The author chairs the Digital Radio Mondiale consortium.
Dear Editor: I was extremely impressed and moved by Rubén Darío Basay Roberts’ article about AM radio in Chile.
Though he represents just one station that is facing great difficulties, the points he raised address the survival of AM and its transformation on a much wider scale.
Sooner or later the great existential AM dilemma was going to confront Latin America, too. It is a continent with many vast countries, remote communities, big social and economic gaps but also still demonstrating great dependence on ubiquitous and much-loved analog radio.
We agree with the author’s answer to the general question, “What should an AM station do to survive?” Migration is the answer. But serious, tested, supported migration.
AM is not an obsolete technology. Large countries like India, U.S., China, South Africa etc. retain and develop an AM presence. AM remains critical for large parts of their population for information, education and disaster warnings.
There is a lot of noise on OTT, satellites, G5 and other fanciful technology. Their role cannot be denied but they in turn cannot replace yet fully terrestrial broadcasting, whichever frequency band (AM or FM) is used.
India, for instance, has adopted the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) standard for its AM broadcasts and currently there are some 900 million people in India in the incidence of DRM MW signals.
So migration of analog AM to digital, to DRM medium-wave, is indeed the solution for countries wishing to maintain and enhance their coverage and relevance.
China has also adopted DRM for its medium-wave broadcasts, with focus on its usage in cars as fueled by the Chinese great interest in emergency warnings and alerts (using the DRM Emergency Warning Functionality – EWF).
AM broadcasters in the U.S. are fighting and so far winning the effort to maintain AM broadcasts in cars, where radio is essential.
Migration needs to be well thought through, supported for many years, no matter which government is in power.
We have seen that the Brazilian project to migrate AM broadcasts to FM has not proved to be a complete solution. The act mandating it runs out at the end of this year and overcrowding in the spectrum that triggered the migration remains a spectral issue in the big cities.
A lot of smaller cities and vast regions are left without medium-wave transmissions as a result. Therefore, migration from AM to FM is only a partial and insufficient solution.
The real leap forward is from analog AM to digital, to DRM medium-wave. This can deliver spectrum and energy savings and a lasting solution for large country coverage with enhanced audio and multimedia content (including distance learning and emergency warnings).
Even in western Europe, where AM seems to have been abandoned, there are valiant attempts by some broadcasters to keep their AM transmissions, as in Italy. (Eastern Europe still maintains it in some places.)
We agree with the author that transformation has many aspects: technical, human, social and especially economic.
In an age of enhanced communication, we are in danger of doing exactly the opposite, deciding to conveniently die (rather than strongly migrate), all in the name of some digital future that in reality exists already.
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