[sudo-discuss] Radio: Internet radio is about to get borked; just say CONELRAD.

Federal circuit court in DC is set to rule on net neutrality and appears poised to strike it down. http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/so-the-internets-about-to-lose-its-net… That means say byebye to internet radio. Small-scale community netcasters won't be able to "negotiate" fees with The Bigs to get access, even at speeds that are common today in residential broadband. If that occurs, it strengthens the moral justification for pirate radio and similar solutions, by a decimal place or two. In the spirit of which... ...anyone here ever hear of CONELRAD? That was the late 1950s - early 1960s plan for Civil Defense emergency broadcasting in the event of nuclear war. All FM stations would go off the air, and AM stations would switch over to low-power broadcast on 640 KHz and 1240 KHz. Incoming Soviet bombers (in the pre-ICBM era) would be unable to use RDF (radio direction finding) to navigate, while citizens could pick up the emergency stations that were nearest to them. Radio dials were marked with little triangles at 640 and 1240 to make the CONELRAD broadcasts easy to find. The signal interference issues Anthony and others brought up, must have been addressed during the design of the CONELRAD system. If nothing else, AM reception is more directional, and the lower frequencies (kilohertz rather than megahertz) would reduce the problems of signal synchronization, including during times when official announcements were being broadcast simultaneously over all the stations in a region. If this is the case, then blanket coverage by low-power AM transmitters might be technically feasible. -G ===== On 13-11-04-Mon 2:17 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote: