to submit. FM stereo had standards that the FCC mandated.
Then the industry tried to monitize AM digital which doomed IBOC because the receiver manufacturers were not offered it for free. Had there been a fleet of car receivers and the FCC made everybody go IBOC at a set date it might have worked. I believe digital would have helped with static. I keep on hearing the "marketplace" solution. It doesn't always work in industries that have been regulated heavily in the past. The Texas power grid failures a couple of winters ago proved that.
IMHO Digital AM radio might have kept AM viable and extra 10 or 20 years maybe even until the Internet kills off OTA radio. Would it saved every small town operator dealing with big box retailers, to survive, I doubt it.
In typical FCC fashion they left all of radio really vulnerable to the Internet. When the commission moved OTA TV into the digital age thanks to the cell companies. They should forced all radio to transition over a 20 or 30 year period mandatory digital delivery too. TV analog Channel 2 thru 4 weren't the best channels for digital TV. All radio stations could have had a channel. IIRC channel 2 thru 4 were about 12 mhz of spectrum. Divided by 10 khz that's 1200 channels 5 khz wide. Class A & B AMs would have got class C or B FM height. C and D AM, FM A and FM HD subchannels and gets class A FM height. A 5Kz channel can easily do 56 k one way using the old dial up digital compression scheme. I am sure there are better digital compression schemes but whatever they used should have be "open or free" for receiver manufacturers.
Of course this will never happen.
All folks who post gleefully about radio's shortcomings get ready. You can soon celebrate the dimise of WBT AM. You will get to post negatives about one of the few AM stations that still could be viable for a decade at least. I believe it will be the first Class A AM and the first 3 call letter "W" station to have it's licence surrendered this Century.
Urban One is stupid. They should have kept WBT AM as a flanker to their FM Republican Talk. Is the one time land profit going to offset the multiple year revenue lost if someone puts iHeart's national talkers on a decent Charlotte signal?
Yeah, probably. I just never thought about that. There's not a good place to put it up front, but a small box like the phone is in now could go somewhere.
The answer to that riddle depends on debt agreement financial covenants, Urban One's current cash flow leverage ratio, and how much cash is likely to be raised from selling the land versus keeping the land to operate the radio station.
I'm not sure fragmenting their political talk radio audience would be a wise strategy in any event.
It takes 30 seconds for it to come on, in any case.
I thought about sending it back when I found out I had to press a button for a certain amount of time to even get it to do that.
Who designs a thing like that when it's supposed to be easy to use?
I didn't send it back because it's better to have something than nothing. They changed it so pushing a button made it start up without any effort, but it still takes a while.
And I only got it when I decided to cancel my landline for the cable company's VoIP. That got the phone company's attention and they suddenly figured out how to make faster Internet cheaper.
They design it that way so it can't be accidentally turned on and its battery drained by some object tapping against its keypad in your glove compartment or armrest console. Think how often people "butt dial" their contacts, then imagine all those instances being stranded motorists on deserted roads finding out their formerly charged emergency phones were dead because the power button wasn't more discriminating about how it should be actuated.
As for low profile devices that require 30 seconds to boot from cold power-off once the power button is pressed, the kind of people who design things that way are idiots.
In my book, anything that requires 30 seconds to boot had better be loading a full production scale, multi-gigabyte OS like Linux into memory.
Mexico adopted an AM stereo standard, but AM was already dying when that happened. No matter how much the government pushed, AM was dying. The biggest issue was part because the public did not want to spend on new radios as they already were listening to FM. And it was also in part because station owners did not want to spend money on AM which they realized was dying already no matter what.
Who would have paid for for the receivers if not the manufacturers who wanted to sell them at a profit?
Example: replace every car radio, about 250,000,0000 of them, at a cost of perhaps $75 t0 $100 per car with very cheap radios and labor... that would be at least the double of radio's gross billings per year back then! And not including home and work radios.
If you analyze AM stations in the bigger (rated) markets, you see that about 90% of them don't have a full market signal day and night to begin with. Spending on them is like dressing a hog in a ballroom gown: no matter how much you spend, you can't make those stations viable.
In the case of AM, start with daytimers. That class of service should never have been authorized. Then those stations that are so directional that they miss huge parts of their market. And stations in such small markets that there is no longer enough local business to sustain them.
I don't know how many AMs are on the air still just to sustain a translator. If translators could stay on and close the AM, I'll bet 2000 or more AMs would be off by tomorrow.
Look at El Salvador: of 42 AMs, either 5 or 5 are not religious. And at least 4 of the 5 are simulcasts of major FM stations that are sort of "heritage" stations. Yet 40 years ago, there were about 80 stations, all with adequate power and fulltime and none were directional. Yet, despite all that, FM swallowed them alive.
While we waited for old cars to become junkers, you'd have a a decade where not even half the cars had digital AM, and even more before folks got new kitchen or home radios. In the meantime, who pays for the cost of running those stations?
HD radio was born of the fear of satellite radio, not of the internet. HD began development in the 1980's, long before the internet was even much of a dream.
Viewers wanted high definition TV and would pay large amounts for it. There was no demand for slightly better AM radio back around the 80's when 75% to 80% of listening had moved to FM and there was no need for "improved" audio on AM signals that, mostly, did not give fulltime full market coverage to begin with.
You are creating a scheme to fix AM radio at a cost many times greater than a decade's worth of gross AM radio billing.
Remember, in the average rated radio market, only about 5% of listening by people under 65 today is to AM.
We don't know their plans. Remember, WBT has such a bad night signal that they used to have a 1kw "repeater" to the west of downtown just to cover an area that the original facility just does not cover.
I'm with you on this one, chimp. To turn off or restart my smartphone, I have to press down two of the three push buttons on the right side at the same time. The problem is that I do it so infrequently, I can never remember which two. I end up having to Google "how to turn my phone off". As well as later on deleting all the accidental screenshots I took.
My ISP's going to have to learn fast, too, because I'm getting dangerously close to cancelling. I'm paying for 1 gig service, and getting maybe 1/4th of that speed at best.
A phone is not smart if it requires such a complicated procedure for such a simple task.
I liked my old Motorola StarTAC (I was actually able to activate and use it as recently as 2021, after which they fully shut down the old 2G signals it relied on). It started up and was ready to go in less than 10 seconds from pressing the power button.
c
Have you reset your modem? I had that problem, unplugged my modem, plugged it back in, and the problem was solved.
Yes, I have. Numerous times.
It's not an equipment problem on my end as far as I can tell. Just Mediocre service.
c
I just bought a new Samsung Galaxy S26. That two-button fustercluck was the default, but I was able to change it to just the power button.
I was watching some show that mentioned the fact that flight attendants have to be nurses. I had no idea!
"An AI search says ..."
I am a half glass full person. You are correct in that I didn't say royalty free instead of free. I guess some folks got worked up that there might any attempt at the any part of the post might happen. I said this will never happen.
The channel 2 thru 4 spectrum would have been very easy to do technically. Narrow band FCC approved radios already exist. The coverage of railroad radios (which got their channels really narrowed recently) and police radios is amazing. I know they are different frequencies but still both are basically line of sight plus one third if you lucky.
If you are convinced that there is no hope for AM why does this thread exist and why do you read it?
I have very little faith in anything "an AI search says....""An AI search says ..."
Unless, of course, I can verify its accuracy via a traditional search with reputable, human-generated sources.
c