The Indian-Republican on the 5 person FCC Commission has made Saving AM radio one of his top priorities. There is a big radio meeting this week in Florida and another member – the black woman from South Carolina whose credentials for holding her job are she ran a so called “black newspaper” in her local Communisty announced the official FCC plan to save AM radio.
They plan to fast track changes for AM radio – handing out 1 FM translator license for every AM station (gotta stop those evil LPFM stations!) and tweak the power rules for night time operations.
I’ve had the feeling for a long time (partly based on Europe) that letting AM stations have FM translators is the transition path to end AM radio – it will be subtle – something like “since you now have an FM station, you can convert the FM station to full power if you turn in the AM license. It isn’t that the AM band would be reused, but just the reality that FM is what most people listen to and AM is losing critical mass.
WABC has been talk radio for over 30 years. In 1999 on Memorial Day, I woke up with it on my clock radio and literally thought I was dreaming when I had actually woken up – they had taken old air check recordings from the 1960s and were playing them live over the air. DJs I hadn’t heard in decades playing 60s music, with 60s commercials, with 60s prices in the supermarket commercials, etc.
It was so popular that the station brought back the 60s music format for Saturday nights.
I always listen through streaming and my car has satellite radio – both have high fidelity sounds.
Once I actually put on WABC to hear the oldies in the car. The thing that I literally hadn’t heard in decades is the fading or the songs when passing power lines or when there is an electrical storm. Someone needs to make an app for that, just as there are apps to add scrates, folds and lines to digital photos to simulate analog.
Got to say though while it was fun for me, it was only because it brought back memories… it is not something that benefits society or people that didn’t suffer through it in the 60s.
BTW, Art – The Canadians have long had a program of retiring AM stations and replacing them with FM stations. Some countries have digital networks where the radio will know what frequency to tune to listen to get the best signal for the network. We can do much better than what we have- saving AM is like saving those free community newspapers that end up in your driveway each week.
Hmph, Just because the Canadians are doing it, doesn’t make it right CC : )
I would rather see the big lib newspapers go away than the AM radio stations, much more use for a radio station. That’s just me though.
Parrott
Their hope is someday you find the FM button and find your familiar AM stations there, and never go back.
The reality is that unless these FM translators for AM have priority over satellite fed translators and class D FM (high school stations for example), there will be no available frequencies in major markets unless they expand FM below 88 Mhz, which they have talked about. Equipment compatibility then becomes an issue.
They could transmit FM in the 530-1700 band- just fewer stations as FM using a much wider bandwidth as a means to make the audio less susceptible to impulse noise.
Perhaps it is time to upgrade the technology to digital and scrap the analog AM/FM all together.
Bingo! The IBOC HD technology was a half ass way to avoid swapping out the technology. We made it through the digital TV switchover. The problem is to get real spectrum efficiency, you need multiplexing a lot of stations on one big pipe (ala Sirius/XM) – but that means some entity other than the licensee is running the transmitter(s) – but if you go there, what is the purpose of even having station licenses?
That’s right. Each big pipe would cover a large geographical area – like cable TV but with the radius of a typical FM station today. Within the big pipes, the small pipes would have unique identifiers so that the radio can switch to a different big pipe while remaining connected to the small pipe.
Notice that is is similar to cell phone technology- the switching is independent of who you are talking to, but ensures that it is the same person when you switch to a new tower.
Shhh – don’t tell anyone, we can make a fortune. 😉
That’s exactly where I see the end game – the cell towers being used to send a multiplexed stream – as you go from tower to tower, stations would show up and fall off based on proximity, then a cluster of stations that are national – more or less Sirius/XM without the satellite.
Long term, this has to happen for the cell providers – streaming over 4G works, but it is inefficient – radio is outbound only, so there is no need for your phone to constantly Ack (I got it!) if the stream has good bit correction and duplicate streams (again Sirius)
But if the owner of the big pipes incorporates non-FCC licensed programming sources, the current radio model breaks – you’ll have to attract listeners by being good, not because you own part of a government controlled monopoly.
BTW- The new SiriusXM Art Bell radio has Art saying he is now on “extraterrestrial radio”. Very clever.
BTW- I agree with most of what you wrote but the communication will remain bidirectional so that the providers know your location and can provide specific content (traffic if you are moving, weather, and most importantly commercials for the gas stations and food stores at the next exit)
IOS7 (at least for Siri) has built in support for multi path TCP so your iDevice can hop seamlessly from WiFi and 3G/4G
The point about being one stream and not having to ack means one copy of the stream from the tower, not one channel per listener. In theory, maybe it be smart enough to aggregate only those streams someone is actively listening to