Save Our Signal! Politicians close in on votes needed to keep AM radio in every car

[localroger]

11. I am no fan of the most popular AM content, but it is important

The last time there was a major hurricane the only reliable source of information, unless you personally knew a ham radio operator, was AM radio. All that nifty stuff on your cellphone dies within a day or two as the batteries on the towers die with no grid electricity to recharge them. FM stations are limited by the horizon and those in range were all dark too. We are so used to ubiquitous connectivity that we don't realize how much infrastructure it requires. It doesn't help that the folks who own and maintain that infrastructure are more interested in profits and stock prices than worst-case reliability, as the old Bell phone network was. AM does not require a complex circuit with a computer or frequency synthesizer, or even an old school superheterodyne architecture, to work. It's unlike any of the more modern, more capable, more convenient communications media in that way. It is a shame that daily programming has been taken over by loons and whack jobs but there is still the news, and here in New Orleans WWL is always the source of last resort when everything else is down.