dittybopper: Mr Tumnus: articles like this make me wonder why we still have AM radio.

The AM broadcast band is from about 520 KHz to 1700 KHz, making it a grand total of 1.18 MHz wide. A *SINGLE* 802.11g WiFi channel is almost 20 times bigger, at 20 MHz.

You mean smaller.

Frequency is inversely proportional.

The powers that be have seen this coming for a while.

It's part of the reason they went digital over the air TV broadcasts. More data can be packed into a digital signal.

Mark my words, this is just the first salvo of stories to gain public support for paying for broadcast TV subscriptions as well as prep for cell service and broadband rate hikes.

It may seem unrelated, but the industry has been testing the waters to see if the public is willing to pay for local channels. I've seen the ads on TV making it seem like it's the second coming of Christ if we'd only pay them to watch the local channels that are currently free.

I think in May or June our local dispatch is converting all emergency channels to low band, which will be fun because for a few hours close fire/ems services will be on auto mutual aid while the other dept is being 'upgraded'...

rocky_howard: dittybopper: Mr Tumnus: articles like this make me wonder why we still have AM radio.

The AM broadcast band is from about 520 KHz to 1700 KHz, making it a grand total of 1.18 MHz wide. A *SINGLE* 802.11g WiFi channel is almost 20 times bigger, at 20 MHz.

You mean smaller.

Frequency is inversely proportional.

Frequency wavelength != spectrum band

Doesn't give a fark, he's gonna buzz the cell-tower anyways.

It's a cellular network. By definition you can just add more cells/have each cell cover a smaller area. We are a long ways away from running out of spectrum, but will have to put up with more towers if providers actually bother to grow their networks (and don't just complain about "spectrum").

I tried to explain this to some coworkers the other day; they showed no concern. I imagine that until this has some tangible effect (like service or price) nobody is going to be concerned.

dittybopper: Just so long as they keep their dirty mitts off of these bits of spectrum, whatever.

I'm waiting to see 2m get gutted for the need of "bubutbut CELL"

dittybopper: Bio-nic: dittybopper: Just so long as they keep their dirty mitts off of these bits of spectrum, whatever.

I'm waiting to see 2m get gutted for the need of "bubutbut CELL"

I'd be more worried about 23cm and 33cm, and maybe also 70cm. I don't use any of those except for 440, but still, I don't want to lose them.

I know that the big telcos have had a hardon for 440 for a long time, hopefully we don't lose it, because it would suck, it's a good band to work out of.

FTFA: The number-one biggest driver is consumers' insatiable thirst for e-mail, apps and particularly video on their mobile devices -- anywhere, anytime.

But the spectrum used to track my every move and keystroke then upload it to be analyzed has no effect. Nope, none whatsoever.

The solution:



More of these. Lots more.

/with them being secure, of course.

And they all called me crazy when I bought up all those spectrum mines in the '90s! Well, who's laughing now, smart guys? Who's laughing now?

Whatever. We all know that peak bandwidth is just a myth perpetuated by spectrum scientists to justify their inflated research budgets.

stevetherobot: And they all called me crazy when I bought up all those spectrum mines in the '90s! Well, who's laughing now, smart guys? Who's laughing now?

Forget the doubters. I started cranking out tumbleweeds in the Edward Jones Dome right after the Rams won the Super Bowl. I'm pretty close to being able to buy the team at this point, if the market keeps up.

sasbazooka: FTFA: The number-one biggest driver is consumers' insatiable thirst for e-mail, apps and particularly video on their mobile devices -- anywhere, anytime.

But the spectrum used to track my every move and keystroke then upload it to be analyzed has no effect. Nope, none whatsoever.

Compared to video...no, not really.

Mr Tumnus: articles like this make me wonder why we still have AM radio.

As others have pointed out, the commercial medium wave band used for AM broadcasting doesn't have a lot of spectrum (only about 1.2 MHz between 525 and 1700kHz). In comparison, a single 3G UTMS channel consumes 5MHz, 802.11b consumes 20MHz while 802.11n can consume up to 40MHz. There just isn't enough bandwidth for high-speed data.

Having said that, medium wave analog AM broadcasting is slowly coming to an end. There are a couple of digital radio standards, such as Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) and HD Radio that work on the medium wave band. They can offer quality similar to FM stereo. But the medium wave band can be rather brutal around sunset and sunrise. Many people have said that digital medium wave broadcasts just don't go as far as AM broadcasts (the same complaint as DTV - when you get it, it is great; if you live on the fringe of a broadcast area, you go without).

In my experience, if you throw enough money at a problem, it tends to go away.

LAZARZ

dittybopper: I don't think they will supplant analog AM broadcasting, not for a long time. In a pinch, I can built a receiver with what I can scrounge around the house. Hardest part would be making the detector diode, but that's been done with a wide range of materials, and I've got some oxidized .535" lead balls and fine copper wire, my son has some pyrite and galena crystals, and worse come to worse, I could use an old penny and a pencil lead, so I should be OK.

Not that I've ever tried it, but If you've got access to metals, maybe you could build a weak battery so you can just bias the carrier input slightly above ground relative to the cap? Probably distort the hell out of the signal, but I'd think it would work well enough in a pinch. I assume you already have an amplifier of some kind worked out if you can activate a diode?

Clearly the answer is to just shift some of the existing spectrum into unused areas of the entire frequency range. For example, shift AM broadcast from 535 KHz-1.605 MHz range to the VLF range of 20 Hz - 20 KHz.

/COME ON DOWN TO CRAZY LARRY'S USED CARS!! OUR PRICES ARE INSANE!

dittybopper: Just so long as they keep their dirty mitts off of these bits of spectrum, whatever.

Hey, UPS successfully grabbed a couple of MHz of spectrum from us and they just deliver packages.

Gaumond: Did they action off the bands that were opened up after TV switched to digital? I remember that mobile companies wanted some of this and not sure if that was part to the 700mhz auction a few years ago.

Yep, was the entire auction. So... VZW now owns it. It's what the LTE network is currently deployed on.

dittybopper: bandy: dittybopper: Just so long as they keep their dirty mitts off of these bits of spectrum, whatever.

Hey, UPS successfully grabbed a couple of MHz of spectrum from us and they just deliver packages.

As I recall, they grabbed it, but it took so long for them to get it that by the time they got that chunk of our 220 MHz band, they had found other ways to communicate and didn't want it any more, so we lost the spectrum, and the assholes who caused us to lose it didn't use it anyway.

Right. We were given 1MHz at 219MHz seemingly in compensation, but as secondary users. Here's the history. (pops)

No-one has still made a narrowband data network on those freqs.

The_Homeless_Guy: It's a cellular network. By definition you can just add more cells/have each cell cover a smaller area. We are a long ways away from running out of spectrum, but will have to put up with more towers if providers actually bother to grow their networks (and don't just complain about "spectrum").

What? That would involve capital expenditures. They can't do that. How are they going to rake in absurd profits if they can't ride the towers they built 20 years ago into infinity? AT&T is a shining example of this way of thinking.

Then they have the added benefit of the operation of cell towers being a difficult concept for the average person/congressman to understand. So they just shout "b b b b but WE NEED MORE SPECTRUM," resulting in the-sky-is-falling articles like this one, when the better solution for the public is to just add more towers instead of letting a few companies gobble up control of the entire spectrum.

dittybopper: I don't think they will supplant analog AM broadcasting, not for a long time. In a pinch, I can built a receiver with what I can scrounge around the house

I agree that it'll be some time before analog AM disappears from the mediumwave band in the States, but I doubt that circuit complexity has much to do with it.

The lack of a unified exclusive digital radio standard across the Americas (ITU region 2) or in any single country therein is probably the largest reason. That in turn excludes any sort of government mandate requiring new radios to include digital mediumwave support.

Another reason is because of the problems with hybrid analog/digital in-band on-channel broadcasting on the mediumwave band. The channel width is too small to support bitrates needed for quality music broadcasting, so it's really only good for having multiple subchannels of talk radio. That really isn't the sort of killer app that will drive market support.

A third reason is that digital mediumwave stations have been crippled due to complaints of co-channel and adjacent-channel interference with analog stations. Broadcasters have had to decrease power levels to appease analog listeners, which in turn makes digital stations harder to receive. Again, that impedes market adoption.

Having digital repeater stations might help, but the current mediumwave band is fairly crowded as it is. One idea might be to expand the mediumwave band from 530-1700kHz to 530-1790kHz + 1850-2000kHz, leaving the old 160-meter amateur radio band at 1800-1840kHz alone. However, the ITU has recently reserved everything from 1800-2000kHz for worldwide amateur use, so it would probably piss a lot of people off.

Most likely what'll end up happening is that manufacturers will just release dual band HD Radio tuners by default. At some point, mediumwave stations will convert to digital-only channels once the market is saturated with digital tuners.

dittybopper: and my HF rig doesn't even have 160 meters

That's the thing about the 160m band... not a lot of people use it because of the antenna requirements. Even a quarter wave dipole or resonant loop will be fairly large for most suburban back yards.