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0 pointsmisswaterfairy1y ago0 comments

They might not be listening to AM radio all the time, but it's often used as an emergency broadcast frequency in Australia, and not for apocalyptic reasons though it could be.

AM travels a lot further than FM, all other things being equal, and the local frequency is signposted on road signs around the country.

The big three typical emergency broadcasts down under include wildfire (which have, and do kill motorists caught in them), flood, and cyclone.

The problem with 'narrowcast' mediums like mobile phones (inc. SMS), and landline phones, is that mass emergency alerts can overload those networks which can delay the message getting out, and it takes time to contact each endpoint in the alert area. The message they get is also likely to be short.

AM broadcast is immensely useful for non-overloadable continual updates on an emergency (or several emergencies at once). Though like narrowcast mediums, broadcast mediums also have disadvantages.

AM is used as part of a wider solution. Sometimes the only way to get an alert to people is via AM radio. It's much easier to mandate AM radio in vehicles, and never need it, than to allow manufacturers to drop it because 'reasons' and then discover we suddenly can't warn some members of the community because they relied on AM broadcasting (even if they didn't know it at the time).

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dghlsakjg1y ago

The same is true in the western US and much of Canada.

It’s pretty easy to find a place where you won’t hear any FM stations reliably, but much harder to find a place where AM service is degraded to unusability.

It’s pretty normal for weather and traffic alerts to go out on AM radio in remote parts of North America.

patrakov1y ago

I don't buy this "narrowcast mediums like mobile phones" argument. Please watch any video of any Debconf 24 session. You'll hear how the mobile phones of all participants at the same time start reading emergency alerts (about the heat waves) aloud. So the mobile phone network was, in fact, designed with a broadcast use case in mind, and this gets regularly tested and does not overload the network.

I do agree that AM radio receivers are cheap to build and not a burden to require.

cogman101y ago

> I do agree that AM radio receivers are cheap to build and not a burden to require.

The actual burden of AM isn't the hardware it takes up, but rather the frequencies it hogs. Keeping AM indefinitely alive means we are reserving prime low frequency bandwidth for a dated tech for no real good reason.

Heck, I'd even agree that keeping the AM bandwidth dedicated to audio broadcasts is a desirable thing. However, I'd argue that it should be converted to a modern broadcasting format that can handle more than sermons and talk radio. Change it into a QAM digital broadcast with a fair bit of error correction and a modern codec and you suddenly can stuff a lot more stations into the same bandwidth, with a long range, and a crystal clear output.

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