According to current planing, The Netherlands will have analogue FM until 20235. At least the commercial radio stations are licensed until that year. Our national and regional stations, both public and commercial, are already on DAB+ and essentially every such station now on analogue FM is already on DAB+. DAB+ coverage has improved too during the last few years. Is analogue FM useless or will it be useless soon? Not at all.
Disaster stations.
The regional public radio stations are designated radio stations to provide essential information during disasters. Older technology is often more reliable. It’s a great idea to have the FM network available during a disaster, just as a backup. For one thing, DAB+ will require GPS to be available to get multiple transmitters synchronised to the nanosecond. The FM transmitters for the regional network transmit on different frequencies and are not required to be synchronised accurately. Plus more people have battery powered FM radios in their emergency kits than DAB+ radios. All DAB+ radios can receive FM, but not all FM radios can receive DAB+.
Local stations
DAB+ multiplexes are designed to have 12 to 18 programmes per multiplex. A local station usually carries one programme and, unless we have large cities with dozens of stations, local stations will never fill a multiplex. DAB+ makes no sense for local stations. Just keep them on the FM band.A single studio close to a single transmitting site, that’s what local stations should be. We could have both commercial and public local stations.
Special purpose stations
When the FM band gets unused for the most part, we can finally have some room for stations that do not want or need to be on the air all the time, like campus radio, special event stations, churches or concert halls,. The same frequency could be used during school hours by a campus radio station, during the evenings by a concert hall and on Sunday morning by a church.
Radio Amateurs
In the early days, radio amateurs were allowed to transmit music on shortwave. This was before the widespread use of SSB, and speech was transmitted in AM mode. Ordinary home radios with shortwave could just receive these transmissions. While it is still legal to transmit AM on shortwave, transmitting music is not. It is technically even legal to transmit in FM stereo on the UHF bands, but also on these bands, music is taboo.
It would be great if music was allowed again on the amateur bands. You could add restrictions on the duration of music transmissions or let amateurs pay some form of copyright fee if they want to play music. Only when music is transmitted, you can really judge the audio quality of a transmission. If amateurs are on a section of the the FM band, ordinary people would occasionally listen in and they could be drawn to the hobby.
Unregulated Broadcasters
The Netherlands is one of the few countries where small stations, even hobbyists, can get a license to transmit on mediumwave (low power AM). You need to obtain several licenses and you need to pay copyright fees for music, but in principle it can be done. The same kind of license could be extended to the FM band, when that gets mostly abandoned by regular broadcasters.
Of course, radio pirates do not want to be legalised. For one thing, the copyright collecting societies decided long ago, not to go after pirate stations, because they were “criminal organisations” and they did not want to collect money from criminals. So if you are a pirate, you risk a big fine for transmitting illegally, but at least you are safe from the copyright collectors. And it is part of the culture to do things without a license. The fun would be gone if it was legalised.
It would probably help if the law was rewritten such that pirate stations are no longer considered “criminal organisations”, they just fail to pay some license fees. In that case the copyright collectors can go after them when they play music without paying a fee. Unregulated broadcasters would need to comply with power limits, they would need to use type-approved transmitters (as opposed to radio amateurs who can build their own) and they would have to stay within their section of the FM broadcast band. If they do all of this, they should be considered legal in principle, they just need to pay the required license fees. Criminal law should only be invoked when pirate stations cause real harm.
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