We used to match the medium to the message and the terrain, but now we seem to assume mobile data is everywhere. AM radio is dying, because everybody is online. Except when they aren’t.
I recently went hillwalking in Wales, and it’s handy to have the weather forecast, and FM doesn’t really happen in remote Wales. I was lucky enough to still have Radio 4 Longwave reception on 198kHz, but I was surprised at how quickly FM became useless in Wales. RDS doesn’t really help because the problem is there is no alternative signal to switch to in a lot of Snowdonia. There’s no useful mobile signal in a lot of mid-Wales either – I have a dual-SIM dumb mobile (which ahs better RF performance than a smartphone), on the O2 and Virgin networks for diversity of networks, and that doesn’t get anything in large parts of the hills.
Continue reading “In rural Wales you still need an AM radio, until the last tube fails in service at Droitwich”