I like Morpheus' idea. Restore channel 1, but make it squelched by default. This means that anyone who turns it on wants it to be on, and has no grounds for complaint. As has been stated many times in this thread, there are legitimate uses for an easy-to-use, identifiable, public channel.
Furthermore, I like my idea of putting a 100 mile range on the radio channels, in order to filter out the less relevant (more distant) events. When the number of players on a channel is over 100 or so, you experience information overload.
My 3 cents...