I hear that another major German broadcaster is shutting down all its AM transmitters, and France is about to clear the AM broadcast band.
Why the heck are we still bothering here in the UK? It surely must be time to wind down broadcasting on AM in the UK. Virtually every country across Europe is closing or has closed AM transmissions. Why aren’t we?
The only thing that AM broadcasting was ever useful for was a starting point in radio broadcasting when we were far too backward to know about FM and the potential quality that audio broadcasting could have. Once FM was discovered, we should have forgotten about AM in favour of the better option.
Likewise, having developed digital audio broadcasting (DAB), we should be ditching standard analogue FM broadcasting technology and moving forward into the modern era. Yet, we are not. We still have broadcasts on Long Wave, let alone Medium Wave (AM) and FM.
It would be bizarre if in this country we maintained the 78rpm shellac gramophone record alongside the minidisc player, CD and mp3. It makes no sense does it?
Yet, by keeping AM transmitters running, the majority of which nobody is actually listening to, we are surely doing exactly the same thing.
FM has legs for a while, as, apart from the hissing and fluttering, once one has actually managed to get good reception, the audio quality isn’t too bad. Obviously FM is as nothing compared to digital broadcasting once it has been rolled out properly.
And why isn’t DAB being rolled out properly? Ofcom needs to allocate many more frequencies to ensure blanket coverage, and to allow the extended choice it brings, to use much larger bandwidth, and therefore offer higher quality radio.
Maybe by getting rid of the pointless AM transmitters that nobody would miss, shuffling frequency use around, and treating it with some urgency, we could free up digital radio frequencies to allow for digital radio to reach its proper potential, to become the exacting standard for radio broadcasting in the UK, as it will be for radio broadcasting across Europe.
England's England 