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by JohnFen 1179 days ago
> Doing away with the polite fiction that commercial terrestrial radio is a valid way to communicate emergency information.

It may suck for that, but it's the best choice out of a whole bunch of bad alternatives. What would do this better?
2 comments
msla 1179 days ago
> What would do this better?

A mix of things, some of which already exist.

Obviously, cell phones can do it. They already do this for a lot of people.

NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards already exists as well, but the receivers should be more widespread. Putting them into cars and TV sets would be a good start, especially with GPS receivers to automatically figure out where they are and, therefore, which alerts to listen to.

https://www.weather.gov/nwr&ln_desc=NOAA+Weather+Radio/

Giving more funding to noncommercial radio stations, to guarantee they exist, for one thing, and have people in the booth all the time, for another. America doesn't have an analogue to the BBC so ensuring the local and regional public stations remain usable for this purpose is essential.

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maxerickson 1179 days ago
At this point emergency alerts that go out to cell phones probably reach more people than radio.

That's separate from how well they work in remote areas (but that is getting better over time).

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JohnFen 1179 days ago
> alerts that go out to cell phones probably reach more people than radio.

Only if the disaster is mild enough that cell phones still work. And let's not forget that there are enormous areas of the US where there is no reliable (or any) cell service.

I'm just hoping that for disaster communications, nobody is actually deciding to cut some people off just because there aren't enough of them.

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msla 1179 days ago
The only solution is multiple solutions. Commercial radio has a threshold of how small a market can be before it isn't worth it any longer, noncommercial radio (including NOAA weather radio stations) can fill in those gaps but require people to have the receivers handy, and more people carry cell phones than radios nowadays but cell service isn't absolutely everywhere. We can improve each of those individual technologies, but no single technology is going to become the only answer.
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