Why focus on AM when we already have a federally run national emergency broadcast service — the NOAA Weather Radio. Go peruse around 162Mhz. You may find you're within 2-3 different transmitters right now.
Bonus: Zero political anything to worry about. The weather radio is a completely boring readout of the weather and alerts. It’s simple. It’s beautiful.
It would be trivial to support with most existing FM antennas anyways, it already supports national emergency announcements in addition to weather alerts. It even broadcasts a signal telling you where a given alert is targeting. A vehicle could use and correlate its GPS location to notify occupants.
AM would require manually switching the radio mode, tuning to find an appropriate channel, and there’s so much crap to dig around.
Plus, say a nuclear weapon went off anyways and all the FM transmitters died. Is anyone seriously thinking a lone AM transmitter 2000 miles away is going to help? We had all the communication in the world during COVID and that did nothing to stop people from acting foolish.
Bonus: Zero political anything to worry about. The weather radio is a completely boring readout of the weather and alerts. It’s simple. It’s beautiful.
It would be trivial to support with most existing FM antennas anyways, it already supports national emergency announcements in addition to weather alerts. It even broadcasts a signal telling you where a given alert is targeting. A vehicle could use and correlate its GPS location to notify occupants.
AM would require manually switching the radio mode, tuning to find an appropriate channel, and there’s so much crap to dig around.
Plus, say a nuclear weapon went off anyways and all the FM transmitters died. Is anyone seriously thinking a lone AM transmitter 2000 miles away is going to help? We had all the communication in the world during COVID and that did nothing to stop people from acting foolish.