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Why we still need AM radio

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Why we still need AM radio

3 months ago01 mins

When Hurricane Helene tore through North Carolina in September 2024, the Asheville AM radio station WWNC stayed on air, transforming itself into a makeshift dispatch center to help locals and emergency responders stay connected and informed on everything from road closures to tips about where to find bottled water.

AM radio has long served as a critical communication tool—when the power is out and cell and internet service are down, radio lives on. And while we’re eons away from the days when every family cuddled up to presidential fireside radio chats, today’s Emergency Alert System (EAS—managed jointly by FEMA, the FCC, and NOAA) is still set up to let the president address Americans within 10 minutes of a national emergency via 71 radio stations (along with TV). Out of the stations set up to deliver the alerts, eighty-five percent of them are AM radio stations.

Most Americans listen to AM radio in their cars—but perhaps they won’t for much longer. Over the past few years, a number of electric-car manufacturers—like Tesla and Volvo—have begun phasing it out of their vehicles entirely.

AM radio was the earliest, and simplest, form of radio transmission—taking off in the 1920s and dominating until the 1950s. By the 1960s, tech had changed and radios got smaller, popping up in every pocket. By the late 1970s, we were into the era of FM radio—it was cheaper, had higher fidelity, and was less susceptible to interference. AM remained a stalwart for talk radio—sports, news, weather—but with the advent of satellite and digital, its share has continued to erode.

In our current era of climate crisis, as we’re bombarded with increasingly frequent and ever fiercer extreme weather events, many argue that it’s not time to ditch AM altogether. There’s a bipartisan effort in Congress to keep its availability a default in all vehicles, precisely because of the role it plays in connecting us during emergencies.

In addition to warming the planet, the CO2 we’ve poured into our skies is cooling the ionosphere, causing radio waves to lose their strength. We still don’t know exactly how these trends will change our communication, or our weather. But we know that the change is here, we’re the ones who’ve brought it on, and we’re the ones who need to fix it.

Ariel Aberg-Riger is the author of America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History.

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