Subchannel Stations: The Radio Broadcasts You Didn't Know Were There

13 points by pkaeding 6 months ago | 5 comments
  • disjunct 6 months ago
    Love the weather forecast on the coffee machine. Like so much 2000s tech, such a weird luxury that seems less useful and more experimental.

    I do wish there was more openness in FM band technology. As a young ham, HD Radio and DirectBand were both interests of mine — ubiquitous and extensible layers on existing tech — but were so commercial that they will be/were phased out before we get anything substantial to be open.

    • eadmund 6 months ago
      If they’re not as often used nowadays, I imagine that they must be pretty cheap to get license for … perhaps they could be repurposed for some useful project?
      • emchammer 6 months ago
        Microsoft had a service in the mid-late 1990s which provided datacast services like traffic, weather and news blurbs to an ActiveX plugin on the Windows desktop on using this as a bearer. It required the right kind of PCI FM tuner card on your desktop PC. I think most people have given up on this now that everyone is expected to have Internet access on their phone. It's too bad, these kind of experiments were neat.
        • hakfoo 6 months ago
          I wonder if we're going to eventually lose institutional memory of the efficiency of broadcast systems.

          Today, the obvious answer for traffic data is to make it an on-demand "pull" service. So a million users means a million individual requests for the same data clogging the infrastructure, and a server and/or caching infrastructure ready to service one million requests scattered within the window of 7:30 to 8:30 AM.

          A broadcast "push" model would only need to make a few transmissions-- with effectively zero load balancing and distribution hardware-- to cover the same million users, and the client box would just listen and cache.

          A more ambitious idea might be caching CDN nodes-- potentially at the neighbourhood or single-customer level-- that were fed with popular data on a broadcast basis. Netflix pre-streams Episode 1 of every new series to your cable modem, so on "release day" there's a guaranteed smooth experience.

          • 6 months ago
            • johann8384 6 months ago
              Some cable networks do have this sort of thing built in.The content of each channel on the wire is dynamic and adjusted based on what is to be sent. There is also regional and edge caching for on-demand type conte t.