This is for you, England; Don’t Be Beastly About AM radio.
Well Christopher, AM radio was used in the past since that was all there was and people were quite content. When all the channels were used up, that was as much radio as there could be. The marine radio pirates exploited the suggestion that there were not enough radio stations, for at the time the Government controlled the number of stations by regulation. Then commercial radio came to the UK and more and more stations were licensed, which was fine up to a point.
Then FM came along that had advantages and disadvantages. The quality was better and the signal could be stereo, but conversely it did not go as far. Stations started simulcasting by both methods and then began to put ‘young’ radio on FM and old persons radio on AM.
Then with the regulatory people packing in national and regional and local and micro stations in to every available space and with owning a licence being ‘for a while’ a warrant to make money, UK radio was like a Gold Rush.
But then it peaked on the grounds that no matter how many stations there are, you only have (more or less) the same number of potential listeners, so everyone gets an ever smaller share. Added to that, unlike years ago when you had a couple of TV channels and a few radio channels to choose from, endless new ways of having home entertainment emerged.
So, radio is now contracting, by which I mean that the same huge number of transmitters are still sending signals, but that the content on many of them is identical through networking. The industry which was once a good career path, is shedding staff at a great rate to get costs down and the programme quality is whatever can be most cheaply created.
In to this mix, comes the madness of DAB which it is said is the solution to a problem that does not exist. It was sold to the public as the highest possible audio listening experience, but it is not.
DAB is a brilliant con to make people discard perfectly good radio sets and buy a new type of set that does not work as well. I am not sure if DAB will topple or whether it has gone too far to be allowed to fail. The industry are wavering I think. An MP told me ‘They (the Gov’t) just don’t know what to do’.
In all this, AM works just as well as it ever did. The audio quality is adequate if the signal has some power and is modulated properly. If my ears can only detect a certain sound range, why do I need signal that gives extremes of bass and treble that I cannot hear anyhow.
Some will say that AM uses heaps of electricity and that we ought not to be generating this in order to help ‘save the planet’, but we don’t believe that hokum do we Christopher.
If I had the money (I don’t) I would love to go to Holland and take over a massive AM channel and send a signal with English programming right across the UK, saying to people ‘don’t buy anything, just dig out your good old AM radio and plug it in’.
Well I can dream.
Peter Moore.
(Guest Author)
England's England 