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.
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.
Edit clarified car radios are battery powered
Why can’t the Android manufacturers just be accountable by themselves?
Otherwise if that's the drum you want to beat, android makers were the first to push bigger and bigger screens ("phablets") and opened the door for Apple to also inflate it's devices, to the point where 6" is considered "small" by today's standard.
It’s irrelevant to Android phones whether Apple made the choice first or how they did it. Android manufacturers are able to be accountable for their own decisions.
it’s even more irrelevant that Android phones had larger screens first, unless people on the Apple side are blaming Android manufacturers for the push to larger screens.
I don't see how the two are exclusive.
In fact your own reply starts of with blaming solely Apple. Your only mention of Android is how they did bigger screens first.
This sub-thread started about Apple, addressing it first feels logical to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41762229
My other response was enterely focused on Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177226
I would be that person, but the iPhone mini showed the market just isn't there for it :(
Then of course Google just went bigger for their garbage 5G variant of it which just trashed battery life, and all subsequent phones doing ML with the Tensor processor also went bigger.
It makes me think it's not a matter of commercial success, or even if there's a market for it. The issue is probably the massive incentives on the maker side to push a bigger battery to deal with more computation and push the device price upper to get better margins.
It seems like something that ought to be technically doable, but perhaps the market isn't there compared to just selling standalone little radio-things?
I guess it could make sense if the phone is driving your wireless earbuds or you want to change stations using Siri, but yeah other than that, I dunno.
It was true at one point - I owned at least one phone with a disabled FM radio.
Some cursory checks on my current phone suggest it's got one (just doesn't work for some reason with FM Tuner apps).
But, there are folks complaining about how Samsung broke FM tuners with an update on this phone a few years back. Who knows what that is about.
The story goes that analog radio receivers are built-in to nearly every smartphone, but most lack the app or drivers to access them.
I imagine adding analog FM radio isn't a major selling point on a phone where you can already stream the digital feeds from most FM stations – not to mention Spotify, Youtube, Apple Music, etc.
That will use up your data.
By contrast FM radio is free, and we have some bloody good BBC radio stations in blighty.
American culture leans “against the feds”, it really is wackamole trying to shut them down, on the other hand it drives more subscriptions to satelite radio which is good for the gdp, so win win.
Hell I believe this is even the case in London, just not as extreme.
Those pirate radio stations are still out there just with a low power license and a sheen of legitimacy now.
I’m the one who said it’s weird we single out cars to have AM radios, but my wife actually listens to live sports on AM during her work commute. If I had to pick exactly one of FM or AM to have in our car, it’d be AM without a second thought.
Unfortunately my antenna can't pick up the FM signal, and iPlayer is geo-blocked, but... I do seem to be able to stream some BBC radio stations and program[me]s via the magic of the internets.
https://ipodwiki.com/wiki/IPod_Radio_Remote
Shows Apple can do FM if they put their mind to it.
RIP iPod Classic (2007-2014).
Where do you live that you're worried about data? Is this an American thing?
I've lived in Asia and Europe and data is so cheap and plentiful that I'm never changing my behaviour to save a few MBs.
Or are you not worried about data but you're trying hard to make a case for this FM antenna that no one wants in their phones?
At least start your sentences with a capital letter, they might at least have the veneer of being worthwhile to read.
On the other hand, everyone can get their own personal "radio station" via streaming...
(That might just be a strategic device by the incumbent public transmitter operator though – they have ubiquitous FM coverage, which helps avoid competing programs on DAB out by decreasing the utility of buying a DAB receiver.)
An AM radio doesn't even need a battery, I built a crystal set as a child.
Or, you can just use the old wood stove in my childhood home. We had some wire racks for drying gloves and mittens supported above it, and the whole contraption played the 670khz radio station broadcasting about 15 miles away, sometimes at an annoying level of volume. You could quiet it down with some wet gloves, though.
It also would shock you when it was being loud. Somehow, the demodulated signal ended up at a pretty high voltage. I’ve often tried to imagine the circuit that was going on there between the stove, grounded at the bottom and with a 30 foot high metal chimney, the aluminium foil backed insulation in the house, the two metal pipe penetrations connected to the huge foil planes 9 feet apart on the first and second stories, the gasketed top of the stove that was somewhat insulated from the grounded base, and attached to the chimney at the top, and the corroded bolts that held the bottom to the top.
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.
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.
Do we have studies that test this hypothesis? Did people actually fail to replace the old thing by the new, or did it turn out okay?
I think this number is waaaay smaller than anyone thinks. Especially with modern buttonless car systems.
To replace the AM in cars isn’t just the cars - it’s all the signage and transmitters, for regional information.
And a common use case for this would be people evacuating a disaster area. Being able to put up a simple transmitter with localized instructions would be a very good thing. As it stands there are government transmitters out there running looped broadcasts with general information and closure information.
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.
I’m not far from places where you’re legally required to use tire chains in bad weather. You have to provide your own.
Also, in grand scheme of things, AM tuner is probably a fraction of a dollar. Optimizing it out is weird.
> 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.
In Germany, the inspector would fail you pretty quickly. Consequently compliance is very high, and somehow not very expensive.
Nope, here in Italy at least it's not compulsory.
Or where you talking about what would happen if such a mandate existed?
It's a first aid kit, as well as accident signaling cones and reflective vest.
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.
And note that AM is much more forgiving of terrain than FM. You can still be shadowed but the lower the frequency the less likely you are to be shadowed from the transmitter.
Example: https://xdaforums.com/t/diy-fm-antenna-with-3-5mm-audio-jack...
If only we had legislation to bring those back...
Meanwhile commercial FM is like ~3.5M wavelength; you're pretty close to a quarter wave with a normal headphone wire (~3ft).
You mean half-wave, right?
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
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.
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.
You can use a crystal radio for that case [1].
There are probably more homes with a charged USB power bank that could power an FM or DAB radio than homes with a crystal radio or the means to build one.
We're talking about the USA here. Probably a higher fraction of Americans have a car than have a home!
If where you are at, nobody has cars.
And you loose power. Does everyone just huddle at home with zero information while some tidal wave is coming at you?
If you say, well we keep a battery powered Radio handy at home. (and we are so prepared we replace the batteries every year)
Well, then that is the answer. Cars already have radios, so keep the AM option available.
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.
This is about US policies. The US has a high dependence on cars so it makes sense that it is being singled out
Really, if you are isolating in your house, and loose power. What are you doing? A lot of people would need to go out and sit in the car with the AM radio to get any information.
I suppose to make it fair, every house should also be required to have an AM radio.
Maybe just to prevent digital lock in.
I'd hate to be in an Emergency, and suddenly I can't get any information because all I have are digital devices, An app on the phone, and the app was discontinued, or no longer supported.
So you probably want to enforce a check on having am radio and that it actually works because young folk won't notice it not working as they won't be using it. This means that the enforcement will likely fall at least partially on the car owner. I wonder how younger folk, who have less financially stability and are not as interested in the radios as the previous gen, will react to this potentially new requirement.
This being the US, I would expect the kind of people that argue against socialised healthcare to also argue against on the basis that each person should be capable of purchasing a $10 am radio receiver and keeping it with themselves, their emergency bag or their car for emergencies without needing the state to play nanny
Nothing about this is car specific except it makes for a good example, and people like to whine anytime cars are mentioned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Older phones used to be able to play FM, requiring a headphone cable to be used as an antenna.
For the purpose of emergency broadcasts, maybe using both AM and FM would make sense.
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.
I do have an emergency AM/FM/WB radio at home that I take on camping trips.
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.)
So much the worse for being you.
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.
We mandate seat belts in cars when they could be aftermarket, too.
(In practice, I like any car I ride to have seat belts. But I support the argument that since there's no externalities from other people not using seatbelts, we shouldn't force them to have some. And in any case, the orthodox way to deal with externalities is via a tax, not via a ban.)
That argument is wrong. There are absolutely externalities to allowing other people's car rides to be less safe for them, even if no one else is injured or killed because of it.
Every injury or death makes health care more expensive for everyone, even in a place like the US that don't have socialized health care. The costs of these emergencies are largely borne by health and car insurance companies, and those costs mean everyone's premiums are going to be just a little bit higher.
Also consider the effects on family (or friends) when someone dies (or is much more severely injured) because they weren't wearing seat belts. Maybe the breadwinning spouse dies or becomes disabled, and now the remaining family has to go on welfare. Maybe it was a single parent who died, and the kids end up in the foster system. In the disability case, insurance (which might be Medicare) companies will have to pay for rehabilitation and possibly care for the rest of the person's life. Hell, just the emotional anguish of a loved one dying in a situation where it was easily preventable is an externality worth trying to eliminate.
Insurance is a bet between you and the insurance company. If you decide to engage in extra risky behaviour, then a competent insurance company will charge you extra. (Or rather, more PR friendly but equivalent: your insurance company will offer you a discount, if you can prove that you are exercising, don't smoke and always wear a seatbelt, etc.)
Realised average accident rates for certain parts of the population can help you fine tune your risk models, but they aren't mathematically required.
That's why insurance companies can profitably insure one-off events just fine. Eg have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance for example where you can get bespoke insurance for your one-off novelty promotion. Golf course A making their golf holes wider won't affect the hole-in-one insurance premium that Golf course B has to pay.
Of course, that's all unless there's some regulation that forces insurance companies to set premiums a certain way. But then, blame that price control regulation.
An insurance company that prices risks accurately will outcompete an insurance company that solely relies on population averages. The latter will overcharge less risky people who drive with a seatbelt on (so they will move to the competition), and will undercharge risky people without seatbelts, and thus lose money on them.
> Also consider the effects on family (or friends) when someone dies (or is much more severely injured) because they weren't wearing seat belts. Maybe the breadwinning spouse dies or becomes disabled, and now the remaining family has to go on welfare. Maybe it was a single parent who died, and the kids end up in the foster system. In the disability case, insurance (which might be Medicare) companies will have to pay for rehabilitation and possibly care for the rest of the person's life. Hell, just the emotional anguish of a loved one dying in a situation where it was easily preventable is an externality worth trying to eliminate.
You are proving too much here. Yes, this argument could apply to driving without a seat belt. But it could apply just as much to any driving at all. Or to lazing on the couch instead of exercising, or to living in the New Mexico instead of Maine, or to drinking or smoking, or working as a lumberjack.
---
Just to be clear, on the object level I'm ok with smoking bans (instead of just high taxes) and laws requiring seatbelts. But that's just because they are convenient for me. They aren't properly justified.
Only if the price of costing risk accurately is less than just using population averages. So they look at cheap ways to cost risk, like credit scores and driving records.
For one, the company presumably finds out you were lying when you got hurt or died. So you -- the person who made the contract -- are not the one who gets punished for lying.
Instead, it's your family who's punished, because they don't get the monetary support after you die or to help take care of you, and likewise society is, because if you're still alive you're likely bankrupt and therefore fall into social support systems.
Second, putting something in a contract doesn't make it magically happen. If the company wanted to recoup anything for you lying, they'd have to take you or your estate to court. That's both extremely expensive for everyone involved and also overtaxes the courts, an already overtaxed public resource.
The damage to individual freedom is negligible (the right to die by windshield strike is not well-recognized) and the damage to innocent parties and society is much higher.
I don't see how you can say it's not well supported with a straight face.
> Instead, it's your family who's punished, because they don't get the monetary support after you die or to help take care of you, and likewise society is, because if you're still alive you're likely bankrupt and therefore fall into social support systems.
Huh, that's exactly the same situation as lying to your life insurance, eg about prior conditions or whatnot. And they handle that just fine.
> Second, putting something in a contract doesn't make it magically happen. If the company wanted to recoup anything for you lying, they'd have to take you or your estate to court.
They'll just don't pay out. No need to recoup anything.
> The damage to individual freedom is negligible (the right to die by windshield strike is not well-recognized) and the damage to innocent parties and society is much higher.
There's no damage to third parties. The damage is approximately all to the guy who's dumb enough to not wear his seat belt.
All our lives are interconnected and interdependent. Most untimely deaths will leave a financial, practical and mental health crater in many lives around them. When children are involved the fallout can last generations. Not to mention the lost investment of parents, the education system, etc.
Compare and contrast https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democrac...
No it isn't. Very false dichotomy.
The benefits of doing something have to be balanced against its costs. People's longevity and freedom both matter.
And something impossible can't have valid arguments for it. No independent decisions is an unattainable scenario even for maximalist autocracies.
What, that I actually said, do you disagree with?
Sure, but you could still try to minimise independent decisions as much as possible.
Have a look at the article I linked for a more eloquent argument.
In any case, even if you discount energy conservation, the extra danger to other people from you becoming a projectile is likely tiny. You can run some cost benefit analyses, and I'm pretty sure you'll come to the conclusion that a Pigouvian tax of something like a dollar a year is enough to offset this.
> One persons dumb choice to not wear a seatbelt can have potentially fatal consequences to others riding in the car who are not responsible for that decision.
Are you talking about people in the same car as the guy not wearing a seatbelt? Then you can exactly identify the other parties, so the transaction costs for Coasean bargaining are very low. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem Basically, if you think it's dangerous to ride along with people who don't wear a seatbelt, then don't ride along with people who don't wear a seatbelt.
As a pedestrian you can't opt out of what drivers are doing. That's a real exernality. But as a fellow passenger, you know exactly who else is in the car, and you can refuse to ride with them.
If I understand your suggestion right, it's like marrying someone with bad breath, and then asking the government to make a law to make your spouse brush their teeth?
Extremely slightly less. What, 170lbs compared to 4,000lbs+? Is 4% weight reduction after the collision starts, minus the energy imparted to the seats and other passengers and the windshield and what not, really going to make much impact to the overall collision calculus here?
In the UK they ran a campaign to raise awareness that during an accident a passenger riding in the back can injure the passenger in front if they don't wear a seatbelt. That seems like a serious externality to me. I don't know if you just hate seatbelts or love arguing but there are absolutely reasons that people should wear seatbelts and I'm glad most people have accepted that the inconvenience of wearing them is pretty negligible now.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE&pp=ygUeVWsgc2VhdGJ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/359am5/ysk_i...
If you are a driver, and you want people in the back to wear a seatbelt, just ask them to wear a seatbelt. Duh.
> I don't know if you just hate seatbelts [...]
Why would I hate seatbelts? I wear them all the time, whenever I have to take a car. I just don't buy the usual justification for forcing other people to wear seatbelts (or have AM radios..)
> [...] and I'm glad most people have accepted that the inconvenience of wearing them is pretty negligible now.
I'm all for people wearing seatbelts, too. Just like I'm in favour of people eating their vegetables and flossing their teeth. Voluntarily.
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.
Our government should step in when it makes sense. We determine if it makes sense via cost analysis and risk analysis. This is why the communism slippery slope argument doesn't work.
For example, banning public smoking along with other measures have saved millions of lives in the long run. Of course smoking is a personal choice, but it's also addictive and dangerous. It is sometimes beneficial to override people's "personal choice" if the benefit is big enough and the cost low enough. Ultimately, pretty much everyone is now grateful public smoking is gone.
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.
AM is dead, and FM is nearly there as well.
“Me, being successful in my 40s and living in a city with 2 teslas don’t listen to AM or FM radio, so those technologies are dead and should be abandoned”
Not being popular isn’t a reason to declare something as dead or useless.
Tho none of that is a reason to force auto makers to include AM radio.
Spectrum is a finite, shared resource. Especially these lower frequency bands.
The commenter with the teslas was saying that AM is dead and FM is nearly dead.
There is little debate that radio is declining. To me, it more interesting how it is changing: the audience, the programming, the impact. Whether (and when) radio might completely "die" is a prediction that requires some kind of clarification about the details.
Overstated and incorrect. (The author reveals their own bubble in the preceding paragraph.)
Word selection matters; there is not point in using "dead" when we have more accurate words like "declining".
Talk is cheap. If the parent commenter wants to make a prediction about if/when AM and/or FM will die, I recommend going to a prediction market and practice making testable predictions. Most people are poorly calibrated. Many people would benefit from seeing how poorly calibrated they are firsthand. Losing is a powerful motivator for course correction.
And what bubble did I reveal, because it could be that I’m able to afford cars that cost ~$30k, like used Teslas or a new Toyota Camry, it could be that I like technology (but that’s mostly a given here), did you mean I’m an early adopter? Stop discounting me and my opinion baselessly by placing me in a bubble you won’t even define. How am I to even discuss with you when you use weasel wording.
> My wife and I both have Teslas
Even if they are bought used at affordable prices, you have convenient access to electric charging, right? This often involves homeownership or relatively high quality housing rentals or employers with that capability. This is a small segment of the population, as I see it. Fair?
https://apnews.com/article/radio-station-tower-stolen-am-fm-...
In context, your comment could easily be read as suggesting the radio tower was so unimportant that zero people noticed something amiss until a landscaping crew saw that it was physically missing.
If so, ok, that would be a pretty big waste of a radio tower. But did it really happen like your comment implies? No regular listeners tuned in and heard … static? Unlikely. Nobody scratched their head? Nobody who worked at the station got curious?
Here is what the article wrote:
> The theft was discovered Feb. 2, when a maintenance crew arrived in the wooded area where the tower once stood and found it gone.
This makes perfect sense because one does typically have to put eyes on the thing (or the lack of it) to conclusively prove that a theft occurred. I don’t think it would be possible to steal a radio tower while it was broadcasting. I don’t think it would be likely that the talk radio guy or DJ would say “sorry the transmission is about to be terminated because the tower is getting stolen.”
Or it was the middle of the night and the station wasn’t broadcasting. Anyhow. This is one of the sadder and more hilarious windows into what people will do for money. Where do you sell a stolen AM radio tower? How much is it worth?
In your local area I presume…
> I’m able to afford cars that cost ~$30k, like used Teslas or a new Toyota Camry, it could be that I like technology (but that’s mostly a given here), did you mean I’m an early adopter
Yeah, exactly. You also mentioned you live in a city, which are pretty dense and don’t require much effort to spread emergency information in. Most people can’t afford new Camrys or teslas at all…
> Stop discounting me and my opinion baselessly by placing me in a bubble you won’t even define
No… and I did define it.
“ being successful in my 40s and living in a city with 2 teslas”
That is not a common situation… especially nowadays where something like 40% of American households would be in danger of a debt spiral when faced with any kind of unexpected $400 bill.
Also I don't assume that my life experience represents everyone else's but then I don't drive a tesla or go on HN to tell people why they're wrong.
The last one is a lie, but the rest is true.
Only if your power grid is functioning, which I wouldn't expect to be the case in most major disaster situations. Otherwise you'll be stuck burning fuel in a generator to charge your car.
EDIT: the other great thing about liquid fuel is it doesn't weigh very much. Diesel is 7.1lb/gal so if your diesel car gets 32mpg (like mine does) you get 4.5mi/lb. With 1500lb on a trailer--let's say it only gets 20mpg or 2.8mi/lb towing--that's an extra 4200mi of range. That's enough to go from Boston to Anchorage without refueling. It's also a much more easily transferable energy source than electrons--all you need to do is pour liquid from one container into another. You don't need some fancy battery charger that needs stable power at such and such Volts, Watts, and Hz.. So, no, in a disaster or war situation I doubt the EVs will work at all.
Another problem with going to the gas station is payment. No internet means no credit cards or whiz-bang apple wallet stuff.
> it's a fungible asset
Cool, let me put that in my gas-powered ICE car. Its so fungible.
And I mean practically every household has a 200gal tank of diesel in their apartment and suburban household. Only the oddballs wouldn't have it.
> tractor
Hmm, makes me think maybe most households aren't in the same situation here. Most households are going to be in the same situation if their car is an ICE versus an EV. Maybe ever so slightly better in the EV, because at least they're likely to already be charged to like 90% every night versus somewhere between nearly empty to full. In the end, if the grid stops working chances are they're going to have a hard time getting more gas until they get someplace where the grid is functioning.
That's a choice, definitely the more common one in the US, but not the only one. I've been driving diesel cars for my entire adult life--better part of a quarter century now.
Gasoline is by far the worst of the common fuels--diesel, gasoline, and propane. They make propane dinghy outboards for exactly this reason--carrying gasoline just for the dinghy really inconveniences a boat whereas they already have propane and diesel onboard for the engine and galley. Diesel and propane both have ~infinite shelf life.
> Hmm, makes me think maybe most households aren't in the same situation here.
Yes, I've prioritized access to nature and quiet over pretty much everything else. That's not normally what people who do computers for job do.
> Diesel and propane both have ~infinite shelf life.
1. Air leaks in the fuel system. If any of the negative pressure components have an air leak you'll be sucking air. This means less fuel, but more crucially less lubrication. High pressure injection pumps are meant to be lubricated by fuel.
2. Algae. Sometimes a fuel system can be contaminated by extremophiles that grow in untreated fuel. This will merely clog filters, and in the absence of water or air leaks will cause only fuel starvation and no engine damage.
3. Water. Water will turn into a steam bubble in the vacuum of the suction stroke of the injector pump, and then on the subsequent compression stroke the bubble will cavitate--turn inside out--and blast the wall of the injection pump cylinder with an extremely concentrated high temperature jet. Doing this hundreds of times per second wreaks havoc on the poor engine.
So if your fuel is dry and clean you're good.
For the pollution question, my retort is "which kind?" I claim diesels create more NOx and soot for less CO2. So, which is your priority?
I'd say "it depends". In a dense city I see NOx and soot as being a higher priority. If you're out in the sticks, probably your contribution to global warming (CO2 et al) should be weighted more heavily.
> "Google disagrees with the comment about diesel fuel. It looks like 6-12 months"
> I don't know where Google is getting their information from, but I've personally started diesels I know haven't run in 20+yr on the first crank.
> So if your fuel is dry and clean you're good.
They are talking about diesel fuel, which definitely has a shelf life without additives to keep it from turning to mush.
Its definitely much shorter than a decade, but if stored really well more than a year is pretty doable. 2+ years can be a gamble though. And if it causes problems, it might cause some serious problems. Want to gamble on your generator during an emergency?
I've definitely had some gas sitting in a tank with stabilizer last a couple of years. I've definitely had gas sitting in a tank go bad in under a year.
Not defending EV in particular but you can't expect everyone to have that.
Or in a generator, for use in your EV :-) Whereas it will be hard to run your diesel car or tractor on solar power.
If the apocalypse comes, EVs will be running for a lot longer than ICEs.
An AM capable emergency radio is a few bucks on Amazon, and they have a hand spin generator next to batteries and a 12V or other wide-range DC input to attach a regular wall wart or a tiny solar panel.
A hybrid will be very competitive and likely do better if it's cold (maybe a jam because of a blizzard)
When we had no power for a week, I drove a couple hours away to a gas station, spent 15 minutes filling jerry cans, and came back with enough energy to power my entire house for a week.
Yeah, in a continental or global disaster, we’re quickly going to be unable to get our hands on gasoline without the drilling and refineries and distribution, etc and electricity would be much more available. In the much more frequent and likely regional disaster… I’d prefer to be stuck with gasoline right now.
I could definitely see a future where instead of a noisy generator I power my house off of my car for a week until the charge is getting low, supplemented by some solar, then drive a couple hours to where the electricity is working and spend a half hour charging it back up.
I just don’t think we’re quite there yet. A typical long range EV right now, after the power to get me there and back, would have about 25kWh of power I could use for other things. That would be three hours of driving to replace 3 hours of generator output.
Both times gasoline quickly became incredibly hard to come by. Electricity would have been a lot easier.
Also, there was massive amounts of traffic trying to leave. An idling car slowly creeping through a 100mi traffic jam still uses a good bit of gas. An EV uses very little energy slowly rolling in the same situation. Sure at normal speeds I would have easily had 300+mi in the gas cars, but my mileage in traffic was massively worse on the 14+ hour drive from Houston to San Antonio.
> spent 15 minutes filling jerry cans, and came back with enough energy to power my entire house for a week.
How much fuel were you using to power your house for a week? I find it hard to believe you can pump more than 100 gallons of fuel in 15 mins.
> in a continental or global disaster
(Side note: I have noticed that the prices on the big rig side of a truck stop are usually slightly higher for the same diesel fuel!)
First off, apparently gas pumps should have a flow rate around 8-10gpm. So 100 gallons is still only ten minutes of pumping.
But also... If you need 100 gallons to keep your house going for the week maybe, I don't know, try turning a couple (hundred) lights off or something for now?
Using 100 gallons over 7 days is 14.3 gallons per day. Assuming you can kill the generator while you're sleeping, figure 16 hours you have it running. So you're using 0.9 gallons per hour. Looking online, looks like for a gasoline generator ~6kWh/gallon is fairly typical.
So you're planning for, averaged out, a 5.5kWh draw continuously every hour you're awake.
If that's your typical power usage, you're looking at 5.51630.4 = 2,675kWh/mo, which at our electricity rates would cost me about $375 just in usage charges to buy from the grid (never mind the connection fees and stuff).
In reality we're using more like 4-6 gallons per day.
Well, maybe you should have stopped after the question and we could have cleared up the confusion!
If I run the generator from morning to night with typical loads, I'm usually burning through about 5-6 gallons a day. So a week of fuel is 35-45 gallons.
Because I know "I actually did it" isn't a good answer, went and looked and the typical flow rate for a gas pump is supposed to be 8-10gpm. So... actual time holding the handle down on the pump, worst case, is about five and a half minutes.
> in a continental or global disaster, we’re quickly going to be unable to get our hands on gasoline without the drilling and refineries and distribution
Did you... disagree with that? Or are you just saying things to say things? Is there a big culture of backyard oil refining where you are? There isn't where I am. I didn't think I needed lived experience to say "if the refineries are shut down and the roads are impassible, oil products are going to be pretty hard to come by".
EDIT: sure would love to know why y'all're downvoting... Is anything I wrote incorrect? Speaking from experience having crossed the US more than once burning various waste oils I'm pretty sure everything I wrote above is correct and factually accurate..
None of that is true in the EV case.
What EV can do at least half of that?
EDIT: To add to AM radio in said car I also have CB Radio with detachable (magnetic) antenna, just in case.
And there are 4x4 diesel trucks like Excursions and Suburbans that can carry 8 to 12 people in leather comfort for 700 miles, even over rough terrain (rough terrain shortens your range, just like anything.)
Maybe that won’t always be the case, but it is now.
Electric cars are a luxury atm.
Now, try to imagine that could happen for electricity. (It's the same reason why datacenters always have diesel generators.)
Heck I'm hardly a prepper or living in a risky area but I have an extra fuel container in my garage simply because I sometimes drive through remote areas and having some extra fuel in the back is a worthwhile safety measure.
https://www.newsweek.com/tesla-charging-station-police-solar...
What is it about EVs that makes you people's brains turn off?
What? I would love to be able to drive EVs. They just don't cut it for the uses I need a vehicle for. Multi-hour recharge times and the weight of batteries make it untenable. Hopefully some day we'll get there, but we're talking an order of magnitude in both the charge and mass dimensions.
> 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? Are you saying gasoline burns? Congratulations you cracked the world's greatest mystery! Batteries burn real good too, you should try it sometime it's quite spectacular :D
EDIT: Seriously, though, taking out all the hydrocarbon fuels is a much, much more difficult proposition than taking out the power grid. The environmentalist in me wishes this wasn't true, but it is.
When hurricane Irene hit NYC, you couldn't get fuel in the area for a week. And once it started showing up again you had to wait in 2 hour lines even at 3 AM.
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.
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.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/there-path-counter-russias-spa...
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.
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.
Here is a free one for you Elon: Throw a small usb-chargeable AM radio in the glove compartment and just move on.
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...
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.
Having an emergency frequency that devices auto-tune to would at least mean if you did manage to broadcast on that frequency, someone will actually hear it.
Also like… I doubt regulations would stop them from doing that, if that was their goal.
As we continue to expand our Satellite System, this becomes even moot as we can broadcast via SOS text messages
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.
(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.)
I don't particularly expect that there would be any effort to lean on AM either.
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.
Pretty rare to have people actually listen to AM radio or OTA TV for a massive chunk of the population.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman... (not a farmer but still)
No power, so no internet, cell service was overloaded and didn't work because of that, and well.. all that was was left was the radio.
I don't remember how I found out what was going on, and the university I was near still had their power station up, so I may have had better local comms (it was small and not real tied to the grid, mostly used for heating).
I certainly didn't spend time huddled around an AM radio.
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.
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.
And the threat of having to pay for it limited my interest in exploring it any further.
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
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.
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.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if someone has considered using coherent wave forming from electric vehicles as a targeting mechanism. In a malicious-actor scenario, EVs often have GPS which can provide a pretty accurate time-synchronization mechanism. With enough collected GPS points to eliminate significant error and fine-control over the inverter phase/frequency it seems that it would definitely be a possibility given the number of EVs in many urban areas. Heck, most EVs are even internet connected for software updates.
For example: seat belts and air bags add extra cost (a lot more than an AM radio), maybe they should be optional too?
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?
ICEs have electric motors too.
Analogue degrades gracefully, if you need to listen to the news in an emergency, it doesn't matter if it sounds fuzzy.
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.
MELP targets 2.4kbps, and there are later examples for even lower bitrates (e.g. 1.2kbps, 600bps)
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these codecs or technologies are designed to operate at very low bit rates because the signal carrier is required to be capable of operation in "contested environments" where jamming and/or other environmental effects are present (and throughput potential is the tradeoff for assurance).
Especially for speech, there are aggressive and impressive algorithms that can turn a trickle of bits into understandable voice.
> Digital radio remains working at much worse SNR than intelligible fuzzy analog.
Your opus codec needs to demodulate the signal first.
So long as you can get pops of decodable signal, you'll be able to understand what's being said. Using a more robust modulation scheme would also go a long way in improving reach.
AM gets it's range benefits not from the modulation used, but from the frequencies it occupies.
So I dont really understand what this comment has to do with the article at hand here?
There are literally millions of AM radios out there in the US, at the already agreed frequency range. For emergency broadcast uses, the increased quality of FM is meaningless.
So i dont belive am will ever be dropped for emergency radio
It is working through slope detection. Basically if you've got FM at frequency X carrying voice and you measure the energy at a frequency a little bit away from X, as the FM signal frequency varies due to the voice modulation the energy you measure near X will vary in a similar way, so your voice modulation of the frequency X becomes amplitude modulation of your energy measurement.
You can play with this on an SDR, such as a cheap RTL-SDR dongle. Find an FM station and tune to its center frequency with your SDR software set for FM demodulation, and verify that you are indeed on an FM station broadcasting voice and/or music. Then switch the SDR software to AM demodulation and start slowly tuning away from the FM center frequency. You should find a point where you can clearly hear the voice and/or music. It won't sound great compared to FM demodulation of the same station, or compared to an AM station, but it should be serviceable for receiving emergency information.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HamRadio/comments/oz5rri/i_accident...
Use an amplifier is not a basic circuit. Resistor diode capacitor cable and power source are the basic of electronics
For comparison, commercial AM mono bandwidth is 10KHz. SSB AM ham radios use 2.4KHz.
For AM, that’s 5KHz+-, or 10 total.
Thus, current standards, the entirety of the broadcast AM spectrum can support no more than 8 concurrent FM broadcasts in a region.
And maybe that "works," but it certainly doesn't leave much room for competing markets.
When multiple stations with wide propagation all use a singular frequency, they have to be geographically spaced quite far apart: The hypothetical Toronto station centered at 1330KHz station would step on the Detroit station at the same frequency, which would step on the Chicago and Cincinnati stations.
And, sure: One could give one channel to each market to reduce this co-channel interference, but then there's not enough density for any meaningful competition.
(And our band of capitalism requires competition in order to even begin to work.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
We still do allow this on the shortwave bands under very limited circumstances like WBCQ.
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.
It would have to be a very short disaster, because your cell battery is going to die before the day is out. I've only changed the batteries in my AM/FM shower radio once since I bought it a decade ago.
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.
this is something that I think is being overlooked.
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.
I think you succeeded in motivating for the opposite of what you intended...
You can get home receivers that monitor NOAA radio for emergency alerts tones and will automatically switch on in a disaster.
It's a great feature, every home should have one.
As a HAM I have an amateur transceiver in my car and i find weather band reception to be really useful
It was wonderful going through New England mountains trying to know what the weather will do in 5 mins when it inevitably changes.
Jokingly, perhaps it was not a feature but happened accidentally due to the head gaskets design on the EJ25 engine.
... and wisdom also suggested that when you realize you've not seen semis on the road for a good while from how bad the snow is, you should take the hint and go find a spot to sleep for a while until things improve.
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.
This is exactly why we should still have AM radio in cars, and why you still see signs on the highway about tuning into X AM station for emergency updates.
Reminds me I need to go through the winter kit I carry.
Yes actually. Where I’m from cars are required to have a first aid kit and everyone who has a driver’s license needs to do a first aid course.
You’ll be at the scene of an accident you witness waaaaaay sooner than the ambulance. This stuff saves lives.
This is standard in Europe. Yes, we should. Small, light weight, low cost, and "it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it".
And tire jack/spare tire, and a reflector vest.
Instead had to wait hours for a tow truck and a replacement tyre.
Vest and first aid kit cost like €15, absolutely should have them - although I'm not convinced the typical "cut finger" first aid kit would be much help. Sure if you knick yourself changing your wheel (which of course you don't do any more), but I wonder what level of injury it's useful for when looking at a typical crash.
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.
Then there’s Unintentional Radiators which is probably what you’re thinking of, which include computers and other electronics, which are regulated to limit RF.
In my software development experience, companies invoke this line of reasoning all the time.
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
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
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/am-radio-congress-automakers/
I can find other references as well if you want. EMI in cars has been an issue for a long time, automakers however did do the needed work suppress the noise from spark plugs, I do not see this as any different.
Any idea if the law requires the redesign (i.e., requires that the AM radio meets some level of audio quality when operating in the vehicle) or if it just requires the AM radio to be present and (somewhat understandably) the manufacturer don’t want to include an AM radio if it consistently sounds bad?
Keep in mind that things like hurricanes do happen occasionally, and the car's AM radio might be the only working communication medium...
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...
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.
(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.)
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"
The FM is also an afterthought, the antenna system under-performs horribly, and appears to actually be //inside// the cabin.
That being said, they should be required to have better shielding on their electric motors
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...
All the music stations encourage people to listen all day. "We are here for you while you work, or for your entire drive."
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.
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-...
91.7% of American households have at least one vehicle. Podcasts are free?
There have been several times being in a car during those warnings that that AM station was the only reliable source of information.
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.
did you not observe 30% of the world population's actions between 2020 and 2023?
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!
"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.”
If you choose to die at home fine, but public roads are life-critical infrastructure. Guaranteeing everyone in the ensuing 'thundering herd' at least access to a basic AM/FM radio isn't too great a cost burden.
"Why do I need this radio, I don't use it" is a lot like saying, "why do I need this seatbelt, I never crash!"
To be honest I thought this part was kind of obvious and I don’t know why you made such a sarcastic comment about power buttons. Realistically speaking, every car on the market has a sound system anyway. You just need an antenna and AM radio, plus the user interface. It is not a major expense relative to the price of the car.
We're in cities, not the middle of nowhere in this scenario. The idea that we need an AM station to cover a few hundred square miles doesn't really apply here.
> You just need an antenna and AM radio, plus the user interface
And ensure all the shielding is good enough so your AM radio is actually useful, and designing all that shielding, and potentially having to change the placement of antennas on the car, etc.
Sure, you could phase out AM and do all your emergency broadcasts on FM. We haven’t done that. Do that first.
Here is more info about EAS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System
There are 77 PEPs, which are commercial radio stations that double as emergency broadcast, as primary interfaces to FEMA. They are a mixture of AM and FM. You want to get rid of the AM requirement? Fine. Just switch all the broadcasts to FM first.
In the end though it still kind of sucks. We're expecting people to know about AM radio and then also bother to look around to find the right station. While stations will automatically trigger on an alert, its not like your radio is designed to listen and find these alerts and automatically alert you.
Even better with requirements for car radios, how about we require WX radio and have it set up to by default alert drivers when an alert goes through? So many cars these days are now a part of the cell networks as well, how about we require emergency alerts broadcast over cell networks?
I own a robotic vacuum cleaner.
I also own a broom.
This regulation seems somewhat sensible but I'm not sure what the point is if it interferes with EV motors.
Surely playing music doesn’t require that you you connect your phone to your car?
Pretty much all cars also support bluetooth, USB sticks, and some still have Aux in. Some support various internet radio/music (spotify etc). Most cars support Android Auto/Carplay, wired and wireless, giving you access to anything your phone supports.
According to https://www.acea.auto/figure/average-age-of-eu-vehicle-fleet..., the average age of a European car is over 12 years. It'll take another seven years for your average European car to have DAB+ support, let alone all cars.
In theory any old car can support DAB+ but car accessory manufacturers like to as ridiculous amount of money for car radios, so I doubt this change will occur faster than the car replacement rate.
DAB+ has been a complete failure so far. Its reception issues are even worse than FM and of the few people I know that have even heard of it, nobody cares. The benefactors of the DAB+ transition aren't the people listening tk the radio, but the radio stations fighting for frequency space.
(norway and switzerland are both mountainous countries, which meant the same FM station had to maintain several different transmitters on numerous frequencies — if you're in a country flat enough to serve with vanilla sugar and hagelslag, might that have something to do with our divergent experiences?)
Furthermore, DAB transmits on an even higher frequency than FM, so mountainous areas will need more transmitters than with plain FM, not less. Sure, the combined digital streams DAB provides are used to reduce the amount of transmitter installations, but that also could've happened with FM.
DAB is far from a failure. It'll eventually replace FM by mandate, because there's an incentive for governments to let more radio stations pay for broadcasting licenses. However, it's also far from a success at the moment. Access to streaming services such a Spotify or the internet broadcasts of the radio stations themselves has probably eased the transition as well.
Why would I listen to what the station programmers decide (and possibly riddled with ads) when I can configure my phone to play whatever I want when I want?
AM bands aren't very useful for modern tech because you need huge antennas, can't do MIMO or squeeze much data in, etc.
You gotta wonder what the congress of bygone eras would have done with the current system we have of media and corporate control.
[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.
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.”
The fact that "conservatives" are also bad on an issue doesn't make non-conservatives good or even different on an issue; that's from that weird pseudo-argument where people who passionately hate Trump mention that Trump also did some act or took some position that they're trying to defend.
It's become an argument that something is fine if the people who one claims are the evilest people in the world also think it is fine. Or that if evil people can get away with something evil, then that's unfair to the good people who have earned the opportunity to do evil? I have no idea.
I don’t really know what you’re otherwise on about. I think you’re suggesting I’m making things far more partisan than I am. I’m just responding to the highly partisan selective quotes given.
(It’s worth going through the whole slideshow.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've now owned cars without an AM radio for 10 years. I don't miss it.
are you joking? coast to coast is worse than 4chan
Kinda stopped reading there, it's clear that this is just a desperate attempt to save a dying market for no reason.
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.
We live in a world where the United States EV “success story” is now protected by 100% tariffs on competitors.
But you can add a Carplay\Android Auto screen to most cars.
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.