The Myth of Interference

Weblogsky wonders what would happen if we stopped thinking of frequencies as always being in danger of stepping on the toes of nearby transmissions. IOTW, two radio stations too close to one another will step on each other’s broadcasts – we’re all familiar with that problem. But what if the radio transmitters and receivers had the “intelligence” of a router on the internet — the ability to sort out bits that constitute a like stream? The problem of interference goes away, and the spectrum is blown wide open, available to anyone for anything. Hmmm…

Music: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins :: Little Demon

3 Replies to “The Myth of Interference”

  1. sure. but the time/energy/$$$ it would take to adopt such a standard would probably exceed radio’s relevance.

    history: hdtv; am stereo

  2. sure, still adopting it after what – 10 years? and how much adoption have we seen? and yes, it will come – the FCC is seeing to that. still a work in progress.

    not sure if the multiplexing (or whatever this idea would manifest as technically) would be able to happen though for this reason: HDTV had BW set aside for it. that’s why it can take 10 years to become ubiquitous to the point of being able to kill analog tv. do we have the BW to set aside for something like this though? yes, it eventually could save BW, but yr still gonna need a chunk to get started, to start recycling it into multiplexed BW or whatever.

    another thing: this isn’t going to happen in the analog domain (i guess it might be able to, but the metaphor really works much better w/ digital data, due to it’s ability to multiplex more transparently in teh time domain). but you practically have this kind of “radio” in the home if you run itunes and have wifi. with the impending wifi revolution, you’ll HAVE your radio stations, using the same bandwidth that you’ll be using anyway. you still have an idiotic congress that wants to make stations pay royalties per user, but once the BIG radio companies catch on to this (and go from airwaves to bitstreams), their lobbying power comes into play (they were probably lobbying for the fuct internet radio royalty thing anyway). this will have3 a much better chance than current digital radio because people will already have the hardware (pc w/ wifi and more hotspot coverage than my current celphone)

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