AM radio being removed from cars

Cafe Society
222

I loved Radio. I worked in the business for more than 50 years. But in the event of a local emergency, the last place I would expect to find any information would be a radio. I would turn to local TV stations, all of which have staffed news departments, even on weekends. And if we lost power I would use my phone or iPad to go on-line and look at their web sites.

Radio? Forget it! Several years ago I was working a weekend shift at a large market FM station. There was a tornado warning. With 4 stations in the building, the one I was working was the only “live” station, and thanks to me, was the only one that covered the event. The rest were automated. And I got my information from a co-owned TV station!

However, I do think AM should continue to be available in cars, not arbitrarily discarded because few people actually listen to it. Most people born after 1980 don’t even know it exists. It’s still a viable service for those who want what it offers, dismal as it is, but I would never expect to get any emergency information from any of our local stations, AM or FM.

However, if I lived in a market like Philadelphia, where 1060 KYW has been doing an excellent job of local news since 1965, I might feel differently.

223

I posted this in the other thread.

The federal government has an Emergency Alert System (EAS) run by FEMA, FCC, and NOAA. It has several mechanisms to broadcast alerts and AM radio is the last option. Technically speaking, there’s nothing better than AM radio – it’s low power to transmit, the network of hardened radio stations are in-place, and it’s range is massive.

There aren’t going to be examples of why we need this system – it’s a last resort. It’s unlikely that we would ever need it. If we did, it wouldn’t be “there’s a flood in your area”, it would be “survivors are gathering in Des Moines”.

AM radio in cars is useful for this scenario – they’re mobile, have their own power source, and are temporary shelter.

It’s not the only solution. Instead, we could:

  • require all buildings to have a battery backed up AM radio (there are fewer buildings than cars)
  • hand out portable AM radios to everyone

However these are completely new initiatives that would be harder to implement compared to forcing the status quo of AM radios in cars.

Personally I wish this wasn’t the case, but I see the logic. Massive enterprises are usually messy and have sub-optimal, hybrid solutions for historic reasons and inertia.

224

I know a LOT of people who have an emergency radio, and I suggest everyone get one.

Good.

Huh? no one is suggesting getting rid of car radios, just maybe AM.

225

I believe I posted about up thread on this law driving automakers to have AM radio capacity in their vehicles. I was actually assigned to review this two years ago when I worked for Nissan making media head units.

In my review I found that removing AM from existing vehicles would actually cost more than the savings. The AM and FM band chipsets have been paired together for decades and an FM only chip validated for automotive use would need to be developed at a substantial cost, best to just not use it.

The real issues has to do with having AM in electric vehicles requires an expensive filter circuit to keep the AM signal clear, and to design future vehicles without AM capability would be very risky considering the possibility of the bill requiring AM passing. To go back later and add AM back would be very expensive. So of course they decided to keep it in future designs that are just now coming to market.

Myself, I have no love for AM and never use it. If not for government regulations no manufacturers would have it. They make more money when you stream services through their telecom services.

226

So the apocalypse, then. We need AM radios in cars so that those who aren’t vaporized instantly will know how to die somewhat more slowly.

227

Not just an apocalypse, but major storms like Hurricane Katrina. AM broadcast from an AM station in New Orleans running off a generator is credited with saving lives.

How did radio save New Orleans? – Massachusetts Daily Collegian How did radio save New Orleans? – Massachusetts Daily Collegian

228

I’m not disputing that an AM radio can be useful as a last resort if all other communications have failed.

What I dispute is that they are SO urgently needed for this purpose that Congress needs to mandate that they be built into every single automobile on the road, and the safety angle is being oversold to conceal the corporate welfare that this bill actually is.

229

I actually still listen to AM radio. I travel a lot by car from LA to San Diego and KNX radio not only comes in crystal clear wherever I am, but they have the most reliable traffic reporting and are also a CBS news affiliate. So I put it on for a half-hour and get traffic, news, sports scores, and weather without having to touch my phone. The handy mute button on my steering wheel handles their onslaught of ads for lawyers, tax services, medical products and life insurance commercials.

If there were a major emergency, my phone battery would only last so long without power. I could get a lot more time out of the car radio.

230

Yeah, basically. It’s just part of the overhead of a country with 340M people. As I said, there are other solutions, but would cost more to rollout.

If it’s any consolation, I don’t think AM radio is doing the heavy-lifting of radicalizing conservatives anymore. TV and the Internet have taken up that mantle.

231

Yeah, it drives me nuts when I’m researching something and find it in The Dallas Morning-News or the New Orleans Times-Picayune or somesuch mid-market paper that I am unlikely to ever need to read again, and I have to pay for a month subscription or such. The fees aren’t onerous, but I don’t want subscriptions to all these papers, I just want access to one article. I might pay a few cents, or I might pay a subscription to some all-encompassing news subscription service that covers all papers, or at least a sizeable portion of them, so I can just pay one subscription and have access to articles throughout the network. But at the current model, I have to pay individual subscriptions at every little paper I come across (thankfully, my Chicago Sun-Times doesn’t force subscriptions to read their content, and is run as a non-profit.)

232

Couldn’t you charge your phone with your car? It would use a trivial amount of power.

233

On many cars the power to the various USB or cigarette lighter / accessory ports is not live until you wake up the car. Which is then consuming a lot more power running all the car’s electronic systems.

234

It was years ago that I attended an emergency management conference in Kentucky where they were unveiling a new improved Emergency Broadcast setup. This one involved100% FM radio stations, rebroadcasting warning from one end of the state to another. The broadcasters in the audience took one look at the map of repeater stations and said, “The signals don’t overlap. Sure, those three stations will cover the entire western part of the state, but they can’t pick up each other.”

We need AM radio in cars in the Midwest where cities are far apart and people don’t live in reach of FM radio stations. We also need fully-staffed stations because tornados strike at night, but that’s another issue.

We needed AM radio during the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 and the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis when thousands of people were stuck in their cars.

We needed AM radio during the historic Mississippi River floods when levees were breaking and Emergency Managment bulletins were being issued every 10 minutes telling people to evacuate this or that tiny community.

Just because a person doesn’t need AM radio where they live doesn’t mean no one anywhere doesn’t need it.

235

How many of those folks had 5G smartphones?

Just because someone might need one somewhere in some last-ditch scenario doesn’t mean Congress has to mandate that Sean Hannity have access to my drive time.

236

The local KCBS affiliate does traffic updates every ten minutes. Very handy in my traffic dense corridor. I don’t listen to it most of the time, but near rush hour(s) it can be pretty useful and the AM reception area is superior.

237

How many cell phone towers were out of service? How many were in service but overwhelmed by call volume?

238

Think of it this way:

If one can accept that making sure that as many Americans as possible have access to a functional AM radio, in case of serious emergencies, is a worthy idea, then having it installed in cars as a factory default is probably the easiest way to do this, and might well be less expensive, and more reliably available, than other alternatives.

About 92% of U.S. households own at least one motor vehicle, and up until recent years, and the rise of EVs, effectively all privately-owned U.S cars and passenger trucks were delivered to their original owners with an AM radio. While, as already noted, a lot of EVs don’t have AM radios right now, fully-electric EVs only account for around 1.2% of U.S. vehicle registrations. So, the percentage of households with a car with an AM radio right now is probably still around 90-ish%.

If one decided that mandating AM radios in cars is not the way to go, but that AM radios are worth making sure that people have, then it’d be a matter of providing portable AM radios to people who don’t have them…which would not be cheap or free, and would undoubtedly have lower adoption (i.e., the people who opt in would probably be people who are already somewhat prepared) than those people who are buying new cars.

Another advantage to the radios being installed in cars is that an owner generally knows where their car is, and knows that, in 99+% of cases, if the car will run (or, at least if it has a functional battery), then the radio will operate. If we instead decided to distribute portable radios, we would likely have a significant proportion of people who (a) cannot remember where they put the radio, (b) don’t have functional batteries in the radio, and/or (c) sold or gave the radio away.

In an ideal world, we’d have a well-informed, well-prepared populace, who already all have a “NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards” (NWR) – which often are able to pick up AM signals in addition to NWS emergency signals and emergency information for things beyond weather (earthquakes, chemical hazards, etc.) – and know where they have stored their radios, in case of an emergency. But, we don’t have that (and we probably never will).

239

I listen to AM radio on most days, and I assure, Sean Hannity does not have access to my drive time. He might be on another station. I wouldn’t know. That doesn’t sound like a mandate to me.

240

In 1989 and 1927, when the events you cite occurred?

241

You’re not their mark. Their mark is the low-information listener idly switching channels waiting to hear someone tell them it’s the gays and the Mexicans who made their daddy’s factory job go away and made women not want to date them.