alt Hacker NewsIn some way it is short-sited, as radio is a good backup medium for global communications in case the entire Internet ever goes down.
Vacuum tubes also aren't vulnerable to nuclear weapon electro-magnetic pulses.
However, other than ham radio enthusiasts I guess no one listens to analogue radio anymore.
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Very few radios can pick up long wave now. My car certainly won’t.
Even when they can most people Wouldn’t have a clue to listen to it.
There’s a reason LW isn’t critical national infrastructure.
I got my RTL-SDR to see what I could listen to, and by the time I tuned in, nearly all the short wave stations I could tune to were just broadcasting evangelical religious stuff, or other crazy conspiracy stuff. It's remarkable that these powerful stations spend most of their broadcast day transmitting that content.
This transmitter doesn't really have the range for reliable global communication, it's optimised for covering the UK. For the global communication usecase, there are other networks of military transmitters (DHFCS) that are much better suited for the job, and they aren't being shut down any time soon.
What it did provide was a simple but reliable way to maintain emergency broadcast to general public within Britain. And it probably should have been kept online just for that reason.