[PlanarSpeakerFan]

Originally Posted by W9TR

It depends on where you live. In Europe, countries are slowly moving to a digital system that is not backward compatible with analog FM. I believe Norway will be the first to discontinue analog fm broadcasts sometime in 2017.

In the US, there are no plans to shut down the existing analog FM stations.

The new "in band on channel" or IBOC systems could take over, however. These are sometimes called HD Radio, the HD standing for hybrid digital, not high definition. As the HD injection percentages increase the resulting interference to analog fm could make it unlistenable.

This is already happening, so buying a vintage tube FM tuner like a Mcintosh MR 65 or Marantz 10B is a crapshoot depending on where you live and what you are listening to. These older tuners don't have post-detection filters that are needed to eliminate the HD radio self noise. So you get a lot of noise in stereo, even on strong signals. To eliminate this noise, you have to run these tuners in mono.

The FM radio business in the US is not healthy right now due to massive debt loads taken on by companies like Clear Channel after the consolidation boom fueled by the telecommunications act of 1996. They have eliminated all the local talent and gone to country wide homogenous programming. They are not even investing in that.

But the good news in this somewhat bleak scenario is that for about $50,000 in power cost per year you can reach millions of people. Receivers are cheap and plentiful.

So I guess it all depends on your timeline - I am very comfortable buying and maintaining high end FM tuners for the next 10 to 20 years.

I live in a market that has some of the best sounding public radio outlets in the country - Minnesota Public Radio alone has three carriers 89.3, 91.1, and 99.5 MHz that carry unique programming; alternative, news, and classical respectively.

Great post, Tom. Long live Frequency Modulation!

Ken