There are 77 PEPs, which are commercial radio stations that double as emergency broadcast, as primary interfaces to FEMA. They are a mixture of AM and FM. You want to get rid of the AM requirement? Fine. Just switch all the broadcasts to FM first.
Sure, lets do that. FM is where most of the listeners are anyways. We can start with every AM EAS station which also transmits on FM also get their FM stations up to standards and grants to make that happen. Sounds good to me.
In the end though it still kind of sucks. We're expecting people to know about AM radio and then also bother to look around to find the right station. While stations will automatically trigger on an alert, its not like your radio is designed to listen and find these alerts and automatically alert you.
Even better with requirements for car radios, how about we require WX radio and have it set up to by default alert drivers when an alert goes through? So many cars these days are now a part of the cell networks as well, how about we require emergency alerts broadcast over cell networks?
Sure, you could phase out AM and do all your emergency broadcasts on FM. We haven’t done that. Do that first.
Here is more info about EAS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System
There are 77 PEPs, which are commercial radio stations that double as emergency broadcast, as primary interfaces to FEMA. They are a mixture of AM and FM. You want to get rid of the AM requirement? Fine. Just switch all the broadcasts to FM first.