Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/10/congress-fights-to-keep-am-radio-in-cars/

291 567 2 years ago

SF Giants are still aired on AM radio -- that's about all I use AM for these days.

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).

illini1• 2 years ago

FM radio has not been deprecated, where did you hear that? And the infrastructure is not disappearing any time soon.

londons_explore3• 2 years ago

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.

SoftTalker6• 2 years ago

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.

486sx33• 2 years ago

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

zephyreon• 2 years ago

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.

hinkley• 2 years ago

What’s the total bandwidth of the AM band? Does it make sense to reclaim it for wide area wireless networking?

pfdietz• 2 years ago

The width of the AM radio band in the US is just a shade over 1 MHz, so there's not much room.

Mr-Frog• 2 years ago

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.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

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.

uberman4• 2 years ago

A portable AM radio costs 10 bucks. Should we also mandate that cars come with first aid kit, a flashlight or defibrillator?

jalk3• 2 years ago

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.

ysavir• 2 years ago

"Voting with your wallet" works for small and frequent purchases. The bigger and less frequent the purchase, the less impact it has.

flaminHotSpeedo• 2 years ago

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

cvoss• 2 years ago

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.

bobthepanda• 2 years ago

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.

anonexpat• 2 years ago

That didn't work out very well for consumers buying GM cars that sold their driving data out the back door to insurance companies.

loeg• 2 years ago

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.

Aloha6• 2 years ago

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.

Aloha6• 2 years ago

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.

trinix9124• 2 years ago

Does that also mean that those cars could potentially be responsible for tons of interference in the AM band in the future?

Lammy• 2 years ago

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

hotspot_one2• 2 years ago

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...

christophilus• 2 years ago

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.

amatecha2• 2 years ago

No, the inclusion of AM radio will not be an actual dealbreaker for anyone, anywhere, who is buying a vehicle, so "voting with their wallets" is not a thing that will happen. Even for me, an amateur radio operator, I won't skip over a vehicle choice just because it didn't include AM radio. It's absolutely the kind of thing for the government to regulate, because individuals cannot make enough of a dent to affect whether AM radio is included, nor are they generally thinking about the criteria that a government regulator will consider, nor do individuals even care or realize what they are missing.

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

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.

mplewis• 2 years ago

Digital radio remains working at much worse SNR than intelligible fuzzy analog.

greesil• 2 years ago

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.

hulitu2• 2 years ago

Citation needed.

Tor34• 2 years ago

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.

sitkack2• 2 years ago

Is capable of, but does not currently. This isn't an argument for turning off AM radio.

kachapopopow3• 2 years ago

FM radio will still exist afaik. Nobody in my country used AM for a decade now.

LeoPanthera5• 2 years ago

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.

wakawaka283• 2 years ago

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.

ajsnigrutin4• 2 years ago

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.

dylan6043• 2 years ago

Then whatever decision Congress makes will have no affect on you

GJim2• 2 years ago

FM radio will still exist afaik. Nobody in my country used AM for a decade now.

Some fool has downvoted you for making a factual statement.

It is indeed the case that long and medium wave (AM radio) broadcasts have ceased in Ireland and several other countries; FM and DAB only here. Whether this was prudent thing to do for reasons of emergency broadcasting is a different question.

Aloha6• 2 years ago

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?

Gigachad3• 2 years ago

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.

winkelmann• 2 years ago

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.

stroupwaffle• 2 years ago

I’ve always wanted to drive in circles under power lines listening to the Jethro Tull Christmas special!

okanat• 2 years ago

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.

bigfishrunning2• 2 years ago

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

quantumfissure• 2 years ago

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.

jessriedel7• 2 years ago

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.

notjulianjaynes3• 2 years ago

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.

notjulianjaynes3• 2 years ago

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.

azinman23• 2 years ago

"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.

Nasrudith• 2 years ago

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.

SllX2• 2 years ago

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.)

FergusArgyll2• 2 years ago

  The Baraboo fire may have been as much a protest over the difficulty of local 
  German language courses as an expression of anti-German sentiment prevalent 
  across the nation at that time.

Are there easy German language courses?!

hagbard_c• 2 years ago

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.

azinman23• 2 years ago

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.”

LeoPanthera5• 2 years ago

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.

jessriedel7• 2 years ago

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.)

shiroiushi3• 2 years ago

Sure, but who's going to pay for this? Satellites (especially geostationary ones) are expensive. And SiriusXM doesn't provide a worthwhile service that compels enough people to subscribe; it's a wonder it's still in business. The main function of a music subscription service is to listen to music, but have you ever listened to SiriusXM? The audio is so compressed that it sounds terrible.

echoangle2• 2 years ago

Not sure if anyone would ever consider doing this due to the collateral damage, but I think a retrograde GEO orbit would work fine for destroying a lot of GEO Sats. You would need to spread out your impactor by detonating it but the fragments would have 6 km/s relative to the GEO Sats.

gwbas1c2• 2 years ago

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.)

maxerickson4• 2 years ago

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.

ajsnigrutin4• 2 years ago

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.

heavyset_go• 2 years ago

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.

numpad0• 2 years ago

Backup powers on cell towers lasts hours at most. After that they have to be individually reconfigured for generator powers and regularly refueled.

TV and radio stations are centralized, there's no millions of AM cell towers distributed throughout regions. You tow the power car or a fuel truck next to the station and it'll be good for multiple days minimum.

evanjrowley2• 2 years ago

The scenario you ask about is exactly why I subscribed to Sirius XM in the first place.

During the time I had Sirius XM, the entire point for me was to continuous radio coverage as I drove across remote parts of Appalachia where cellular, AM, and FM coverage inconsistent.

BurningFrog• 2 years ago

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!

analog313• 2 years ago

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.

verdverm• 2 years ago

Sirius wants $40/m for their space radio and most people have unlimited data plans without coverage gaps.

I'd bite if it was around $5 per month. Alas, their lowest $10 plan is going to use my data plan on cell networks

jlv22• 2 years ago

I had a new car that also came with a Sirius radio and 3 months free. I tried it, but found it often dropped out while driving through forested roads in my area. That made it annoying to listen to. I stopped using it.

shiroiushi3• 2 years ago

Modern cars in the US... are not only dropping AM radio but also now SiriusXM satellite radio

What's wrong with that? It's utter garbage. Only a fool would spend money on a subscription to it. You'd get better audio quality from a 1970s-vintage tape deck.

llm_trw2• 2 years ago

In an emergency, cellular will be the first to go.

As will all bank transfers.

I'm starting to sound like a crazy prepper for keeping enough cash and batteries to run my life for a week.

It's like people assume that if the internet dies they will too so there's no point thinking about it. Makes me wonder if living in areas what have natural disasters which knock off power once every few years vs ones that don't makes people think differently about this.

zzo38computer• 2 years ago

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.

notjulianjaynes3• 2 years ago

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.

1. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1230840/

benoau2• 2 years ago

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!

BoxOfRain• 2 years ago

I think there's some cases where the medium is part of the experience, Radio Caroline in the UK are a former offshore pirate who used AM by necessity in their heyday (they'd anchor the ship just outside of British territorial waters to circumvent the BBC monopoly). The revival station worked hard to convince Ofcom to let them operate on AM given their historic connection to the medium, but they were granted a licence and are probably one of the few AM stations in the UK not in terminal decline.

I'll miss Five Live on 693 kHz, I grew up coming back from Watford games with it on in the car crackling as we went under power lines. Test Match Special on 198 kHz longwave is already gone in preparation for Droitwich's closure.

dylan6043• 2 years ago

the radio is not only for the use in the car.

this is something that I think is being overlooked.

hnpolicestate• 2 years ago

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.

fmajid• 2 years ago

And what about buggy whip holders? Will no one think about the buggy whips?

resters2• 2 years ago

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.

ClassyJacket• 2 years ago

Because Tesla wants 10$ a month for Premium Connectivity.

But you can add a Carplay\Android Auto screen to most cars.

resters2• 2 years ago

True, but why pay for the obsolete tech in the first place? A simple amplified speaker system and slot for a tablet would cost a lot less and avoid much of the obsolescence one faces with cars. Oops, the obsolescence is a key part of the profitability of automakers.

Wait, the "big 3" should have gone under in 2008, likely bought up for scraps by Toyota, etc.

Even Tesla is propped up by 100% tariffs on competition.

We have no American innovation or reason these companies should even exist. This is not capitalism. It's a big wealth transfer to the incompetent, a giant corporate welfare project we should all be ashamed of.

userbinator• 2 years ago

This is the most important use of AM radio in cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_information_stati...

telgareith• 2 years ago

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.

fibers• 2 years ago

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.

isiahl• 2 years ago

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.

LeoPanthera5• 2 years ago

It was probably NOAA Weather Radio.

https://www.weather.gov/nwr/

beAbU• 2 years ago

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...

briandear5• 2 years ago

We’re talking about US legislation though. So it’s very relevant.

kmbfjr3• 2 years ago

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.

kstrauser7• 2 years ago

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.)

ralph842• 2 years ago

I got news for you, power lines interfere with AM radio too. Guess we need Congress to do something about those too.

klez3• 2 years ago

I got news for you: they already did https://www.arrl.org/power-line-noise

Arubis• 2 years ago

Always worth following the money. Major broadcasters still using AM tend to be either sports or right-wing talk.

btbuildem2• 2 years ago

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.

robertclaus• 2 years ago

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.

djha-skin• 2 years ago

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.

1: https://www.ktnnonline.com/events/

asdefghyk3• 2 years ago

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

d0gsg0w00f2• 2 years ago

There's just so many cell towers compared to radio broadcast stations. The very nature of the frequencies demand it. You would need ~$1m upgrades to every tower to retrofit with generators capable of lasting more than a week.

I think it would have a huge impact on monthly bills for cell service. Likely one that the general subscriber would not appreciate given the rarity of a knockout event.

kalleboo2• 2 years ago

In these more rural areas where it's more likely for trees to take out the power supply and restoration takes a long time, adding solar and battery backup would be much cheaper, and might even make it's cost back in reduced power cost during non-emergency times.

toast03• 2 years ago

On a unrelated note, it is my opinion that the mobile phone network should have reliability standards for power supply

Maybe they should, but they don't. In my neck of the woods, towers start dropping off after 4 hours, and in 6 hours, they're all gone. I don't have a real landline, but my DSL line has zero seconds of run time when utility power drops; sometimes I get lucky and the DSLAM maintains service through a trip/reclose event, but usually that's enough to drop the connection and then I have to reboot my modem because the two ends won't resync otherwise. (NBD, I have automation)

sidewndr464• 2 years ago

When I have an outage of any kind in my area the towers go offline after just a few minutes. If the power is off in the area, everyone pulls out their phone and starts using it for data. The towers can't handle that many active units and I lose service.

sidewndr464• 2 years ago

Arguing that AM "has significantly longer range" is quite foolish. The range of AM on the long wave band is the entire Earth, in some cases many times over. We use to allow very high power AM stations in the US that covered all of North America but that was phased out.

We still do allow this on the shortwave bands under very limited circumstances like WBCQ.

SoftTalker6• 2 years ago

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.

cma• 2 years ago

There are road outrage/park status things still broadcast on AM

klodolph3• 2 years ago

The public interest reason for mandating radios is so that drivers can receive emergency broadcasts.

SoftTalker6• 2 years ago

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?

GuardianCaveman• 2 years ago

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.”

jalk3• 2 years ago

So shouldn't it be mandated in peoples homes as well?

CatWChainsaw• 2 years ago

Microsoft's market "decided" that I wanted to log in to a computer with a Microsoft account, not me. The car manufacturer market "decided" that everyone wanted their every trip tracked, not me. The phone duopoly market "decided" that I didn't want a headphone jack, not me.

nimbius• 2 years ago

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.

Gigachad3• 2 years ago

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.

giantg24• 2 years ago

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.

mnw21cam• 2 years ago

Spark plugs triggered by an ignition coil and a distributor (AKA what cars were doing 100 years ago) is an arrangement that logically should produce so much interference, I struggle to think how modern electronics can top it.

kstrauser7• 2 years ago

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.

wslh3• 2 years ago

If I’m at home without power...

You can use a crystal radio for that case [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

sneak• 2 years ago

Most people don’t have those bags.

We mandate seat belts in cars when they could be aftermarket, too.

giantg24• 2 years ago

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.

dhon_• 2 years ago

Cars radios are battery powered so will continue to work during power outages, and large enough that adding an AM radio + antenna is not really an issue - unlike a mobile phone. Seems like a good way to ensure most of the population has access to emergency broadcasts.

Edit clarified car radios are battery powered

hansvm• 2 years ago

Regulations (ignoring riders, graft, and other political inefficiencies) are made with consideration for relative costs, compliance, ease of enforcement, ...

Forcing manufacturers to keep an AM antenna hooked up to the infotainment they're already including is pretty cheap, easy to enforce, and will have high compliance. Moreso because they already have the engineering expertise for doing so.

It also forces at least one AM radio into the hands of >90% American households, and since for most disasters there's some kind of an evacuation you'll likely be in your car rather than your home.

Could we draw a line in the sand somewhere else (e.g., building codes)? Sure. It'll be a higher cost solution that grandfathers in most homes as not having an AM radio though. Could we mandate disaster bags? It'll probably devolve into a cottage industry of the cheapest thing that's maybe legal with low compliance of households even buying something to that standard, but sure, we can do that too. A "greedy" (as in greedy algorithms) utilitarian perspective might be valuable here though. Instead of bikeshedding, does this bill help make people safer at an appropriate cost? If so, pointing to other lines in the sand is reasonable insofar as we want to make the law better, but not to refute the law in the first place. If not, we ought to be able to point to those reasons instead of other lines in the sand.

dataflow• 2 years ago

while I’m camping

If >1/3 of Americans lived in tents every day and >90% of them were in tents every year, then you can bet they'd have more such regulations around tent living, yes.

fitsumbelay• 2 years ago

This is the result of conservative/Right leaning interests lobbying Congress for years, because a substantial amount of AM radio programming in metro areas is conservative talk and religious programming. The connection to car audio systems is likely because drivetime is where stations and shows make their money. To polish the point to a blinding glare: this is freedom loving/rule hating American conservatives leveraging the government to force businesses to incur expenses because politics and feelings

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

why is being in a car a special case?

Because this is about America, a large and sprawling country where most residents can be safely assumed to own a car and would use it in the event of an emergency or disaster.

Obviously if you have the foresight to have a (AM!) radio in your home and your camping gear that's even better.

kelnos3• 2 years ago

Part of the point is compliance. If we were to decide that all homes must have an AM radio, you're not going to get great compliance. I would likely put off buying one because it doesn't feel necessary "right now", and I'm sure if there was a requirement for builders to actually build the radio into the home, old homes (read: nearly every single current home) wouldn't be required to have a retrofit.

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 don't have a disaster bag in my trunk, and I know exactly two people who do (they are volunteer SAR people, so big surprise there). You'll get very little compliance for this requirement. And if you want to try to enforce compliance, doing so will be incredibly expensive.

And that brings us to the other part: cost. Every (or nearly ever) car out there in the US today already has an AM radio, from my 2-year-old car to some restored antique from the 1960s. Most people don't have a standalone AM(/FM) radio these days, and basically no one has one built into their home. Can you imagine how expensive it would be to require all homes in the US be retrofitted with a built-in AM radio? Even requiring homeowners to purchase a standalone AM radio would be massively expensive. Especially when compared to the cost of $0 to require that all cars have them in it... because they already do! And for car makers planning to drop the AM radios: it will be at most a few tens of dollars added to their cost to continue to include them. A cost they can continue to pass on to their customers.

toast03• 2 years ago

While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

If you are in an emergency that requires evacuation, and you have means to evacuate, there's a good chance that means will be a car. In such an evacuation, having a universal way to communicate would be pretty useful. Although, it's not clear that people would know to listen to it.

Also, plenty of existing travel advisory systems rely on AM radio, so it's a mess if a new generation of cars can't tune to AM 530 when lights flash. The vast majority of existing cars in the US have an AM radio receiver, and there's a generation of classic cars that never upgraded to FM radio.

evanjrowley2• 2 years ago

Many cellphones could receive AM and FM radio through the 3.5mm headphone jack, before it was eliminated from most devices. It was possible, but people just never talked about it. You can't even find search results because the idea is so alien to most people in search engines.

Example: https://xdaforums.com/t/diy-fm-antenna-with-3-5mm-audio-jack...

If only we had legislation to bring those back...

dehugger• 2 years ago

Because people use their cars to escape disasters and being able to provide information like "I5 is deadlocked for miles, find an alternate route if you are fleeing from $catastrophe" is critical.

tw04• 2 years ago

I assume you’ve never driven across the middle of the US? Basically every state has emergency broadcast channels for significant snowstorms. Without AM radio, you’d pretty much be screwed.

Sitting in your house you have all sorts of options that aren’t available when you’re 30+ miles from the nearest town without any significant supplies on hand in your car.

zo13• 2 years ago

Because it's Yet Another Step in the wrong direction, and will be used as justification down the line to get rid of AM/Radio/Analog Radio a bit more or entirely. Keeping it around, or in a car, may be the wrong or inefficient way of solving the problem of comms in an emergency. But it does mean that we "force" the lingering of the tech in some way, so as to not let it be dismantled in the relentless march of whatever is causing these kinds of things to disappear.

It's a quirk or random fact of history that they got put into cars but not houses, but that doesn't mean we should get rid of it. It's smart and reasoning people like you and me that look at this and think "ugh, no need to have it in a car, we can have it in a bug out bag and it'll make cars cheaper, etc". But that kind of thinking is wrong for society past a certain point.

Before we know it, we'll own nothing, we'll rely on Daddy Government for everything, and we'll be happy! Maybe they'll let us own a Digital Government-Issued Codec-Infused Satellite Radio®, so they can reach us at all times.

m4rtink• 2 years ago

In the eastern block cable radio[0] was used explicitly like this - even though it normally worked as a normal radio, but as the receivers were powered by the cable & the system presumably had battery backup, it could be used in an emergency/apocalypse scenario.

And it also had the added benefit of being easier to control, as the receivers could not be used to listen to western radio like regular radio receivers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_radio

Moto7451• 2 years ago

why is being in a car a special case?

Cars are expensive to modify if possible at all. My recent make Audi and Porsches, aside from being completely unreliable, have no ability to have a third party head unit due to module coding lock in. Gone are the days of slapping a double din head unit where the LCD and AC controls went and wiring up to the CAN bus and analog audio cables.

However, it’s cheap to add in/enable a feature on a chip that’s already installed.

Similarly at home there’s probably already an AM radio somewhere even if you don’t think you have it. My home theater system has an AM radio. I have a clock radio somewhere. An older phone does AM radio. And unlike a car, an AM/FM radio is a $20-50 expense.

netdevnet5• 2 years ago

While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

This is about US policies. The US has a high dependence on cars so it makes sense that it is being singled out

1over137• 2 years ago

While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case? If I’m at home without power...

We're talking about the USA here. Probably a higher fraction of Americans have a car than have a home!

ndsipa_pomu2• 2 years ago

I'd consider that ensuring that mobile phones have AM reception would be better as some people don't own a car. Consider the case when you have a music festival and thousands of people are camping away from their car if they have one - almost everyone would have a mobile phone either on them (especially if they're using it to buy drinks) or in their tents.

rdtsc• 2 years ago

While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

Legislation is about cars specifically? Many already have AM radios. So it’s not about forcing motorcycles, houses, bus stops or bicycles to add radios just to keep the feature in the cars.

However that is not the only point of the proposal. It might be about the economics of running all the AM stations. So it’s a lobbying effort from that front. The emergency part just sounds more wholesome.

sybercecurity• 2 years ago

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.

From dealing with so-called "policy wonks" over the years, having a solution that requires people take action ahead of time and buy something new to replace something they had in the past is a non-starter. They most likely won't listen to anything after that. They are extremely risk-adverse in general so any change is seen as bad unless proven otherwise. It's easier (in their mind) to just force things to stay the way they are since they don't trust people to make decisions.

xutopia• 2 years ago

Why a car should be a special case is that that is what people will hop into in an emergency. Great to have it with you in those circumstances.

xpe6• 2 years ago

Let's think about the implied argument behind "why is this is a special case?". It is one thing to see this argument is deployed in a sincere effort to seek the truth and/or some better form of governance. It is another thing when this argument is simply a convenient thing to say to get what one wants.

There is often a nice antidote to the "why is this a special case?" argument that consists of two questions:

1. "What is your alternative?", and

2. "Is this alternative going to solve the problem better than what I proposed?"

In other words, if you don't like the current special-casey-ness of this policy, what alternative will you support that we can _actually_ put into practice?

If the person/organization does not actually support some workable alternative that will solve the problem better, that is quite telling! It suggests that solving this particular issue is not really a priority for them. Some people really are pedantic in the sense that they care about some logical consistency criteria more than solving particular problems. When one sees this in an individual, one might suspect various forms of confusion, poor prioritization, and maybe even some mental pathologies. When one sees this in an organization, particularly one making a public "argument", one should probably suspect they are deploying whatever argument suits their purpose, which is often just to derail progress on something they don't like.

Of course the meta-issue here is far from simple. It would be better if laws were enacted at the right level of abstraction, using some semblance of reasonableness. I often groan at the patchwork of laws that we see here in the US. But don't forget that in a democracy, the will of the people is far from rational, and the political will is even more mercurial. Very often one is better off taking what you can get rather than waiting for something better that may never materialize.

P.S. I find these sorts of discussions are interesting (in a sense), because it is hard to say to what degree someone is trotting out whatever logic simply suits their purpose. I've found this applies both to established interesting making "arguments" in public as well as individuals of all ages trying to defend what they have already decided is the best course of action. (Both are tiresome, frankly -- a part of human nature that I find rather counterproductive -- a suboptimal strategy that we've landed on.)

kawfey• 2 years ago

People don't prepare, so either pressuring or mandating congress to keep AM a standard is necessary.

There is already mature roadway infrastructure that provides localized announcements via AM - tunnels, bridges, mountain passes, low-vis areas, flood prone passes, hurricane evacuation corrodors, etc. I would imagine the cost of pressuring automakers to keep AM pales in comparison to the cost of updating public emergency communication infra.

I'm also a ham but I'm also a person who sometimes forgets there's an air compressor beneath my trunk floor.

johannes1234321• 2 years ago

Car is something where a regulation can be done effectively. Saying "each household has to have one" is a lot harder to implement.

For cars there is a limited amount of manufacturers and imports can be checked, too. Also there are regular inspections for cars.

And then there is a big density of cars, thus even for people who don't own a car it's likely there is a vehicle not far.

Thus it is quite efficient place to regulate.

lizknope• 2 years ago

I have a windshield glass breaking tool and seat belt cutter in my car. It also has a flashlight and an AM/FM radio. It has two AA rechargeable batteries but also has a hand crank. I can remove the batteries and use the hand crank at a reasonable speed to power the radio. I actually used it 20 years ago during an ice storm when there was no power for 5 days. I was able to hear news reports about where power was on and drive to a relatives house because the cell network was overloaded.

diebeforei4852• 2 years ago

There is the stupid underlying assumption that most people have cars, which is not true in the city where I live (only half of households do).

I do have an emergency AM/FM/WB radio at home that I take on camping trips.

llm_trw2• 2 years ago

And what if I'm Amish and don't want to use electricity?

So much the worse for being you.

K0balt3• 2 years ago

Off the top of my head… cars are perfect, Independent, mobile, distributed, self contained radio platforms. Travellers in cars need timely, relevant information during large scale disasters. Travellers in cars are frequently in areas that are underserved by other communication systems.

Cars are already nearly universally equipped with sound systems that include 99 percent of the components to make a good AM radio, and the cost of adding this capability to existing designs can be less than a dollar plus the antenna.

While following popular guidelines for emergency preparedness is a great idea, this is an opportunity to create a public good and a means (listeners) to maintain the required infrastructure for a robust, improvisable, resilient, nation-scale emergency communication system that will be there regardless of the level of preparedness of the average, clueless individual.

antonvs• 2 years ago

While that’s all true, why is being in a car a special case?

We’re talking about the USA. Cars are not special cases, they are the central case around which society is structured, at the expense of many other things.

wslh3• 2 years ago

And, don't miss crystal radios for AM [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

jalk3• 2 years ago

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.

giantg24• 2 years ago

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.

jcgrillo13• 2 years ago

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.

edb_123• 2 years ago

I guess you could say the same about fossil fuel cars and gas stations? I doubt that everyone keeps their tanks full at all times. And just imagine the amount of traffic on roads in such a situation, regardless of your preferred energy source. You'd be struggling to get anywhere at all, unless you're among the first few fleeing town.

4fterd4rk• 2 years ago

Ah yes good thing gas stations have an infinite supply of fuel ready to go that'll never need to be replenished in the face of unprecedented demand. Also we're very lucky that gasoline is such a stable material that it'll surely not cause problems in the event of "battle damage".

What is it about EVs that makes you people's brains turn off?

acomjean• 2 years ago

A sneak preview happened during the eclipse this year. Those with EVs found large waits for charging on the way home.

https://www.newsweek.com/tesla-charging-station-police-solar...

pkulak• 2 years ago

Except that ev “tanks” are full every morning. Besides, all cars are garbage when everyone uses them at once, until Texas finally builds their 200-lane freeway. Give me a bike with wide tires.

infecto• 2 years ago

This does not seem like a very strong argument. I suspect if there was a massive evacuation there would be a lot of strain on gas stations.

kelnos3• 2 years ago

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

Not just the ground stations! If we're talking about an attack, the attacker very well might have the capability to shoot down the satellites themselves, too.

AM radio is portable and decentralized. Sure, it can be jammed, but so can pretty much anything else that requires you to send information through the air.

zie2• 2 years ago

Shooting down satellites is still a very hard, expensive problem. If you have more than a few, chances are nobody will work that hard, without a very good reason.

hypeatei• 2 years ago

Any world where satellites are being shot down most likely isn't going to be around much longer regardless.

michaelteter• 2 years ago

If you are in a car, and you're under the age of 40, you probably don't even know how to switch to your AM radio. Unless you are one of the rare drivers who knows about AM radio and uses it, it's not going to be something you think of using while fleeing a catastophe.

It may have technical merits, just as horseshoes still do (because we do still use horses), but that doesn't mean we should force every car to have it. It certainly could be an option for those who see value in it.

rblatz4• 2 years ago

I’m in my 40s and have no way to receive AM broadcasts. My wife and I both have Teslas, and we don’t have any radio tuners in the house. I wouldn’t even notic if the Tesla didn’t have FM either, I’ve lived in my current city for 12 years and couldn’t tell you a single radio station in the city.

AM is dead, and FM is nearly there as well.

WalterBright2• 2 years ago

I discovered that simply attaching a long wire to the phono input on an amplifier enabled me to hear AM radio.

jojobas• 2 years ago

That would have to be all AM radio at once, or perhaps a local cable radio?

msla• 2 years ago

There arent any alternatives for major catastrophes that can top amplitude modulated radio.

OK, then ensure the radio stations actually have people in them. Otherwise, it's a false sense of security:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment

Because it was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home.

amelius• 2 years ago

It would be pretty easy for (say) a Chinese car maker to jam all AM radio in the entire country.

dartos7• 2 years ago

Sure, but that’s not a good argument against its usefulness in an extreme natural disaster.

Also like… I doubt regulations would stop them from doing that, if that was their goal.

cameronh902• 2 years ago

Maybe we need a standard AM emergency broadcast frequency akin to 121.5 on aircraft. Legislate that all fixed and car radio receivers are always tuned to it and activate automatically if there’s a broadcast. Then scrap the rest of the analogue radio broadcasting band.

squarefoot• 2 years ago

Then scrap the rest of the analogue radio broadcasting band.

Please, no. In case of disaster, I could dismantle a tool, take its motor, fix it to a fan propeller, connect it to a rectifier stage and obtain a wind/water generator, then I could take parts from low tech stuff not even remotely related to a radio and build a crude but functioning transmitter to send a SOS. Problem is that making it work on a certain frequency would be hard without instrumentation, therefore the more ears on multiple frequencies the best chances that some of them will hear my dit dah by mistake.

psychlops• 2 years ago

It's good to have some sort of communication during a disaster. There are many solutions, but you do not really have a reason to have AM legislated into a car.

iamwpj• 2 years ago

I don't understand why people are arguing against this. It's pennies to continue the service and utilizing an established system. All you have to do is say "yep, looks good". Why close this door?! There's literally no upside.

zooq_ai• 2 years ago

Why can't Emergency Alert System provide the same service.

As we continue to expand our Satellite System, this becomes even moot as we can broadcast via SOS text messages

MisterTea• 2 years ago

AM radio can be transmitted with a roll of wire and a relatively simple transciever from an FOB or refugee camp.

Don't forget it can be listened to using a crystal radio set that is powered from the radio waves. No batteries needed and it can't be detected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio#%22Foxhole_radio...

II2II• 2 years ago

I don't know what the situation is like in the US, but I was shocked to discover that there are no AM stations in my part of Canada. It is cool in tje sense that I can direct my antenna and pick up stations in Newfoundland and New York on a good evening, without dealing with interference from local stationd, but it would be positively useless in emergency situations. Even if distant stations broadcast useful information during an emergency, picking it up in a vehicle is unreliable. If the antenna is directional, the strength of the signal is going to vary wildly based upon the vehicle's orientation. If the antenna is not directional, you are going to have trouble with interference.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe that broadcast radio is an essential tool during emergencies. I buy phones with FM receivers and have backup battery packs. I have an AM/FM/SW reveiver with backup batteries. I have a VHF transceiver, and am licensed to use it in both amateur and maritime bands. But, realistically, I don't see how most people would benefit from the few advantages that the AM broadcast band offers. You would likely be better off improving the resiliance of FM broadcast infrastructure. Even then one must accept its days are numbered.

askvictor• 2 years ago

I was hiking in remote Tasmania once, using an AM radio to try to get weather forecasts as there was possibility of snow which would affect one part of our walk. I was getting up pre-dawn to listen, and found that I could not tune in to any local stations, but was able to pick one up from about 2000km away. I figure this is due to the radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere (as intended), but the angle possible with this is relatively shallow, so a greater distance is better than a shorter distance when you haven't got line of sight (there were mountains in the way of most nearby cities).

The moral of the story is to ensure that the broadcasting station needs to describe its location clearly (and the listener to listen for the station's location), as it may be a _long_ way away.

hersko• 2 years ago

Am i the only one who still mostly listens to AM radio when in the car?

codexb2• 2 years ago

cool story bro

ralph842• 2 years ago

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.

jcgrillo13• 2 years ago

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.

analog313• 2 years ago

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.

usefulcat2• 2 years ago

Also it seems like the interference shouldn't occur if the vehicle is not moving or is turned off, and that's still useful for emergency situations.

2rsf• 2 years ago

But then you are merely equipping the car with emergency equipment, so why not a knife and water filters?

bcoates2• 2 years ago

As far as I can tell, electric cars are regular old FCC 15b devices, but the emission limits are generous enough that an AM radio can't operate from inside of one, the same way you wouldn't expect an AM radio sitting on top of a generator to do well.

jcgrillo13• 2 years ago

Thanks this is interesting context

imoverclocked2• 2 years ago

That is interesting from a mass-implementation standpoint. I wonder how many Tesla vehicles working right next to each other would squash AM reception for a given radius around the group of cars with current EM emissions.

blisterpeanuts• 2 years ago

I have (my kid has actually) a 2022 Nissan Leaf with AM receiver. Perhaps newer EV designs are different in some way, such as the placement of the electric motors. Stellantis has stated they moved the radio receiver components away from the EV related systems to maintain good reception.

_hyn313• 2 years ago

AM antennae are simple affairs -- usually just a stick of carbon with a tiny spool of wire around it. Seems like you could just relocate it to an end of the vehicle and put a bit of shielding around it. If that doesn't do it, then the car is a massive emissions vehicle. (pun intended)

codexb2• 2 years ago

The FCC interference requirements are designed to prevent your usage from interfering with others. It's perfectly acceptable to interfere with radio signals for yourself. Anyone who grew up in the 90's and had a car without a built in CD player has used an FM-transmitter to broadcast the audio of a portable CD player to their radio, interfering with any other FM signals on that frequency, albeit in a very small area around the car.

dark-star• 2 years ago

Clarification: everyone in the US. These small transmitters were not legal in many other parts of the world

_hyn313• 2 years ago

Still useful today. I still use an Avantree (https://avantree.com/collections/bluetooth-transmitters-rece...) on my visor everyday to broadcast from my bluetooth phone to my early 2000's vehicles with "vintage" AM/FM/CD stereos that I think are really cool and I'm quite unwilling to downgrade just to get bluetooth.

moffkalast• 2 years ago

Kind of ridiculous for something that could be solved by a paper thin wrap of copper mesh around the motor.

gwbas1c2• 2 years ago

Years ago I met someone who was a high up / owner of a EM testing facility.

He took me of a tour of his facility, and we went into chambers that were radio and acoustic silent. I then asked, "uhm, normally electronics aren't this big, what are you testing in these?"

"Oh, we test cars for EM in here"

"Uhm, those doors seem a little small for a car. Are you testing the Tesla?" (At the time, the very first Tesla Roadster wasn't on the market, but it was probably the only car I could think of that would fit through the doors.)

He then lowered his voice and got very cagey. "We don't talk about our customers" was his response.

A few minutes later the tour ended in his office. He asked me to walk around his desk. There were pictures of him all over the Tesla Roadster, clearly excited to have it grace his presence.

The funniest thing: He wasn't allowed to drive the Roader.

(Conversation is paraphrased)

---

Ironically, I wonder how easy/hard it will be to have a functional AM radio in an electric car. Is it one of those things where all you need to do is twist the right arm, or is it something that's practically impossible?

rightbyte2• 2 years ago

Put the antenna on the roof and the receiver at the buttom of the antenna.

ICEs have electric motors too.

seizethecheese• 2 years ago

Why does it feel like regulations always have a well defined safety argument and a less defined, less “important” argument to the contrary?

tehwebguy• 2 years ago

I recently huddled around a radio with friends and neighbors to see if there were any updates on restoring our power, water, internet or cell service in NC post-Helene. Pretty sure it was FM but I reallllly didn’t expect to ever “need” radio again!

dj_gitmo• 2 years ago

I am surprised the a liberal senator would try protecting AM radio. AM talk radio is very right wing and it definitely contributed to the radicalization of the American right-wing. I remember when AM radio was a major boogie man for liberals.

FergusArgyll2• 2 years ago

The urge to regulate is stronger...

VyseofArcadia• 2 years ago

We need to have a conversation, as a society, about how we cannot rely exclusively on complex things with many modes of failure. We need simple tools to stick around for when we hit one of those many modes of failure.

I own a robotic vacuum cleaner.

I also own a broom.

j45• 2 years ago

Radio is important. Both in and out of a car.

Having one in a car always has it with you when you’re in the car, where a portable one might not be with you or have batteries.

1970-01-01• 2 years ago

Why doesn't someone train AI with AM? It's mostly talk radio, and more factual than the Internet.

sigmar• 2 years ago

It's mostly talk radio, and more factual than the Internet.

are you joking? coast to coast is worse than 4chan

kazinator• 2 years ago

In the Vancouver area of British columbia, Canada, an important AM station recently went defunct: AM 730 Traffic. That was like the only reason to tune into AM anything around here while driving, unless you're into talk radio. Problem with that traffic station model is that you don't have a captive audience. Once the listener groks the traffic situation for their trip, they flip to another station (more likely than not FM, by the way) or their bluetooth or wired connection to their phone. That listener heard one or two ads at most (often none at all). People not driving have no reason to listen, either.

All the music stations encourage people to listen all day. "We are here for you while you work, or for your entire drive."

amatecha2• 2 years ago

wtf, they shut down AM 730? That's brutal. It used to be essential listening on the drive out to work, back when I actually drove to/from work.

INTPenis• 2 years ago

Why don't I ever see a headline like "Congress fights for affordable healthcare for everyone" or "Congress fights for worker's rights for everyone". They're fighting for AM radio instead.

Maybe they're not fighting for the people at all.

To keep it technical, speaking of a disaster warning system, Israel uses text messages to warn their citizens of attacks. It doesn't get more battle tested than that.

paganel• 2 years ago

Doesn’t seem to have worked a year ago to this day.

jve• 2 years ago

TIL that AM radio is still a thing... But I see valid use cases listed. I dunno if it would even click in case of emergency to even try turning to AM instead of FM.

I live in Europe, own a US car Toyota Sienna and I cannot use FM radio (completely) because turns out (and I also learned it few weeks ago) that in US, only uneven channels are used (101.3, 101.5, etc). And I cannot tune it to 101.4!

consp• 2 years ago

Can we at least have non US radios in the EU in that case? AM is dead here, while for the US there might be a use case.

yourusername• 2 years ago

Does it matter if your car can receive some extra bands you don't use? I only use DAB in my car but it can receive AM/FM also even if i've never used that functionality.

juliangmp• 2 years ago

The radio industry has been fighting back, lobbying for legislation that would force carmakers to install AM radios as a matter of public interest.

Kinda stopped reading there, it's clear that this is just a desperate attempt to save a dying market for no reason.

dr_dshiv• 2 years ago

AM radio has a strong political bent. Maybe that’s why?

briandear5• 2 years ago

The AM radio market isn’t dying at all.

loongloong• 2 years ago

The China Government seems to be referencing the USA and EU regulations to also mandate it for vehicles in China

https://www.nrta.gov.cn/art/2024/9/19/art_114_68922.html

translated : https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=https%3A%2F...

quailfarmer2• 2 years ago

We’ve added digital side bands to “FM” broadcast radio. We’ve fully replaced analog broadcast TV with digital. We can solve this problem, with proper planning.

Develop a digital modulation that captures human voice and degrades gracefully, fund the development of ICs to demodulate it, require AM stations to install a new modulation equipment, and gradually migrating all stations to a hybrid mode with both analog and digital transmission. All new cars must use the new version, which is far more resilient to interference. In 50 years you get to turn the analog transmissions off.

tjohns2• 2 years ago

Why would you turn the analog transmission off?

Being able to pick up a station with virtually any radio ever built, or even a simple circuit you can build from spare parts in your house [1]...even if you're on the fringe edge of reception (though it might not sound great) is entire point of AM. You would be throwing all of that away.

Digital is a convenience. Analog is a lifeline.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio

alnwlsn• 2 years ago

This already exists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio

sandworm101• 2 years ago

No mention of the relevant politics? AM radio is talk radio, the home of the strongest political opinions. AM radio targets a narrow demographic: those with enough money to own a car and drive to work, but not sophisticated/rich enough to pay for streaming services. The protection of AM also rings true with the older generation who wish to slow or reverse the pace of technological change. I realize that HN attempts to avoid politics but this is a solidly partisan issue and part of the larger "culture war".

Eumenes• 2 years ago

AM radio targets a narrow demographic: those with enough money to own a car and drive to work, but not sophisticated/rich enough to pay for streaming services.

91.7% of American households have at least one vehicle. Podcasts are free?

childintime2• 2 years ago

Any time my car radio switches to AM there is major discomfort. It's time to say goodbye, and the future should be on the phone.

Any time congress gets involved many millions are spent. Again when a law is passed. Again by the manufacturers. These costs mandate the future should be supported, not the past.

Mandate that cell towers, at least along major highways, survive indefinitely on solar. A degraded service level would be acceptable, no video for example. Require satellite internet fallback! Do it now.

Any highway parking spot should have abundant charging opportunities (on solar) and drinking fountains. Prepare for the inevitable big disasters coming.

googledocsftw2• 2 years ago

A bit of crackle and you wanna throw out AM?

childintime2• 2 years ago

No, AM is never used. So there is no station, just some loud hammering noises. The urge to get rid of that makes driving more dangerous.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

National security means anti-fragile technology.

sanj• 2 years ago

A recent software update enables AM radio in Ford EVs: https://es.ford.com/support/how-tos/ford-technology/software...

FrustratedMonky4• 2 years ago

It's such a no-brainer to keep the AM option, I'm not sure why this is controversial.

It's like we've become so comfortable we've forgotten the experience of a disaster. So comfortable with our phones always being on.

Who wants digital lock in during an Emergency.

Phone : Alert. "We've been notified there is an Emergency in your area, please download the app to find out more"

kj4ips• 2 years ago

I have a vehicle w/o AM radio, and our local traffic authority uses an AM station for traffic and other civil alerts. It's really annoying that it is absent.

The FM is also an afterthought, the antenna system under-performs horribly, and appears to actually be //inside// the cabin.

javier_e06• 2 years ago

There was a Netflix movie last year or so about an attack on the US where people outside NYC was meandering aimlessly trying to get Internet signal in their phones while NYC appeared to be under attack I they where lost without their phones. Are people that dense? All military radios support AM radio waveform I would not purchase a vehicle without AM radio support.

albrewer• 2 years ago

Are people that dense?

did you not observe 30% of the world population's actions between 2020 and 2023?

jlv22• 2 years ago

I owned cars with an AM radio for 30 years. I never used it.

I've now owned cars without an AM radio for 10 years. I don't miss it.

sn• 2 years ago

The way to do this is with MA3, not traditional AM:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/12/03/2020-25...

"In addition, digital broadcasting allows visual and other metadata, such as song and artist identification, station identification, and emergency information, to be transmitted along with the audio content."

https://www.radioworld.com/tech-and-gear/upgrading-an-am-to-...

It looks like MA3 has a longer range:

https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/guest-commentar...

adolph• 2 years ago

A moderately compelling argument for mandating AM radio receivers in vehicles is that AM Radio has an incumbent position in emergency broadcast of communications.

Would a small portable radio optionally powered by a vehicle's accessory port suffice? Does the AM Radio feature need to be tightly integrated with the vehicle's other systems?

Here is an example of one that retails for $11, albeit using 2x AA batteries.

https://www.amazon.com/J-166-Transistor-Excellent-Reception-...

diebeforei4852• 2 years ago

I have a portable AM/FM/WB radio in case of earthquakes or other disasters (it's the Wirecutter recommended one).

This regulation seems somewhat sensible but I'm not sure what the point is if it interferes with EV motors.

Componica• 2 years ago

In our area of the rural Midwest, a local AM station made a niche for themselves being the critical go to point of information during tornado, storm, flooding, and derecho warnings. Sadly as the storms keep showing up more often and more powerful, I've actual bought a couple more portable AM/FM radios spread around the house because of it.

There have been several times being in a car during those warnings that that AM station was the only reliable source of information.

Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars

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