11th June 2010, 1:06 AM
I did forget one other thing between the AM and FM, the standard that a lot of Ham Radio nerds use, allocated specifically for that purpose. I consider that an early form of "chat room" thing, and normally when I see old movies where someone's talking to random people on ham radio and describing it, the whole scene reminds me of early 90's movies where someone's in a chat room describing what they are doing. Apparently, as is the nature of amateur things in general, they've been keeping up on their end all by themselves and are already using a digital standard based on TCP/IP. Since the very point of that part of the spectrum is to allocate it to all-comers and experimentation, I see no need to require any standards complience for that group, just a requirement to stay in their bandwidth. It's a smaller one than AM anyway so it's not really doing much harm, and won't be missed much if a lot of AM gets freed up anyway.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)