• foggy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    6 months ago

    That only works if people actively tune into AM radio. The person you’re replying to, I think, is implying that the number of people that would be affected by an emergency communication not going over AM radio… while tragic, costs less than losing the ability to have folks like Alex Jones get tiny pockets of crazy scattered all over funneled into one convenient silo.

      • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        6 months ago

        Yeah, after listening to NPR’s “divided dial” it feels like a lot of how the US ended up where it is was when we he fairness doctrine was dropped or ignored.

        And now citizens United has magnified and worsened it all.

    • Today@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      6 months ago

      There are a lot of parks that have AM station signs for weather and emergency info. We’ve used it when we were camping during storms.

    • aard@kyu.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      6 months ago

      Ability for AM radios to interrupt other playback for announcements has been around at least since the 90s. Back then it was commonly used to pause cassette playback when traffic announcements were made.

      This just requires for the device to monitor radio when on, and to be on - and with how integrated it is in modern days cars functionality I’d say the chance for them to be on is higher than it was in the 90s. So having that functionality is a pretty good way to reach a lot of car drivers.

      • foggy@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        9
        ·
        6 months ago

        That is straight up not true.

        AM radio cannot, has not ever, and will not ever be able to pause a cassette.

        Wtf are you smoking?

        • breadsmasher@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          15
          ·
          6 months ago

          I believe they are simply smoking facts. Maybe you should look stuff up before being so adamantly incorrect.

          The RDS-enabled receiver can be set to pay special attention to this TA flag and e.g. stop the tape/pause the CD or retune to receive a Traffic bulletin. The related TP (Traffic Programme) flag is used to allow the user to find only those stations that regularly broadcast traffic bulletins, whereas the TA flag is used to stop the tape or raise the volume during a traffic bulletin.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_announcement_(radio_data_systems)

        • aard@kyu.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          RDS and related protocols like TMC have specifications for both FM and AM transmitters. Those are used to stop playback if an urgent message comes. I’m assuming you have AM stations with such signals in the US (I don’t think we have in the EU) - otherwise the AM radio mandate would indeed be stupid.

          edit: did some digging (it’s been almost 30 years since I cared about that stuff) - seems the US was pretty late to the party for radio data channels, and side channels for AM (which wasn’t of that much interest here due to the FM heavy radio landscape in Europe) only was discussed in the early 90s for the US specific variants. I couldn’t find any details if that actually ever got implemented. Given that most documentation available on that topic is heavily focusing on EU I’d guess it never got that much use in the US.