The end of AM radio as we know it? And introducing Thomas!!! He will live in a different world.....

Introducing Thomas!! My future Radio Apprentice!

I have finally managed a bit of time away from the workshop to spout a few words of reflection and possibly wisdom (although I doubt the latter) on matters radio and beyond. The time available is largely a result of the grand arrival of Thomas Martin, weighing in at 8lbs 8oz, born at 5.17am on Friday April 1st.  I've closed up the workshop for a few days to enjoy being a grandad and helping the new parents and grandma settle the new human into the world. He's just beautiful......  

So I got thinking about how my father (Thomas) and grandpa (Thomas) influenced my radio development and wondered how things might be different for young Thomas as he enters a world of wifi, computers, social media and all the 'fast living' that entails. His mum has already been feeding him with the help of an APP on her phone. Its definitely going to be different.

Will he have to learn how to hold a pen and write neatly? Or better for him to have fast keyboard skills? He will read of course but from the printed page of a book or from the pixels on a screen? Will he ever know the mysteries and joys of radio propagation or just develop his skills in sorting out a decent Bluetooth connection? When I try to teach him morse will he look at me aghast and think the old guy has gone even more potty in his old age?  "Why grandad??!??" ... Hmm, food for thought!

I recently read an article on Radiophile Magazine which I will quote from and paraphrase below on what might be the 'Death of Radio' as we know it and which has nothing to do with the much delayed idea of the 'digital switchover' and the rise of the DAB radio revolution.  The government I think are playing a crafty game here. Talk of the digital switchover has certainly gone quiet and because of this there are some out there that think that it will never happen.  They think that FM won't be switched off. They think that AM (Long Wave and Medium Wave) are safe. Too costly they will say, to switch them off. Not enough DAB radios out there to warrant the change they will say... Cars don't have DAB radios and reception would be poor.... Hmmm, no actually! Don't be fooled... The digital age is here and is beginning to dominate by stealth.... And this is why.... Read on!

The idea of a stand alone DAB radio is sweet enough but its the rise of other platforms that is actually taking over slowly but surely.  Internet streaming radio is now pretty universal and gaining popularity. TV's attached to cable or Sky dishes are streaming radio and offering an amazing choice of worldwide radio listening. 'Smart Phones' and Tablets sucking up wifi are now everywhere and everyone has one, don't they? DAB stand alone radios will survive (mainly on  the DAB+ platform) but they will be just a small proportion of the available multitude of devices on which 'radio' can be heard. 

The Pye P76

But this is the 'Death of Radio' as we know it? Yes it is and the main cause of the demise isn't at first as obvious as you might expect. Going back to the Radiophile article I mentioned above by Rob Rusbridge, he hits the nail on the head in his discussion concerning the make up of an old Pye P76 he was working on. Basically the Pye has a pretty daft aerial circuit which relies on a single coil for each waveband all tuned by the tuning capacitor and without what would or should have been a nice transformer arrangement to smooth out the signals coming into the radio. Instead a resistor is employed between the earthy end of each coil and  the chassis together with the other end of the resistor connected to the earthy end of the aerial. This means that the signals reaching the aerial develop a rather large voltage across this resistor which is in turn naturally injected into the tuned circuit. 'Bottom Coupling' this was called. 

Back in the old days this arrangement would and did work fairly well but nowadays, in our over noisy modern world of switch mode power supplies, broadband routers, LED lighting and flat screen TV's, all the radio frequency noise each and everyone of these new gadgets shouts out has finally come to, as Rob puts it, "come and bitten the wireless set on the bottom" because noises of all frequencies are most effectively coupled into that tuned grid circuit and there isn't a high-Q coil in the world which can enable an ECH42 valve to select Radio 5 Live from the cacophony of a thousand screaming switch-modes. 

So there we have it.. The death of analogue radio isn't and won't be due to a government imposed digital switchover. It won't be because of the rise of stand alone DAB radio sets.  It's death will come from the slow strangulation of the airwaves as they are swamped by man made electrical noise. It's a slow 'death by a thousand cuts' which will mean that the use of old valve radios, confined to Long Wave, Medium Wave and Short Waves, will become more and more impossible. 

Some old radios will hang on for as long as they have a signal to listen to. Those with inboard antenna systems such as the Bush DAC90A will have some use in that their design means that by moving the set away from the source of noise may bring about an improvement in the heard broadcast. Those with ferrite rod antennas will also have better immunity to electrical noise than those such as the Pye. These radios will linger on but eventually the insidious rise of 'the noise' will render them obsolete too.

My new grandson Thomas will never experience the fun of listening into short wave radio like me, his great grandfather and his great great grandfather. When I was young I used to listen to far off radio stations and feel like I had travelled there and had peeked, as if through a window, into those distant worlds. I feel sad that he won't experience those joys like I did.  However I'll do my best to tell him about the way it was and I'll play him recordings of those long lost radio stations whose names and places he will find on the old radio dials he'll see in my workshop... Athlone, Hilversum, Luxembourg, Valencia, BBC Home Service, Voice of America, Deustche Welle, Radio Switzerland and many, many more. He will no doubt humour me and show me his latest APP on his phone.... or perhaps on his personal cloud?