For a half-century, people have been driving their cars with their eyes on the road ahead of them. Many have listened to their car radios, and thus radio has thrived as a mobile medium. The automobile electronics of the future will have displays, which tell you where you are, or let you read your e-mail. So after a half-century of drivers looking at the road, we now enter a new era of drivers looking at their dashboards. After several hundred rear-end collisions, we will rediscover the value of simple, unembellished radio.
Reception is usually fairly good.
Shortwave signals from the south of Europe travel across the Atlantic with more success than those from northern Europe. Indeed, if a team of scholars of mass communication were to perform a content analysis of the output of RAI's English Service, they might conclude that it comes from a country where people are shy, reticent, given to few words, hesitant to explain their feelings. This is not a criticism of RAI's English-language program. It is, instead, an appeal from a listener that Italy consider enhancing its use of radio to speak to the anglophone world. This could be once a week, for an hour.