Geek Culture
Not everyone knows the difference between FM and AM radio yet
With cell phones and easy access to digital broadcasts, you no longer have to fiddle with your radio and scare yourself when you switch from FM to AM by accident. Rest in peace to anyone who did this with their portable radio while wearing headphones. But what’s the real difference between them?
How does the radio work?
Before you can understand the difference between AM and FM, you need to know how radio stations receive signals. They still use old-fashioned ways to send signals to our stereos.
A station starts with a carrier signal, which is an electromagnetic wave (in this case, a radio wave) with a steady frequency and amplitude. These variables are changed when they play a song or when the host reads the weather report, for example. This adds the new information to the carrier wave.
The big transmitters that are attached to radio stations then send out this newly mixed signal. The receiver on a radio picks it up, uses a demodulator to decode the information, and turns it into sound waves.
What’s the difference?
Knowing what AM stands for gives you a clue about how it works. The amplitude of a wave is its height. To send information, AM stations change the amplitude of the carrier wave.
FM, on the other hand, stands for frequency modulation. As you might have guessed, this means that stations change the frequency of the carrier wave.
FM vs. AM
But is one better than the other? AM and FM are still used today.
People may not want to use AM because of one pretty big problem. Radio waves like those from AM come from many other places, such as power lines, lightning, and even the Sun. Waves can interfere with each other. In this case, the other sources can mess up the carrier signal and change its amplitude.
Because of this, our radios send out a lot of static, which scares the living daylights out of you when you switch to AM just to see what’s going on.
When you listen to an FM radio station, on the other hand, the sound is usually much clearer. This is because the information is stored in changes in frequency, so a little amplitude-changing interference doesn’t really affect the end result. It also helps to have more bandwidth options.
That being said, why do people still use AM radio?
It has a much wider broadcast range than FM because its wavelengths are longer. It can even get through areas with a lot of buildings. Radio is more than just music. AM’s ability to send messages to a large area can be very useful for alerting people to an emergency.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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