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The end of AM radio in your car?
31–40 of 104 posts
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trending down slowly, but still 40% of US households: https://www.statista.com/statistics/612660/paid-services-bro...
What is historically the highest % of US households with TV? (Paywall. And that is the most aggressive form I've ever battled.)
Hmm, I guess my mass of adblocking extensions in FF must work pretty well, I had to dismiss a single modal. But it looks like Peak TV was reached by about 1980[1], 98% of households!
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#33What a shame. I've lived in a rural areas for most of my adult life. FM reception is notoriously poor due to the terrain. AM repeaters were always a nice touch. Also worth noting that AM radio content is absurdly easy to support and transmit.
I doubt AM is easy to transmit in practice. Complicated modulation schemes cost almost nothing, but high power is still expensive and needs real engineering.
It might be easier on a DIY level, but on a commercial level complexity is free, substance and power are expensive.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#34I haven't seen much discussion about how AM gets used for local road condition or emergency communication. When you're driving and see a sign that says "TUNE TO 1610 AM" and the car has no AM receiver, what do you do? This may be a shrinking niche, but it's potentially a last bastion of AM radio usefulness.
In a sample size of maybe 10, every time I’ve seen one of those highway signs and tuned to the station, the quality was so bad I couldn’t make out any words and so got no useful information. If that’s the last bastion of AM usefulness, scrap it and give that spectrum to the wireless carriers. Frankly, for stuff like road closure information I’m a lot more likely to get that from Waze (delivered over a 5G connection)…
I don't think wireless carriers would want 1.2 MHz at that low of a frequency. They'd have the same issues with interference that broadcast stations have. The transmit antennas would take up acres of land (each element hundreds of feet long). Receiver antennas would also need to be large.
Also, very little data would fit in such a tiny spectrum window.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#35I haven't seen much discussion about how AM gets used for local road condition or emergency communication. When you're driving and see a sign that says "TUNE TO 1610 AM" and the car has no AM receiver, what do you do? This may be a shrinking niche, but it's potentially a last bastion of AM radio usefulness.
Those low power highway information stations are actually required to be low quality audio [1]. My understanding is that back in the day, broadcasters insisted that these stations were low quality so they would not compete with commercial broadcasters.
In my opinion, those stations actually make AM seem much worse than it really is. That scheme backfired in the long run.
[1] 47 CFR 90.242(b)(8) https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...>
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#36I haven't seen much discussion about how AM gets used for local road condition or emergency communication. When you're driving and see a sign that says "TUNE TO 1610 AM" and the car has no AM receiver, what do you do? This may be a shrinking niche, but it's potentially a last bastion of AM radio usefulness.
What about sports broadcasts? I often listen to games in my car on AM.
As do many people. AM stations that run play-by-play sports programming do very well in the ratings, and do very well with the station's sales team.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#37What a shame. I've lived in a rural areas for most of my adult life. FM reception is notoriously poor due to the terrain. AM repeaters were always a nice touch. Also worth noting that AM radio content is absurdly easy to support and transmit.
I doubt AM is easy to transmit in practice. Complicated modulation schemes cost almost nothing, but high power is still expensive and needs real engineering. It might be easier on a DIY level, but on a commercial level complexity is free, substance and power are expensive.
AM transmissions (10 kHz) are relatively narrow compared to other broadcast formats, so the power bill is less than FM (200 kHz) and TV (6000 kHz).
The real cost problem in 2022 is the size of the antenna. The entire tower, or array of towers, is the antenna. They can take up many acres of land. It is hard to justify not selling out and replacing those towers with more lucrative residential, retail or industrial development.
A single station's antenna could be 5 properly spaced towers, each hundreds of feet high.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#38What a shame. I've lived in a rural areas for most of my adult life. FM reception is notoriously poor due to the terrain. AM repeaters were always a nice touch. Also worth noting that AM radio content is absurdly easy to support and transmit.
It's a notable argument you bring up that AM stations are sometimes the only audio service available in remote areas.
The characteristics of AM (i.e., daytime groundwave and nighttime skywave) provide service that other services can not.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#39This is the most interestingly line from his letter: > nearly 90 percent of Americans ages 12 and older — totaling hundreds of millions of people — listened to AM or FM radio each week, higher than the percentage that watch television (56 percent) or own a computer (77 percent) Admittedly it seems dubious but if true I'm surprised by basically every one of these numbers
No way that's true. Wonder if they're getting selection bias, ex. the 90% of the people who are willing to take an unsolicited survey on their land line phone.
I can't back up the 90%-of-people claim, but as per the industry-accepted audio listening diary survey, a giant 74% share of audio consumption comes from AM/FM broadcasters [1]. So 90 percent is very possible.
[1] https://www.westwoodone.com/blog/2022/11/21/edisons-share-of...>
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#40> The AM band in the United States covers frequencies from 540 kHz up to 1700 kHz I wonder if there's something useful to do with that range. It's a big chunk of lower frequencies right there, in the range that reliably does over-the-horizon propagation (although better at night perhaps according to wikipedia?) The benefit of AM being super simple to build a receiver for is less relevant nowadays, FM is trivial to ge…
I'd bet that most would conclude that the best use for those frequencies is broadcast.
In Seattle, half a million people listened to KIRO-AM 710 last month [1]. In Boston, 454,600 people listened to WBZ-AM 1030 [2]. In Los Angeles, 625,500 people listened to KFI-AM 640 [3].
It's difficult to justify discontinuing an audio service that is performing as a top conduit for audio (more than Spotify or Pandora, for example) because of a perception that the service is no longer viable.
[1] https://radioinsight.com/ratings/seattle-tacoma/> [2] https://radioinsight.com/ratings/boston/> [3] https://radioinsight.com/ratings/los-angeles/>