There arent any alternatives for major catastrophes that can top amplitude modulated radio.
if you are in a car fleeing for your life from a wildfire, major storm, or war, AM radio is available sometimes hundreds of miles from your location to provide timely instruction and lifesaving updates. if you need electricity for a radio, your car has fuel and can provide a radio signal to you for quite some time.
AM radio can be transmitted with a roll of wire and a relatively simple transciever from an FOB or refugee camp. digital radio requires codecs, licenses, and specialty equipment. Satellite radio may, or may not be available as the ground stations that power it require even more advanced transcievers and software to operate and could take months to repair if attacked or destroyed. Cellular towers require special beamforming antenna that can take months to rebuild or procure in an emergency and rely on an advanced system of transcievers and software to provide a signal.
its not Dolby quality, but if you need clean water and shelter it will guide you. Arguably you could mandate a VHF receiver in every car for FM based NOAA/EAS alerts, but AM is still cheaper.
While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case? If I’m at home without power, I can’t access online information sources any more than I could if I were driving somewhere without cell data coverage. Should building codes require my house to have a radio installed? No one is legislating that tents have built in radios, but if I’m camping I’m in even more need of emergency information than if I’m already in a car and driving. Someone might rightfully tell me that it’s my responsibility to take a radio with me while I’m camping. Why does Toyota have to provide me with a radio while driving?
I ham a ham extra license. I like radio and see its value. I think it would be more appropriate to tell people to pack an AM radio in the disaster bag we’re all suppose to keep in the trunk.
I think it's more like a radio in a plane. You sometimes have travel advisories and signs telling you to tune to an AM frequency when flashing. A radio in the trunk doesn't do you any good and could lead to a real mess if everyone had to pull over to use it. If you're already putting FM radios and stuff in the car, it shouldn't be a problem to put an AM radio in. If interference is an issue, then they should be working to clean that up with better shielding.
Most people don’t have those bags.
We mandate seat belts in cars when they could be aftermarket, too.
> If I’m at home without power...
You can use a crystal radio for that case [1].
If you're fleeing a disaster in your EV you may soon end up on foot anyway. I'd hate to think what the grid demand would be if, say, New York or LA suddenly all headed to the hills in EVs simultaneously. Especially if that infrastructure is taking battle damage.
I had read in a previous thread that some cars had been dropping it as the modern electronics in cars were generating too much interference for AM radio to work.
I heard it was the EV vehicles drive systems, not the modern electronics. Either way, they should fix the shielding if it's really that noisy.
And, don't miss crystal radios for AM [1].
Yes there are plenty of good reason for AM based emergency radio, but the fixation on cars is pretty odd. Plenty of scenarios where the car is not accessible, so should radios also be mandated in peoples homes?
Here is a free one for you Elon: Throw a small usb-chargeable AM radio in the glove compartment and just move on.
Isn't their problem that the car is a noisy interference emitter? They'd have to fix the shielding issues to let the radio work while driving.
Well apparently they’ve already solved this since AM radio in cars has been a thing for like 90 years.
The issue is with inverter based EV drive systems.
The manufacturers' chief objection seems to be that EV motors interfere with AM signals, therefore the AM band needs to go away. Not an EE, but for what little I understand of FCC mandated EM compliance testing, this seems like an absolutely ridiculous argument and I hope the automakers are swiftly and harshly taken to task for it.
I haven't been in the business for a while, but I remember learning that the EM compliance rules have some special carve-outs for electric motor control systems.
Internet radio has MANY potential points of failure, particularly during emergency situations, when electric power is unreliable, or out for many days.
AM radio has a"head office " situation, studio and broadcast transmitter, both of which normally have emergency power supply's and generators capable of sustaining the station for several days. AM radio in cars can operate from car batteries. AM has significantly longer range than FM. Satellite radio , would be nowhere as wide spread as AM radio in cars. ( On a unrelated note, it is my opinion that the mobile phone network should have reliability standards for power supply - ie base stations and other network elements would keep operation if the commercial/ public electric supply was down - as often happens in emergency situations - like floods / cyclones / hurricanes / typhoons " Electric car makers need to try much harder to reduce their vehicles Radio Frequency Interference or RFI
Why does it feel like regulations always have a well defined safety argument and a less defined, less “important” argument to the contrary?
This is the most important use of AM radio in cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_information_stati...
which side of the line did you intend to place yourself with that statement?
I found that AM radio had so much interference 20 years ago listening to Radio Disney that I gave up. (oh god. That might be closer to 30yrs now)
Dipping my toes into software defined radios (RTL-SDR, and a HackRF), I found AM to be incoherent in my area.
So, what exactly is there to save? It's obvious there's an agenda- FCC already has enough latitude to allow low power FM broadcasts to replace AM ones without external involvement.
bloomberg radio has been my go to station for the past 16 years or so since it broadcasts in some major markets and i have no difficulty getting signal even at night. it is way better than using internet radio with buggy apps and where they inject an ad right before the stream starts playing.
They just sold their AM in the bay, (or at least at the beginning of the month it went to some sports talk radio)
Lol, every country listed on your linked Wikipedia page (except US and Japan) use FM.
I think you succeeded in motivating for the opposite of what you intended...
Was at a rest stop and heard talking coming from a box on a pole. It was reading out the weather in TTS voice, guessing it was the transmitter for one of these stations.
It was probably NOAA Weather Radio.
The problem with digital radio is that it's all or nothing.
Analogue degrades gracefully, if you need to listen to the news in an emergency, it doesn't matter if it sounds fuzzy.
Analogue doesn’t degrade gracefully. Every time you drive under a power line it becomes completely unintelligible. Meanwhile digital radio can use error correction to maintain perfect quality under heavy interference.
To be able to decode under heavy interference you need heavy error correction in the digital hardware and in the standard. Nobody designs space-grade consumer radios. You are basically limited with the bits you have and the recovery you have, no more. A really bad digital signal is unintelligible by definition. It is a sharp cutoff when you reach the limit.
However an analog signal is ehmm .... an analog of the original. It is continuous. So the error is also analog and you're only limited by the average case. The signal degradation is also analog, there is no sharp cutoff. So as long as human brain can extract the information from the noise, analog continues to work.
This sounds like a signal strength (or maybe frequency?) issue more than an advantage of digital. I sometimes hear people report the opposite of your experience, but many factors play into that.
Your point about error correction and perfect quality is noteworthy. Yes, if there is some data loss, error correction can maintain perfect quality, but once that fails, it fails badly. And it's not even all-or-nothing: The radio may, due to an arbitrary firmware configuration, refuse to tune into a stream that is still partially intelligible if it deems the signal integrity or strength to be insufficient. Even very damaged digital streams can be somewhat useful, if you can deal with lovely artifacts like piercing chirping noises when the decoder doesn't know what do to with garbled data.
I’ve always wanted to drive in circles under power lines listening to the Jethro Tull Christmas special!
Right, but digital radio is a small portion of the US market, and what IBOC stuff that did happen, much of it has been turned off.
So I dont really understand what this comment has to do with the article at hand here?
Digital radio remains working at much worse SNR than intelligible fuzzy analog.
In my anecdotal experience I have to agree (though I dislike digital radio for completely different reasons). The reception is perfect everywhere around here, while FM was very different, from the exact same transmitter point. The same goes for UHF TV, the quality was very sensitive to the exact position of the antenna on my roof, after they switched to digital, using the same frequency and the same transmitter, everything is perfect even though the wind has turned the antenna 90 degrees. I don't bother adjusting it, there's zero need.
Is capable of, but does not currently. This isn't an argument for turning off AM radio.
For comparable BER. I wonder what SNR is needed for speech to be intelligible?
To be fair, if someone made a voice encoding only with that had a lot of error correction bits, it would probably work at much longer distances. Some of the codecs are 2 kilobits per second for human voice? That's got to have a way better margin for the same channel bandwidth than analog decoded by the human brain. This way we get the digital advantage and lossy compression.
You may find the MELP Vocoder and history interesting: https://melp.org/ (MIL-STD-3005)
MELP targets 2.4kbps, and there are later examples for even lower bitrates (e.g. 1.2kbps, 600bps)
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these codecs or technologies are designed to operate at very low bit rates because the signal carrier is required to be capable of operation in "contested environments" where jamming and/or other environmental effects are present (and throughput potential is the tradeoff for assurance).
Citation needed.
https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.5/
Especially for speech, there are aggressive and impressive algorithms that can turn a trickle of bits into understandable voice.
There isn't an FEC format that uses Opus over a radio signal. We could make one, but analog AM is the best we have for extremely wide area robust voice broadcast.
FM radio will still exist afaik. Nobody in my country used AM for a decade now.
The useful range of FM is much shorter. The reason why AM transmitters remain so useful in geographically large countries like the USA is that you need far fewer transmitters to reach everyone.
That has more to do with the frequency band then the modulation scheme. I wonder if long range FM in the ~1000khz broadcast band would make sense in the future. It would get the range of AM broadcast radio with the quality of FM (but it may require too much bandwidth to be practical)
If I recall correctly, FM needs the higher frequency carrier band to actually M the F effectively. You'd also need much longer antennas for this. The amplitude-modulated signal also needs far less bandwidth than a frequency-modulated one, so it would not "fit" at ~1000kHz because there are other reserved bands nearby.
The bandwidth is the dealbreaker. Commercial FM radio has a necessary bandwidth of 270KHz. That’s not a lot when your carrier frequency is around 100,000KHz. It’s a whole lot when your carrier is around 1000KHz.
For comparison, commercial AM mono bandwidth is 10KHz. SSB AM ham radios use 2.4KHz.
You're not wrong, but that's useless nitpicking. We're not going to suddenly introduce a brand new radio standard that no-one has a radio for.
There are literally millions of AM radios out there in the US, at the already agreed frequency range. For emergency broadcast uses, the increased quality of FM is meaningless.
The advantage of am over fm is the simplicity of the electronic circuit. In am its very easy to create a receiver to listen to broadcast. While an fm radio is too complicated for amature electronic.
So i dont belive am will ever be dropped for emergency radio
FM radios aren't complicated at all. And FM transmitters, in particular, are extremely simple. When I was a student we had a tiny one we made in an afternoon (this was decades ago), we connected it to our 8-hour reel tape deck and had our own music station in the car radio when we drove around in the area. The advantage of AM is, as was mentioned already, the lower frequency used by AM which means much better coverage. FM 87MHz-108MHz is almost just line of sight.
No much to a coil, antenna and a germanium diode.
The geranium diode is doing most of the heavy lifting. Good luck building that from scratch.
Galena cat whiskers were quite common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector
It is not useless nitpicking, it is the sole reason of your argument why the 300 meter band covers more area than the 3 meter band.
It's useless nitpicking because in the US, AM vs FM comes coupled with those frequency ranges. We're as likely to get a brand new radio standard at this point as we are a replacement to the NEMA connector, so the next best thing is to just use the standard we already have that does the job well enough.
The problem is the amount of Bandwidth taken at the lower frequency.
I'm no expert but I think lowering the frequency far below the current standard was not feasible due to the frequencies and ranges being transmitted.
Then whatever decision Congress makes will have no affect on you
In europe, some are actively trying to kill FM radio and switch to DAB... so it's coming, first the european cars, then the others too.
FM radio is radically limited in range. You can listen to AM or shortwave across a whole continent, or even across oceans. With FM you're very lucky to hear something over a hundred miles away. AM radio is most popular for news and talk shows, and emergency broadcasts.
When I was living in "upstate" NY (the Poughkeepsie area, which isn't upstate, but that's what it's called), I would regularly listen to AM stations out of NYC (close to 100 miles away from the broadcaster); using just the standard receiver in my car.
Modern cars in the US, especially EVs it seems, are not only dropping AM radio but also now SiriusXM satellite radio. I was shocked to discover that the "Sirius" radio on many cars I have been looking at recently was merely an app that streamed over the cellular connection.
I find this mildly terrifying. In an emergency, cellular will be the first to go. It doesn't even work reliably when everything is well.
My family's newest car came with Sirius radio and a free subscription that lasted a few months. We let it lapse. Chances are, the lack of market interest is what kills subscription radio. AM and FM are free.
Is there a realistic scenario where cell phones are down and there is meaningful coordination being done over SiriusXM?
I don't particularly expect that there would be any effort to lean on AM either.
[delayed]
Evacuation notices can be, and are, announced on AM radio during emergencies.
Having lived in disaster prone areas, people tend to be glued to the TV and radio before, during and after to get updates on the situation. TV and the internet are the first to go with the power, and even if you have a generator, that doesn't mean your internet connection will work. Radios will.
I don't think the OP's point was that SiriusXM was being used for emergency coordination, but the lack of a traditional radio in the car forgoes the existing emergency radio infrastructure.
Maybe not meaningful coordination, but if the whole citys power shuts down, you'd still like some news about what happened, why is there no power, no internet, no nothing.... war? farmer plowing too deep? ddos attack on the infrastructure? In such cases, having long distance broadcasting service is great.
So a localized total outage? Weird that the farmer had no idea everything was in the one spot.
AM radio then. If you want internet, get a starlink.
The main argument for satellite radio is to have it out in the big receptionless areas expanses, so relying on cell signal defeats a major part of the purpose!
I think it'd be fine if Sirius didn't require a subscription. The subscription nature turned it into a niche business.
(And gosh Sirius's salesmen are annoying a-holes when they call you up to get you to subscribe. The last time I bought a car with a Sirius radio I had to insist that I wouldn't get any calls from Sirius to subscribe.)
Yea, even if the major space powers Kesslerize all the satellites (like Starlink) in low-Earth orbit, the civilian geostationary sats like Sirius XM will likely be flying. (Geostationary sats can, I think, only be brought down individually with anti-satellite weapons, and that would presumably be prohibitively expensive for all of them.)
I am not as concerned that a car has AM radio than I am that AM radio must continue to be available and that you must be allowed to replace the radio in the car with your own that can use AM radio and that the car will not interfere with your use of AM radio (whether by replacing the existing radio or by using a portable radio). It would be good for the car to include a radio that has AM, but that isn't as important as the other things that I had mentioned.
AM radio is good due to the simplicity, instead of forcing replacing them with excessively complicated and confusing stuff like many modern computers are doing.
I still use AM (and FM) radio. I do not have a car, but sometimes use in someone else's car, and I also use it at home; the radio is not only for the use in the car.
I can recount from memory nearly every minute in the last like 10 years I have spent listening to broadcast AM/FM radio outside of a car. Nearly all of them were spent testing new stereos. On one occasion I was circuit bending a Casio keyboard and randomly stuck an inductor coil somewhere and it accidentally made the keyboard an AM radio, Hi Fi Gilligan style [1]. I may have been using the tunable capacitor from a radio to mess with the clock speed as well.
There have however been many major disasters where congestion or service impaired or shut down cellular internet access, so I think we do still need that lifeline... although I'd rather the radios be in cell phones since they're more likely to be with you and powered on in a disaster!
> I'd rather the radios be in cell phones since they're more likely to be with you and powered on in a disaster!
It would have to be a very short disaster, because your cell battery is going to die before the day is out. I've only changed the batteries in my AM/FM shower radio once since I bought it a decade ago.
That's true but we also have a lot of simple solutions for charging cell phones: powerbanks, solar and hand winders, transfer power from a laptop, small generators, and on top of that is charging from vehicles. Electric cars might not even start in extreme weather events and gasoline usually faces immediate shortages.
> the radio is not only for the use in the car.
this is something that I think is being overlooked.
I always thought cars ought to have a weather band receiver in them, but I've never seen that feature in a factory radio.
As a HAM I have an amateur transceiver in my car and i find weather band reception to be really useful
I'm not sure if Truckers still use CB but on a cross country road trip which involved hours being pinned in the left most lane on all sides by trailers with speed governors set to 66mph I recall wishing I had had the ability to communicate with the drivers. It seems like this would be easy to implement from the factory as well, although I suppose giving everyone with a new car the abulity to speak their minds to others on the road with them would a.) be less safe b.) be super annoying.
I agree. Subaru did have them for a bit in the early-mid-2000's. I had it in our 05 Forester. Stock radio. Our 2011 Outback and my mother-in-law's 2017 Forester lacks it though. No clue why they removed it.
It was wonderful going through New England mountains trying to know what the weather will do in 5 mins when it inevitably changes.
Was this stock? I do not recall this feature in either the 1998 nor 2001 Subarus I drove into the ground. Seems strange but not implausible it would have been briefly an option in the generation after that. 2005 is about when Subarus got less boxy with big plastic bumpers and crumple zones.
Jokingly, perhaps it was not a feature but happened accidentally due to the head gaskets design on the EJ25 engine.
It was stock in my 2003 Forester that we eventually got rid of due to head gasket problems.
I had a 2002 Outback wagon for a while with weather band in the stock radio. I rather liked it for rolling across country during the winter - with a good set of snow tires, that car was pretty much unstoppable!
... and wisdom also suggested that when you realize you've not seen semis on the road for a good while from how bad the snow is, you should take the hint and go find a spot to sleep for a while until things improve.
Seems so cheap to include, but I guess it’s the same weird reasons that car manufacturers are willing to make their UI baffling to save a single mechanical button.
In Utah there can be blinding snowstorms that trap people in their cars on the side of the road. There are public service signs every so often, "for weather tune to AM 830" or something like that. It's great to pass one of those signs when there's a bunch of snow coming down. It helps you make a decision whether or not you should pull off and get a hotel room.
Could they move to FM? Yes, but FM reception could be dodgy in a snowstorm, especially when going through mountain passes. Knowing what I know from my HAM radio training, AM radio is fantastic in emergencies. One tiny little station can blast out a signal that can be heard from halfway across the country if given enough umph. Being on the lower bands, AM punches through the storm better too. It makes a lot of sense to put emergency and national weather stations on the AM bands. They're cheaper to run, and they work better in emergencies.
Some commenters here talking about right-wing political radio and sports wanting their AM radio bands available. People who listen to right-wing political radio don't do so from AM, or at least they don't need to. Podcasts and even FM stations out in red Utah are usually reached for first by my friends who listen to them.
I remember driving through the "four corners" area where Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona meet. It's a place home to many American Indian nations. It also has terrible cellphone reception. The first time I bought a paper map in years was when I went down there. You couldn't find your way otherwise.
I think of places like that when they talk about getting rid of AM. There's not a lot of money in AM radio, not compared to all the other media. At the end of the day, if you live in a _very_ rural place, AM radio may be your only source. I remember listening to a Navajo Radio station like this one[1]. The announcer spoke in Navajo. I remember driving through the reservation. It seriously feels like the 1930s. Frame houses but without any electricity plumbing or heating. The people in these regions are terribly poor.
For safety reasons detailed above, I would not drive a car without AM radio. For humanitarian reasons also, I would advocate for keeping The rural and the poor in mind when making a decision to keep a receiver that otherwise makes no sense in perhaps a very urban setting where disasters are not that big of a problem, like the Chicago area where I grew up.
Well, I love finding new and different FM stations while traveling. I confess I haven’t listened to AM in years, in the cities there is often a lot of interference…
That being said, they should be required to have better shielding on their electric motors
Am i the only one who still mostly listens to AM radio when in the car?
Obviously this is just broadcasters wanting to maintain their captive audience. The “what about the apocalypse” argument is just the standard “won’t someone think of the children” misdirection. In an emergency a 120V AC inverter is far more useful equipment to have in a car than an AM radio.
For many decades, having a radio in a car at all was an optional extra. Probably in the 1970s or so it became pretty standard. I see no issue with an automaker deciding to omit AM radios if they think customers prefer that. The market will decide. There's no reason to mandate a radio of any kind in a car.
This is from a linked article. The market doesn't come into play when it's safety infrastructure. You think if you make paying for fire and police optional everyone will pay for it? what are the consequences of not putting out the fire in one house when the neighbors do pay and the fire spreads. The market is moot when it comes to safety issues.
"AM radio plays a critical role in our public safety infrastructure. As seven former heads of FEMA have explained, AM’s resiliency combined with the long distances AM signals propagate means ‘the success of the National Public Warning System hinges on the use of AM radio.’ I agree. Americans know in times of emergency that they can turn to AM radio. I applaud Congress for its bipartisan action to ensure the continued reception of AM signals in all vehicles.”
So shouldn't it be mandated in peoples homes as well?
The public interest reason for mandating radios is so that drivers can receive emergency broadcasts.
Are we going to remove the power switch also to force people to have their radios on at all times in case there is an emergency broadcast?
There are road outrage/park status things still broadcast on AM
The issue Congress is missing isn’t AM radio, it is the willful RFI pollution by Ford and Tesla.
These motors should not be causing the issue because if they block AM reception in that car, they’ll do it for all cars around them.
I agree with that wholeheartedly. If a neighbor’s car is illegally transmitting on frequencies it’s not licensed for, and the neighbor’s the rare sort of jerk I would be afraid to talk to about it, I wouldn’t have qualms about reporting it to the FCC along with timestamped logs of when and on what frequencies. It could be entertaining to see the feds slap an injunction on someone to prevent them from starting their car.
(NB: It’s way better to talk to your neighbors, obviously. I think we all know at least one knucklehead who wouldn’t respond to reason. I’d reserve this drastic measure for that sort of situation.)
I haven't used AM radio for years. It does feel like it would die out if cars stopped including it, but this law seems like it's fighting the inevitable. I'd rather have internet access viewed as a public utility and/or better Internet privacy laws.
Interesting read -- I appreciate their emphasis on what AM radio has mostly become ("divisive, grievance-filled infotainment") and that if Congress were to legislate AM radio as "public good", it should actually deliver a public good, not right wing corpo garbage.
I appreciate that people still find AM radio useful, nostalgic, etc. This feels like something that should not be regulated. Let auto manufacturers decide to include it or not, consumers will vote with their wallets. I doubt most people will miss AM radio all that much.
When living in the unassailed peace and prosperity of a Western society in the post-Cold War era, it's very easy to forget that profound security and emergency crises are still likely to occur sooner or later.
Preserving the viability of simple radio circuits that might receive public safety messages and the towers that can broadcast to them is a concern that operates on a different level than "will it make the car cheaper" or "who even listens to AM"
A lot of the systems and technologies that we've grown used to and rely on for our daily needs are extremely capable but also extremely fragile and brittle. Keeping backstop technologies from being lost altogether is fairly cheap and might make a significant difference if and when crises do arise.
If we are worried about emergency broadcasts, perhaps we should focus on portable solar/crank driven radios, instead of relying on one being bolted to your car, which in new cars also requires the entire car entertainment system to be working. And I'm not sure I'd risk going to my car, when the zombies are outside my front door.
When the power goes out, the car radio is the radio that works for most people. If we're talking emergency broadcasting, car AM radio is one of the more battle tested failsafe options.
Because the car has been the only place a radio might be located for the last few decades not because it was a great option in and of itself. Wanting to mandate emergency radios be made available to every person is a matter in and of itself. Even implementing distribution as part of getting a new car is a separate topic. Requiring it be built in to the structure of the car is neither a good option for safety or a good option for efficiency. The only reason we're even discussing it is it was the last place to use it normally.
A portable AM radio costs 10 bucks. Should we also mandate that cars come with first aid kit, a flashlight or defibrillator?
I'm guessing not defibillators but many countries require emergency first aid kits, hazard triangle markers/flares, fire extinguishers, spare bulbs, etc. to be carried in the car.
I also think the marginal cost of making a FM radio an AM/FM radio is less than $10. Probably more like $1?
Yes an AM receiver is extremely simple.
You think you're making a joke, but many countries do regulate that cars come with basic safety equipment. France is just one example.
Germany may require a first aid kit but it is not required in France. In either case, that argument is moot. We are talking about the USA.
Is life not as valuable in the US? Or are there fewer crashes?
The typical first aid kit doesn’t have anything that is likely to save someone’s life—and if it did I’m pretty sure the typical person wouldn’t know what to do with it.
> we also mandate that cars come with first aid kit.
This is standard in Europe. Yes, we should. Small, light weight, low cost, and "it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it".
And tire jack/spare tire, and a reflector vest.
I had a puncture in a hire car a couple of years ago and was distressed to find they no longer bother with spare tyres - at least in the UK. Not sure if this is some money saving escapade, or if it's because most drivers no longer knows how to change a wheel.
Instead had to wait hours for a tow truck and a replacement tyre.
Vest and first aid kit cost like €15, absolutely should have them - although I'm not convinced the typical "cut finger" first aid kit would be much help. Sure if you knick yourself changing your wheel (which of course you don't do any more), but I wonder what level of injury it's useful for when looking at a typical crash.
In the US some cars just have run flats. But the common case is to just have a donut spare even in cars that can theoretically go off-roading. I suppose the logic is a full size spare takes a lot of room and there are a lot of things that can go wrong beyond a flat and people who use their cars off-road will outfit as needed.
Requiring first aid kits to be carried in cars is a fairly common thing. And for a radio which needs power, is useful while the car is moving, ... it makes quite a bit of sense for it to be built in instead of being a required "you need to buy and carry this on your own" item
The issue is that lots of things might be useful, be in the USA we dont typically mandate useful.
It’s going to be very situational. What you should probably carry in Death Valley is pretty different from a Midwest winter.
That would not adress at all the point of the comment you are responding to : Even though it costs 10 bucks, there won't be any to buy if no one had use for them and when you may not be able to go the store buy a radio when the emergency happens.
Having an AED in every car would be really nice.
Cost benefit ratio would be very low
Just put a couple of leads from the starter. That should apply a good enough jolt
> Should we also mandate that cars come with first aid kit
Yes actually. Where I’m from cars are required to have a first aid kit and everyone who has a driver’s license needs to do a first aid course.
You’ll be at the scene of an accident you witness waaaaaay sooner than the ambulance. This stuff saves lives.
Wouldn't be a terrible idea.
"Voting with your wallet" works for small and frequent purchases. The bigger and less frequent the purchase, the less impact it has.
Exactly. And especially when the feature makes up only a tiny fraction of the whole feature set and production cost of the product, consumers are entirely at the mercy of the manufacturers. I'm not going to buy a different make over this. I'm just going to tolerate it unhappily. In the extreme case, manufacturers know that they could get away with dropping this kind of feature even if literally everybody wanted it.
In my software development experience, companies invoke this line of reasoning all the time.
Especially for things like cars where there's very few options and most of the auto industry does the same thing.
If you have even a single constraint outside the "industry norm" (like a manual transmission in the US, or potentially in the future an AM radio) you are all but guaranteed to have to give up nice to have features and/or pay a lot more
We mandated UHF channel reception for televisions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Channel_Receiver_Act)
I believe that mandating AM reception is perfectly reasonable - as the reason given for leaving it out is because auto manufacturers do not want to spend the money to reduce the EMI from their vehicles.
The total added BOM cost to add AM to a modern radio is zero - because they have a single chip that does both AM/FM.
Does that also mean that those cars could potentially be responsible for tons of interference in the AM band in the future?
My belief? yes, it does. The motor controllers are noisy.
If so, it's interesting the FCC hasn't stepped in since nearly all electronics need that certification.
There’s two types of electronics you’re referring to. There’s incidental radiators, like electric motors, switching power supplies, etc that the FCC understands that RF will be generated from, and they ask that these devices merely minimize their RF.
Then there’s Unintentional Radiators which is probably what you’re thinking of, which include computers and other electronics, which are regulated to limit RF.
It's a standardized part of the highway system in the same way as the standardized lines painted on the pavement, not just something to support or not-support based on current fashion. The linked article does a very poor job conveying this with its framing on radio-as-entertainment and on corporate consolidation of radio stations. Key phrases: “Highway Advisory Radio” or “Travelers Information Station”, neither of which are mentioned in the article.
Here are the technical requirements and implementation details of California's (CalTrans') system, for example: https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/research-innov...
And some general history: https://aairo.org/history.htm
I drive in the mountains in winter and regularly see 'tune AM xxxx for advisories' road signs, for example. It serves a useful public safety function. How expensive is an AM tuner for a manufacturer? Surely it's like, $5 or less in additional COGS.
The cost isn't in the radio, you have a single chip which is a complete AM/FM radio - the cost is in making cars quiet enough from an EMI point of view - something which, IMO, they should have to do anyhow to comply with Part 15.
RE "...they should have to do anyhow to comply with Part 15....." Yes I agree 110% So should al the manufactures of LED lights and numerous other gadgets ....
This seems like a super important fact for the discussion. Do you have a cite that it really constrains the rest of the car?
"Several automakers, most notably Tesla and Ford, have decided to stop putting AM radios in their electric vehicles. They claim their electric motors interfere with the audio quality of the signal and insist that FM and satellite radio are enough."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/am-radio-congress-automakers/
I can find other references as well if you want. EMI in cars has been an issue for a long time, automakers however did do the needed work suppress the noise from spark plugs, I do not see this as any different.
Thanks!
Any idea if the law requires the redesign (i.e., requires that the AM radio meets some level of audio quality when operating in the vehicle) or if it just requires the AM radio to be present and (somewhat understandably) the manufacturer don’t want to include an AM radio if it consistently sounds bad?
No, but they would to avoid customer complaints at the dealer level - I dont think its a huge cost to add needed filtering.
AM is useful in emergency situations, like the hurricane that wiped out Appalachia a week ago. The range of FM is shorter, so it’s more likely to be affected by the disaster.
Regulations are good for enforcing national security measures that the general public rarely has in mind when making a purchase. I tend to have a skeptical view of regulation, but this seems wise.
What would feel like something that should be regulated to you?
Keep in mind that things like hurricanes do happen occasionally, and the car's AM radio might be the only working communication medium...
That didn't work out very well for consumers buying GM cars that sold their driving data out the back door to insurance companies.
What’s the total bandwidth of the AM band? Does it make sense to reclaim it for wide area wireless networking?
The width of the AM radio band in the US is just a shade over 1 MHz, so there's not much room.
It's about 1MHz. Signals can propagate pretty far due to ionospheric interactions, which could be a positive or negative effect depending on your intentions.
I prefer the way talk sounds through AM vs digital. I realize special interests and money is involved but AM radio should continue to exist as some emergency communications fallback.
"While early radio amateurs harnessed its potential to connect and inform, the era of unlicensed amateur broadcasting ended during World War I due to fears that the new medium might be misused to spread foreign propaganda or divisive content."
You gotta wonder what the congress of bygone eras would have done with the current system we have of media and corporate control.
World War 1 era media regulations isn't something to be proud of or looked upon as wisdom, it is something to be deeply ashamed of. These are the people who arrested pacifists and brought us the abominable (in both senses) logic of fire in a crowded theater for objecting to draft and involvement in a foreign war of unseen proportions.
Yeah, imagine if a free people had been able to spread information contradicting and undermining the Wilson administration: https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/world-war-i-american-experie...
(It’s worth going through the whole slideshow.)
Probably the same as some of today's politico's and law makers have in mind when it comes to curbing free speech, e.g. John Kerry's wish to be free from the limits the first amendment puts on government restricting speech [1]: our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence. So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change or supreme court justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson's mournful declaration that [the] First Amendment is ‘hamstringing’ government from censorship [2]
[1] https://nypost.com/2024/10/02/opinion/john-kerry-says-first-...
[2] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/2926698/keta...
In other words, nothing has changed really in that those in power are wary of technology which allows non-government (controlled) entities to spread information.
Your link to KBJ is missing a ton of context that is extremely reasonable and apparently in agreement with her conservative peers:
https://reason.com/2024/03/19/hamstringing-the-government-a-...
Even the NY post at least (shockingly) had enough context to get to the further reasonable issue: we’re seeing mass disinformation, sometimes from foreign enemies, spread across the homeland at rates never before seen, and in doing its ripping apart the fabric of society. The way you’re being selective in these quotes is doing a disservice to the very real issue at hand. This is exactly a “new medium might be misused to spread foreign propaganda or divisive content.”
Nobody mentioned nor complimented the behavior of "her conservative peers." You're the one who has turned the discussion partisan.
The fact that "conservatives" are also bad on an issue doesn't make non-conservatives good or even different on an issue; that's from that weird pseudo-argument where people who passionately hate Trump mention that Trump also did some act or took some position that they're trying to defend.
It's become an argument that something is fine if the people who one claims are the evilest people in the world also think it is fine. Or that if evil people can get away with something evil, then that's unfair to the good people who have earned the opportunity to do evil? I have no idea.
Go look at where that KBJ quote (missing context and then being misinterpreted) is making the rounds: it’s from a very specific news bubble. That’s why I said “apparently in agreement with her conservative peers.” Both of those quotes were (to me) not made in good faith.
I don’t really know what you’re otherwise on about. I think you’re suggesting I’m making things far more partisan than I am. I’m just responding to the highly partisan selective quotes given.
Always worth following the money. Major broadcasters still using AM tend to be either sports or right-wing talk.
SF Giants are still aired on AM radio -- that's about all I use AM for these days.
AM is mostly news, talk, and sports for many years now. When I was a kid most new cars didn't even have FM radios yet and the AM stations were more varied, many played music, top 40, etc.
We've deprecated FM already; it should disappear either end of this year or in a couple of years (I haven't been following very closely; I don't listen to it either).
FM radio has not been deprecated, where did you hear that? And the infrastructure is not disappearing any time soon.
Norway shut down FM in 2023. Switzerland will shut it down in 2026. Various other governments are choosing dates - it's clear it's going away soon.
But Norway and Switzerland are two countries where I'd assume you don't see as many 20 year old cars as you do in the opposite parts of Europe. Many cars since the early 2000s don't have those standardized boxy stereos you could just swap anymore. You can make the point that people can just tune in through their phone but most people won't go through the hassle every time they sit in a (company owned, for example) car. I doubt FM is going away this decade, perhaps even longer, for most of the world. As for Europe, there's also Romania with their longwave AM broadcasts.
Norway still have local FM radios. It's just the big public and commercial stations which were forced to move to DAB. When that's said, I believe there are fewer and fewer local stations available.
Stupid question, but what do you listen to in the car without FM?
Surely playing music doesn’t require that you you connect your phone to your car?
All cars in Europe support DAB (digital radio) for the last ~5 years by law.
Pretty much all cars also support bluetooth, USB sticks, and some still have Aux in. Some support various internet radio/music (spotify etc). Most cars support Android Auto/Carplay, wired and wireless, giving you access to anything your phone supports.
I’ve never used radio in my current car. Yes, I connect my phone to my car and, if I don’t have cell reception, plenty of music in my library. That’s probably pretty normal.
I haven't listened to FM, AM, DAB, or anything broadcast since I've been able to connect my phone to my car (20 years?).
Why would I listen to what the station programmers decide (and possibly riddled with ads) when I can configure my phone to play whatever I want when I want?
The FM bands are more commercially 'interesting', because they're wider. One traditional FM band can fit tens of digital radio stations in, via DAB or DRM or HD radio etc.
AM bands aren't very useful for modern tech because you need huge antennas, can't do MIMO or squeeze much data in, etc.
Yes if you remember back to pre-digital era, there were maybe half a dozen FM stations in most areas. Even without "preset" buttons you could tune them almost by memory by how far you had to spin the dial. Now there are dozens of FM stations, often low power but it seems like almost every 0.2 frequency increment has something.
And what about buggy whip holders? Will no one think about the buggy whips?
I’ve wondered for a while why cars don’t simply ship with a tablet sized indentation, and adapters for popular tablets to connect an amplified speaker system. It appears the reason is because Congress thinks it knows best what type of audio system should be in a car.
We live in a world where the United States EV “success story” is now protected by 100% tariffs on competitors.