Re:Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
by cameronh90 on Monday October 07, 2024 @07:51AM
(#41765073)
Maybe we need a standard AM emergency broadcast frequency akin to 121.5 on aircraft. Legislate that all fixed and car radio receivers are always tuned to it and activate automatically if there’s a broadcast. Then scrap the rest of the analogue radio broadcasting band.
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Re:Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
by squarefoot on Monday October 07, 2024 @08:32AM
(#41765349)
> Then scrap the rest of the analogue radio broadcasting band.
Please, no. In case of disaster, I could dismantle a tool, take its motor, fix it to a fan propeller, connect it to a rectifier stage and obtain a wind/water generator, then I could take parts from low tech stuff not even remotely related to a radio and build a crude but functioning transmitter to send a SOS. Problem is that making it work on a certain frequency would be hard without instrumentation, therefore the more ears on multiple frequencies the best chances that some of them will hear my dit dah by mistake.
Re:Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
by _hyn3 on Monday October 07, 2024 @09:18AM
(#41765698)
Exactly. We are on Hacker News, after all. If there's any place that should be understanding of the need for ears on amplitude modulated frequencies, it should be us.
Re:Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
by cameronh90 on Monday October 07, 2024 @02:35PM
(#41769356)
As it stands, ~nobody is listening to AM radio. The only people listening are radio geeks, and I doubt that number would change if the analogue radio broadcasting band was scrapped.
Having an emergency frequency that devices auto-tune to would at least mean if you did manage to broadcast on that frequency, someone will actually hear it.