IS FM DEAD?

[ChazAnthony1982]

What’s happening ? This forums very quiet and the dial is dead too

[famefm]

And so are the stations djs without thier club work and no adverts with the continued pandemic it's not really a supprise

[fmuser877]

Given my 7 watts FM to my mate and he's used it a few times seems to be doing 2 miles just but very low down so its good but I have not bothered turning on at all.

[XXL]

No DJing is dead thanks to Facebook live. But hopefully radio will come back with the new copyright law they’re bringing in. I read it’s pretty much over for the fb DJ once that is in place.

[Polecat]

No DJing is dead thanks to Facebook live. But hopefully radio will come back with the new copyright law they’re bringing in. I read it’s pretty much over for the fb DJ once that is in place.

Am I the only one who thinks fb live djs are boring? Weird camera angles, awkward movements and uncoordinated attempts at moving to the music (cant bring myself to say dance lol) dont add anything to the music selections.

I prefer FM audio any day....

[XXL]

Definitely but the majority say otherwise. For some reason they would rather watch shows now days then listen. I remember back in the day, sitting in my bedroom tuning into pirates on a cheap 80s hifi (in the late 90s) wondering what their studio looks like, what the DJ looks like, by how it sounded. Some pirates had an echo that sounded like they were in a milk bottle lol. Now days that imagination has gone.

[Polecat]

Definitely but the majority say otherwise. For some reason they would rather watch shows now days then listen. I remember back in the day, sitting in my bedroom tuning into pirates on a cheap 80s hifi (in the late 90s) wondering what their studio looks like, what the DJ looks like, by how it sounded. Some pirates had an echo that sounded like they were in a milk bottle lol. Now days that imagination has gone.

Agree with you 100% XXL. Never seen so many faces made for radio lol.

[sinus trouble]

Sadly i guess you all are correct! In the UK at present it is in decline.
On the other hand? FM broadcast in other parts of the world are still a primary communication.

As we know, public opinion can change like the weather so theres no telling what the future holds?

What i do know is that the whole concept of pirate radio was to express a culture that was not being heard.
I believe the mainstream is becoming stagnant and dismissing real talent!

Its only a matter of time before breaking point.

[famefm]

I left the area over 2 months ago now and I can listen online mainly tunein and quality is very good unlike the truly awful dab quality most stations use such a low bit rate fm is still the best good old fashioned analogue fade away signal rather than the unbearable drop out sound of no reception ditgital same with the TV When the signal just drops. I am not saying bring back analogue TV digital was needed for TV

[Electronically]

Yea I got to say live facebook radio shows karaoke shows etc are no good. For one Facebook boots there stream off what's the point in it. Or it buffers freezes. Where as fm you can flick the switch people hear it steady. So to me fm is the winner of them all.

Sent from my AMN-LX9 using Tapatalk

[mixfm]

facebook wont have it no more, unless you are a big name, lol they seem to stay on; twitch, mixcloud, youtube, restream, you carnt beat fm in rds stereo in the motor, work van or at work on the old radio...

[owen_dee]

Hopefully this country will do a full circle and there will end up being 7 watt boxes broadcasting in every town in the country.. one can only hope

[Itrip875]

You take the mick out of kids putting 7w boxes on but you forget that’s what pirate radio is about. Unprofessional and raw.

Listening to pirates back in the day was like listening into someone mixing in their bedroom. It was great. But now everyone is trying to be too pure and professional.

[Legacy]

I think it's prime time right now to organize as djs broadcast engineers, technicians or whatever and hold a bit more of a standpoint on it. Bauer and Global obviously see the FM dial as still viable... a band scan in the Midlands, where you're never more than 5
0khz from regional BBC tells the same story... but apart from cars and stumbling across pirates whilst looking for radio 1 the general population are loosing interest and the younger underground lot are on the internet doing the internet equivalent of whatever this is...broadcasting to many listeners doesn't buzz people up any more..anyone anywhere can do it..from Thier phone....it's not a big deal to say I've got 1000 listeners on FM to a younger generation, they've all got 1000 friends on Facebook... ...little 10w stations operating stealthily and usually with one bloke behind it won't claw people back to FM, because FM is now to the internet, what pirates were to FM in the 90s.....pirates on FM have to assume a more dominant position on the whole spectrum continuously deliberately and blatantly if they want to try and push it back as a dominant medium. The hope might be that a new bunch of resilient high power stations and a game of cat and mouse with the dti would get some news coverage and appeal to masses arousing the same sentiment it did back in the 60s....breaking the deadlock of regulated, bland centralised media .... otherwise FM pirates will probably stay a sort of niche within a niche I think. ...

[Bton-FM]

@legacy
That's exactly it - How can the dial be dead is multi-million pound companies are willing to invest in it? FM radio is clearly being used to make them a lot of money.

With all the new technology available right now to in Radio (internet streaming, VPNs and cheap high power transistors) It's never been a better time for people (the kids) to cause havoc for OFCOM. If all the kids got their heads out of Instagram posting their silly infographics and put their energy into something like radio it would make a lot of trouble for the government. It's already been demonstrated by the London squat rave scene what happens when young minds come together.

[Albert H]

" It's already been demonstrated by the London squat rave scene what happens when young minds come together."

Unfortunately, those denizens of the squats are largely ill-educated louts with cravings for psychoactive chemicals. They haven't got the technical abilities or even the basic understanding of the principles to be able to get a station together. Back in the 70s and 80s, I used to teach people (who had some electronic knowledge and skills) how to build rigs. I wouldn't bother with today's crop of illiterate and innumerate numpties!

Today's youth want instant gratification without gettng the education to support their aims. The vast majority of those finishing their education in the UK (and this includes University "graduates") are utterly worthless and unemployable (except for flipping burgers in McD's). Education in the UK has been downgraded and simplified to the point that today's "A" Levels are roughly equivalent to the stuff I was taught at 10 and 11 years old, and today's University "degrees" roughly equate to 1950s "O"-Levels. Most school leavers in the rest of Europe are usually reasonably fluent in three languages. The UK school leaver barely manages one.

The sources of cheap components no longer exist - we used to go to the Edgware Road and Lisle Street electronics shops, and order stuff by post from out-of-town suppliers - these days there's dodgy parts from China on the 'net, or you're ordering from the big wholesalers (with their large minimum order quantities).

It's sad, but the days of home-build broadcast gear are largely over.

[thewisepranker]

You do spout some absolute bollocks sometimes. I think you need to get out a bit.

Unfortunately, those denizens of the squats are largely ill-educated louts with cravings for psychoactive chemicals. They haven't got the technical abilities or even the basic understanding of the principles to be able to get a station together. Back in the 70s and 80s, I used to teach people (who had some electronic knowledge and skills) how to build rigs. I wouldn't bother with today's crop of illiterate and innumerate numpties!

I don't dispute that the squat lot like taking drugs but so did everyone in the 60s, 70s, 80s, etc.
There are lots of idiots about who can't do maths, can't spell etc. but that's always been the case. There are still plenty of intelligent, capable people that are willing to learn out there, you just come across the wrong ones because of the way pirate radio has gone, thus biasing the feedback loop.

If what you say were the case, then what about all of the stations that are on at the moment? Are they being supplied by guys from the 70s and 80s? I don't think so.

Today's youth want instant gratification without gettng the education to support their aims. The vast majority of those finishing their education in the UK (and this includes University "graduates") are utterly worthless and unemployable (except for flipping burgers in McD's). Education in the UK has been downgraded and simplified to the point that today's "A" Levels are roughly equivalent to the stuff I was taught at 10 and 11 years old, and today's University "degrees" roughly equate to 1950s "O"-Levels. Most school leavers in the rest of Europe are usually reasonably fluent in three languages. The UK school leaver barely manages one.

I agree with you but I don't blame the youth of today. No generation before this one has had a load of highly optimised algorithms running in server farms aimed directly at them, with the sole task of keeping them looking at their phones. Social media gives a dopamine hit, so you carry on. The algorithms are engineered around this and want to keep you engaged for as long as possible, to show you as many adverts as possible, to make as much money as possible. So you tell me, is it their fault that they're addicted to their phone screens? The algorithms learn on-the-fly and can learn what disengages people.
The whole paragraph I've just written is validation for the increase in demand for instant gratification but it's a learned behaviour from platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

A lot can be said about the youth of any particular generation, including yours, and 99.9% of it won't be to do with their technical aptitude, because that's never been a mainstream thing to focus on.
Your point about language is not a fair comparison. School leavers in Europe will have been learning English from a much younger age (as soon as they start school at 5-6 years old) than when the UK counterpart will have been - usually at the start of secondary school for maybe 1-2 hours a week.
You forget that the scope of what someone has to learn nowadays is massively inflated relative to that of the 1950s, but it still has to be squeezed into the same brain and at the same relative learning pace. And budget.

The sources of cheap components no longer exist - we used to go to the Edgware Road and Lisle Street electronics shops, and order stuff by post from out-of-town suppliers - these days there's dodgy parts from China on the 'net, or you're ordering from the big wholesalers (with their large minimum order quantities).

Rubbish. I acquire parts that I need no problem. I go to RS, Farnell, Mouser, CPC, etc. for prototyping and buy bulk from China. I've bought plenty of extremely cheap parts from China - mains and RF transformers, RF adaptors, RF resistors, potentiometers, surface mount resistors, capacitors, etc. and I've not had any major problems. I've worked for several companies whose business model was to outsource the manufacture of multi GHz products to China and I never had any problems that I'd call "dodgy". I had problems, yes, but they were problems that could have happened just as easily with UK or Euro suppliers. Yeah, I'd be a bit wary of buying a high power output device from eBay but that's not representative of China as a whole - that's just eBay that kind of welcomes the scammers (for a bit).

[DJ Eclypse]

LOL ....

[Bton-FM]

" It's already been demonstrated by the London squat rave scene what happens when young minds come together."

Unfortunately, those denizens of the squats are largely ill-educated louts with cravings for psychoactive chemicals. They haven't got the technical abilities or even the basic understanding of the principles to be able to get a station together. Back in the 70s and 80s, I used to teach people (who had some electronic knowledge and skills) how to build rigs. I wouldn't bother with today's crop of illiterate and innumerate numpties!

When I said ‘squat raves’ I meant as in warehouse parties not actually people living there, and the ones in recent years. The people who run them are far from what I think you are getting at (the New Age traveller lot ?). Obviously, people take drugs at these events as well but no more than anywhere else. In fact, you would find that the politicians who condemn them are quite happy to snort line after line of coke at their lavish dinner parties!

The sources of cheap components no longer exist - we used to go to the Edgware Road and Lisle Street electronics shops, and order stuff by post from out-of-town suppliers - these days there's dodgy parts from China on the 'net, or you're ordering from the big wholesalers (with their large minimum order quantities).

I don’t know how cheap you were getting your components back in the day but there are definitely cheap sources of components like the ones WP mentioned. The other day I bought a reel of BFR93’s for ~4p each on eBay - I think that’s pretty good going!

It's sad, but the days of home-build broadcast gear are largely over.

Where else are the 50 odd stations in London (and elsewhere) going to get kit from then? All the transmitters from professional companies are too expensive to be lost to OFCOM and rig thieves. As long as there is still a demand for pirate transmitters builders will not stop.

Sorry for opening that can of worms, that comment was a bit of a tangent.

[Legacy]

i had to show a 20 year old fairly intelligent sounding lad on site how to change his dads dewalt radio from DAB and tune into an FM station yesterday and he seemed quite taken aback that i just knew the frequency for the station he wanted and that i just did it, he probably doesnt know how to work a VHS either why would he.....This generation IS different and unique in that it has never known a world without the internet, when a camera used to just be a camera, a radio a radio, a phone was just a phone.......Albert is right, Having it all in the palm of your hand from the word go has its negative influences...with instant everything....messages...news......social media...live streaming....there used to be a one in four chance a person would have seen the same tv programme as you the night before, there were only four channels,if you left the house you were on your own.. media used to be a choice but now everyone's just in there own bubble getting milked by facebook and google and listening to whatever youtube shows them..anyway... pirate radio in my opinion is now quite close to anorak territory...even those just listening out for pirates and doing band scans will be seen as anoraky to the new lot coming up..to most people its just another dying format which is handy in the car but the clock is ticking on that too!