The real "magic" of FM radio that it something that Just Works. You don't have to pay, you don't have to connect to some network, and it's something that worked since late 1930s. No matter what people say, any current digital radio formal will almost certainly obsolete in less than 20 years.
Also, OP-1's synthesis capabilities are much deeper than it would seem from reading the manual or watching a typical review. And it has an amazing online community.
And receivers can be built with extremely simple parts so for the war/disaster situation it's a hedge against the complexity of our technology stacks.
One way to do this is to use something called an "FM slope detector" [1]. The idea is that you have a tuned circuit tuned to slightly above or below the carrier frequency of the FM signal. As the FM signal frequency moves around, it also moves nearer and farther from the center frequency of the tuned circuit, which means the output of the tuned circuit rises and falls. The result is that the frequency modulation of the FM signal gets turned into amplitude modulation of the output of the tuned circuit.
You can demonstrate this if you have one of those cheap SDR dongles. Tell your SDR software to decode as AM, but tune to an FM broadcast station, and then start slowly moving the tuning up, and you'll find a point where the broadcast becomes quite intelligible.
[1] https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/radio/modulation/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station
Meanwhile, they also rally against planned obsolescence. How's that going to work?
(luckely, they haven't yet switched of FM, that's scheduled for 2020)
I wonder how long DAB+ will last; I expect that sooner rather than later it will be scrapped for streaming via cellular networks - because doing so will be cheaper still than operating a DAB network.
Sigh.
His last post is poignant, though: "...the absolute soul crushing mediocrity of automated programming is killing the entire industry."