I’m a qualified amateur radio operator and I work in IT as my day job, if you can’t see how bad it would be to continue to put all our eggs into one basket for datacom, primarily in the hands of poorly regulated private cellphone companies, then I can’t really help you.
Fact is, 80-110 MHz FM requires less infrastructure (aka fewer broadcast points) to more completely cover an area, and it’s almost impossible to have it blocked by buildings/walls/vehicles, etc. Sure, the signal might go to shit, but it’s at least able to be heard even in very challenging conditions. It also takes nearly no power to run. Receiver chips can be made so small that it would be a trivial addition to make for most cellular manufacturers. There’s no licensing fees or service fees so the entire process is free from top to bottom.
Add that to the fact that it’s already deployed, regulated and configured for emergencies, and you have a very low implementation cost for a very reliable and robust service.
The idea here isn’t to add it so we can listen to FM commercials all day. Anyone I know who had FM on their cellphone, didn’t use it; and I won’t suggest that anyone will use it now… but if there’s a major catastrophe and the cellular networks go down, having a recieve-only way of getting emergency information to those who are otherwise disconnected from everything is a big deal. A lot of households are going digital only for their entertainment and getting rid of old stereos and hi-fi units with radio built in for all HDMI systems that make their Netflix work nicely. Many also have zero land line service so once the internet stops functioning and the cell towers go out, the only method of communication these people will have is standing on their porch and screaming into the void.
I’ve monitored communications during major outages, like sitting hurricane hits on the contental US and heard the radio traffic stating that there’s people at x location and all consumer/commercial communication systems are inoperable. The only thing working was an amateur owned and operated repeater network to relay the communication across the region; I was listening to an internet relay on the outskirts of the coverage area and it was clear that they would have had no outbound communication if they didn’t have those repeater nets. Inbound, I’m sure FM and AM radio was still operable, so anyone with an FM set could hear news and alerts as they happened.
Radio is also nearly instant, while LoRA mesh networks rely on people having nodes to relay the messages and the messages may be interrupted while a node is down. The first isn’t a thing yet, the second is difficult to do at best. Amateur FM cells can transmit over many miles potentially several dozen, meanwhile most LoRA can’t reach a fraction of that far, requiring a massively larger number of them, and each one is a potential point of failure.
With regulation, commercial broadcast FM sites are required by law to participate in the emergency broadcast system, no such regulation exists for LoRA.
Under normal operating conditions, FM is fairly useless, unless you feel like listening to ads, but in an emergency, it can be the only way for you to be told that, though the weather seems to have gotten better, it’s temporary and you should stay where you are.
All my handheld radio transceivers have commercial FM recievers built in, so either way, I’m covered. I also have several dedicated FM and shortwave receiving radios around. I have adequate communication capability for an emergency. I’m not perfectly set up, even remotely, but I’ll be able to reach out to someone if I’m without power, internet, cellphone coverage, etc, during a major event. I can call for help, get information about the situation and it’s duration, I can reach out over 10 miles or more to communicate with others, all with my handheld.
And you want to take all this infrastructure and preparedness that we as a society have developed over more than a century, and flush it all away… because why? You have a hard-on for LoRA? You think old tech is useless in today’s day and age? Because you have a problem with broadcast radio trying to survive, a service that’s free to you, by playing ads?
Most people won’t read until that last paragraph, ha ha.
Thanks for writing this up. I have always been concerned that my car is the nearest FM radio. I always kept a clock radio stashed in my basement “workshop” area but it was thrown out at some point along with the old rotary phone I had with it.
My son has a beginner electronics kit that can build a very low powered transmitter so I got him a cheap usb chargeable AM/FM receiver with an aux in, speaker, and headphone jack for next to nothing. The antenna is actually extendable and doesn’t suck. Going to stash it when he’s done with it. Could come in handy.
I always did but we moved across country as a lot of stuff just got tossed. You know that old radio in the garage covered in paint, and the clock radios no one uses anymore, etc. My mother’s house has one in every room, I think (except bathrooms and maybe the living room, ironically).
I would like to be the first to encourage you on that journey.
For me, I’ve mainly focused on skills, more than stuff. IMO, preppers are a bit short sighted most of the time, they’ll pack a month’s worth of supplies in an airtight drum and leave it in their garage. It’s 50+ lbs of stuff. You’re telling me that when you get an evacuation order, you’re going to haul that thing into you Ford Explorer before you evacuate, when there may be a flood or wildfire just minutes from you? Okay.
I have my first aid certificate. Standard first aid, level c CPR and AED training. I also know some basic self defense (though it’s been years since I practiced anything), and I know enough about radio that if I’m presented with a walkie or ham radio, or something, I know what I’m doing without being told (maybe if I find one and the previous owner of the radio is incapacitated or something).
I’ve put a first aid kit everywhere I practically can, we have two in the house, plus one in my car (soon to be all cars). I also want to look into some MRE’s and a safe way to store a moderate amount of water long term in my car (winters here are kind of a shit show)… plus maybe some basic survival supplies, enough to make a fire and a crude shelter, which can be repurposed for other things as well. Maybe a water filter for turning Creek water into drinkable/potable water… I want to keep it fairly trim. For shelter supplies, a good multipurpose knife, a couple of tarps and some good rope… you get the idea. Though, that stuff sounds like things you would carry to kidnap and murder someone. Not my intent, but it’s funny how much overlap there is between survival gear and gear for more nefarious activities…
I’m also very well learned on how to fix just about any common thing, like cars or something, so I should be pretty useful in a pinch. I have a ham radio in my car with more range than the walkies I have, and I have a small collection of walkies all with extra batteries charged and ready to fly (usually already attached to my backpack which is my usual daily carry). I need to make some tweaks and round out my setup (as previously mentioned), but I feel like I’m in a good spot for now.
That class of emergency radio is usually shortwave/am/FM. I have a shortwave/am/FM unit but it’s not hand cranked. The one we have is a ccrane, and honestly I’m not sure if that’s all that good. It seems to function, from the few times we’ve turned it on. I’ve never had to replace the batteries yet so that’s a plus.
Not sure on this. I’m prepared for disaster but I’m not what someone would call a prepper. I mostly have VHF/UHF ham radios and the knowledge on how to make use of them. I’m still pretty new, so I hope someone can comment further.
The ccrane was my late father’s. He insisted on buying that brand and I’m not sure why. It’s probably about 10 years old right now. It’s only a reciever, so anyone should be able to buy one.
A lot of people still have am/FM gear, and they’re so invested into their primary communications which is so reliable they don’t think about secondary communications. I have, which is why I’m a ham operator.
Most people at least have FM in their car, the broadcast range is in the lower VHF airspace, not much higher than HF. Most of the HF and LF bands are so tightly allocated that there’s no room to just Willy nilly add another frequency for emergency use for civvies… which would require everyone to buy new radios, which they won’t. Meanwhile, there’s still shortwave, which people also don’t buy that’s already there and lower on the frequency range than broadcast FM… people need to be saved from themselves. Allocating something new and building a bunch of new infrastructure for it is idiotic. The structure is already there with broadcast FM, we just need to save people from themselves and ensure that they have access to it.
I’d be in favour of there being a dedicated broadcast FM frequency for emergencies only. It would become trivial to have a radio station change frequencies to the emergency broadcast frequency when something happens. We could even make the frequency digital instead of FM, and have it encode information by text, and turn it into a recieve-only text-based emergency channel… but making it a whole new band and new radio type on a different frequency that’s not already set up for such a thing is insane to me. So much infrastructure cost for something we literally already have.
Any government that green lights such a program has lost the plot. Use what works.
I’m a qualified amateur radio operator and I work in IT as my day job, if you can’t see how bad it would be to continue to put all our eggs into one basket for datacom, primarily in the hands of poorly regulated private cellphone companies, then I can’t really help you.
Fact is, 80-110 MHz FM requires less infrastructure (aka fewer broadcast points) to more completely cover an area, and it’s almost impossible to have it blocked by buildings/walls/vehicles, etc. Sure, the signal might go to shit, but it’s at least able to be heard even in very challenging conditions. It also takes nearly no power to run. Receiver chips can be made so small that it would be a trivial addition to make for most cellular manufacturers. There’s no licensing fees or service fees so the entire process is free from top to bottom.
Add that to the fact that it’s already deployed, regulated and configured for emergencies, and you have a very low implementation cost for a very reliable and robust service.
The idea here isn’t to add it so we can listen to FM commercials all day. Anyone I know who had FM on their cellphone, didn’t use it; and I won’t suggest that anyone will use it now… but if there’s a major catastrophe and the cellular networks go down, having a recieve-only way of getting emergency information to those who are otherwise disconnected from everything is a big deal. A lot of households are going digital only for their entertainment and getting rid of old stereos and hi-fi units with radio built in for all HDMI systems that make their Netflix work nicely. Many also have zero land line service so once the internet stops functioning and the cell towers go out, the only method of communication these people will have is standing on their porch and screaming into the void.
I’ve monitored communications during major outages, like sitting hurricane hits on the contental US and heard the radio traffic stating that there’s people at x location and all consumer/commercial communication systems are inoperable. The only thing working was an amateur owned and operated repeater network to relay the communication across the region; I was listening to an internet relay on the outskirts of the coverage area and it was clear that they would have had no outbound communication if they didn’t have those repeater nets. Inbound, I’m sure FM and AM radio was still operable, so anyone with an FM set could hear news and alerts as they happened.
Radio is also nearly instant, while LoRA mesh networks rely on people having nodes to relay the messages and the messages may be interrupted while a node is down. The first isn’t a thing yet, the second is difficult to do at best. Amateur FM cells can transmit over many miles potentially several dozen, meanwhile most LoRA can’t reach a fraction of that far, requiring a massively larger number of them, and each one is a potential point of failure.
With regulation, commercial broadcast FM sites are required by law to participate in the emergency broadcast system, no such regulation exists for LoRA.
Under normal operating conditions, FM is fairly useless, unless you feel like listening to ads, but in an emergency, it can be the only way for you to be told that, though the weather seems to have gotten better, it’s temporary and you should stay where you are.
All my handheld radio transceivers have commercial FM recievers built in, so either way, I’m covered. I also have several dedicated FM and shortwave receiving radios around. I have adequate communication capability for an emergency. I’m not perfectly set up, even remotely, but I’ll be able to reach out to someone if I’m without power, internet, cellphone coverage, etc, during a major event. I can call for help, get information about the situation and it’s duration, I can reach out over 10 miles or more to communicate with others, all with my handheld.
And you want to take all this infrastructure and preparedness that we as a society have developed over more than a century, and flush it all away… because why? You have a hard-on for LoRA? You think old tech is useless in today’s day and age? Because you have a problem with broadcast radio trying to survive, a service that’s free to you, by playing ads?
Do you realize how stupid you sound?
Most people won’t read until that last paragraph, ha ha.
Thanks for writing this up. I have always been concerned that my car is the nearest FM radio. I always kept a clock radio stashed in my basement “workshop” area but it was thrown out at some point along with the old rotary phone I had with it.
My son has a beginner electronics kit that can build a very low powered transmitter so I got him a cheap usb chargeable AM/FM receiver with an aux in, speaker, and headphone jack for next to nothing. The antenna is actually extendable and doesn’t suck. Going to stash it when he’s done with it. Could come in handy.
Man, we have maybe 5 radios all around the house so battery operated or rechargeable.
I always did but we moved across country as a lot of stuff just got tossed. You know that old radio in the garage covered in paint, and the clock radios no one uses anymore, etc. My mother’s house has one in every room, I think (except bathrooms and maybe the living room, ironically).
Well this was a fun read and makes me want to be better prepared for a potential real emergency.
I would like to be the first to encourage you on that journey.
For me, I’ve mainly focused on skills, more than stuff. IMO, preppers are a bit short sighted most of the time, they’ll pack a month’s worth of supplies in an airtight drum and leave it in their garage. It’s 50+ lbs of stuff. You’re telling me that when you get an evacuation order, you’re going to haul that thing into you Ford Explorer before you evacuate, when there may be a flood or wildfire just minutes from you? Okay.
I have my first aid certificate. Standard first aid, level c CPR and AED training. I also know some basic self defense (though it’s been years since I practiced anything), and I know enough about radio that if I’m presented with a walkie or ham radio, or something, I know what I’m doing without being told (maybe if I find one and the previous owner of the radio is incapacitated or something).
I’ve put a first aid kit everywhere I practically can, we have two in the house, plus one in my car (soon to be all cars). I also want to look into some MRE’s and a safe way to store a moderate amount of water long term in my car (winters here are kind of a shit show)… plus maybe some basic survival supplies, enough to make a fire and a crude shelter, which can be repurposed for other things as well. Maybe a water filter for turning Creek water into drinkable/potable water… I want to keep it fairly trim. For shelter supplies, a good multipurpose knife, a couple of tarps and some good rope… you get the idea. Though, that stuff sounds like things you would carry to kidnap and murder someone. Not my intent, but it’s funny how much overlap there is between survival gear and gear for more nefarious activities…
I’m also very well learned on how to fix just about any common thing, like cars or something, so I should be pretty useful in a pinch. I have a ham radio in my car with more range than the walkies I have, and I have a small collection of walkies all with extra batteries charged and ready to fly (usually already attached to my backpack which is my usual daily carry). I need to make some tweaks and round out my setup (as previously mentioned), but I feel like I’m in a good spot for now.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Whats a good emergency radio with a hand crank that you would recommend?
That class of emergency radio is usually shortwave/am/FM. I have a shortwave/am/FM unit but it’s not hand cranked. The one we have is a ccrane, and honestly I’m not sure if that’s all that good. It seems to function, from the few times we’ve turned it on. I’ve never had to replace the batteries yet so that’s a plus.
Not sure on this. I’m prepared for disaster but I’m not what someone would call a prepper. I mostly have VHF/UHF ham radios and the knowledge on how to make use of them. I’m still pretty new, so I hope someone can comment further.
The ccrane was my late father’s. He insisted on buying that brand and I’m not sure why. It’s probably about 10 years old right now. It’s only a reciever, so anyone should be able to buy one.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
reddit moment
A lot of people still have am/FM gear, and they’re so invested into their primary communications which is so reliable they don’t think about secondary communications. I have, which is why I’m a ham operator.
Most people at least have FM in their car, the broadcast range is in the lower VHF airspace, not much higher than HF. Most of the HF and LF bands are so tightly allocated that there’s no room to just Willy nilly add another frequency for emergency use for civvies… which would require everyone to buy new radios, which they won’t. Meanwhile, there’s still shortwave, which people also don’t buy that’s already there and lower on the frequency range than broadcast FM… people need to be saved from themselves. Allocating something new and building a bunch of new infrastructure for it is idiotic. The structure is already there with broadcast FM, we just need to save people from themselves and ensure that they have access to it.
I’d be in favour of there being a dedicated broadcast FM frequency for emergencies only. It would become trivial to have a radio station change frequencies to the emergency broadcast frequency when something happens. We could even make the frequency digital instead of FM, and have it encode information by text, and turn it into a recieve-only text-based emergency channel… but making it a whole new band and new radio type on a different frequency that’s not already set up for such a thing is insane to me. So much infrastructure cost for something we literally already have.
Any government that green lights such a program has lost the plot. Use what works.
73
73 to all on frequency.