My favourite radio ever is AM 740 in the Boston area— WJIB, a listener-supported station broadcasting hits from the late 30s to 70s easy listening. Where else in broadcast these days can one expect to listen to the Dorsey Brothers, Glenn Miller, or Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass in the original AM sound? Good music for the soul.
The end of AM radio in your car?
61–70 of 104 posts
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#62Surprised the FCC has not stepped on EV manufacturers for the RFI they create.
They won’t just interfere with medium wave broadcast.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#63> 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 wonder if there's something useful to do with that range.
Non-directional beacons! In Nth America NDBs are 190–535 kHz, but elsewhere they are 190–1750 kHz, overlapping the AM radio band. Keep decommissioning the more expensive VOR stations in favour of satnav (and release the spectrum), but keep NDB transmitters as a low-tech/low-cost backup.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#64It would be so cool to release AM back to the public. Maybe a longer range, low bandwidth Wi-Fi like protocol.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#65> 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…
The only real use I'd see would be some new iteration of Loran-C, to have something harder to jamm and spoof then current GNSS systems.
But the local noise from car and other electronics would likely make it less useful.
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#66I find it funny... here people are afraid their clients (cars) will lose AM support, and in europe, we feer the very-soon coming date when our governments will shut down FM radio, leaving a bunch of cars (those without DAB radios) musicless or tied to some kind of mobile phone connected to AUX ports situation.
Or as they say: Welcome to Norway! [1]
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/13/norway-becomes...
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#67I find it funny... here people are afraid their clients (cars) will lose AM support, and in europe, we feer the very-soon coming date when our governments will shut down FM radio, leaving a bunch of cars (those without DAB radios) musicless or tied to some kind of mobile phone connected to AUX ports situation.
Or as they say: Welcome to Norway! [1] [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/13/norway-becomes...
Are you from norway?
I'm guessing you had a mandate that all new cars need to have DAB receivers.. when did that come in action? Because here in slovenia, you could still buy a new car without DAB just a few years ago. Basically, i'm just wandering if all your cars sold in the last 10+ years already have dab (by mandate) and the turn-off wasn't a real pain for most, or if like 80%+ of your cars on the street just lost radio reception?
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
The wireless carriers wouldn't be able to do anything with the AM broadcast band. It's in the MF range - not useful for cellular at all due to limited bandwidth, giant antenna requirements, and ionospheric bounce.
Low speed informational text message would be good use tho
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what "watch television" means these days. I don't know many people who have broadcast or cable TV.
Trending down slowly, but still 40% of US households: https://www.statista.com/statistics/612660/paid-services-bro...
Basically "old people"
https://www.statista.com/statistics/659779/cable-tv-penetrat...
Re: The end of AM radio in your car?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and lower bit rate codec to handle larger broadcast areas That's why DAB is crap. Because people are greedy and don't care about quality.
Agreed, but the alternative here is AM which has never been good quality. DAB was a big step down from FM quality because the choice of codec / bandwidth assigned to stations was pretty bad (and bandwidth == $$!)
Are you referring to the original DAB (using MP2) or the upgraded DAB+ standard (using HE-AACv2)? I think most, if not all, stations have switched to DAB+. I'm told the quality is better than FM and based on my experience it's certainly not worse as far as I can hear. Of course, since FM is analog it degrades linearly whereas DAB+ is digital: it either works or it doesn't. This might skew the perception of quality.