Background: Electric cars, thanks to their motors and circuitry, cause lots of radio frequency interference.
If done cheaply, this badly crashes any attempt to listen to an AM radio. Hence many car manufacturers are choosing the skinflint option of simply not including AM radios in their vehicles.
There's been plenty of kickback, and now Congress is starting to, maybe, get involved:
[Axios]
Scoop: Congress moves to preserve AM radio in cars
A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to make it illegal for carmakers to eliminate AM radio from their cars, arguing public safety is at risk, Axios is first to report. ====== rest:
As should be their right. AM radios in motor vehicles have always been subject to interference from a variety of sources, including spark plugs in converntional engines, electric windshield motors, and the display panels used to replace old-fashioned speedometers, and oil pressure and temperature gauges.
It's not the fault of AM radios: AM was simply the first method which was discovred for sending voices and music over the airwaves, and for that reason, it became the de facto standard for broadcasting - and the source of the immense fortunes gathered by manufacturers such as RCA, plus the immense power which broadcasters accumulated by portraying their friends in a good light and their enemies in a bad one.
The point is that those whom profit from existing methods of distributing a nation's propaganda always fight tooth and nail to hang on to their privileged positions and profit model when new technologies such as FM threaten them, and our leaders have always let them get away with it. Elected officials at all levels of government had learned hard lessons from the early days of radio broadcasting: how racists like "Father Coughlin" could draw audiences numbered in the millions, and how Franklin Roosevelt was able to use "Fireside Chats" to help restore public confidence in the banking system and advance a liberal agenda during the Great Depression. Never mind the messages they sent out: what politicians count is votes, and the broadcasters have never allowed them to forget it. That's one of the reasons why Geostationary satellites(1), first proposed in 1929, weren't available to carry TV reports until well into the 1970's.
The Congress doesn't give a tinker's damn about "public safety:" they've had souper-seecrit hidey-holes prepared for themselves and their PR teams and families for decades, so in their viewpoint, the public can be damned, in all senses of the word.
What the politicians fear is having their profligate lifestyles revealed to the voters, and that's why every radio and TV station is able to obtain oh-so-sincere statements about any issue of public concern, with multiple versions to choose from, according to the station's programming model and intended audience. All paid for by our tax money, of course.
In return, the Congress goes to extraordinary lengths to delay any technical change which threatens the existing technologies: cable TV operators much, for example, pay royalties to local over-the-air TV stations in order to carry their programming, and are forbidden to carry network shows or stories which duplicate those of the local stations, even if such broadcasts are already distributed for free over the internet.
The congress is demanding that electric car manufacturers prop-up a century-old technology that is useful only to transmit staged debates, shock jocks, Father Coughlin copycats, and all the other propaganda that the politicians need to keep themselves in power.
Bill Horne
The idea of satellites in geostationary orbit was first proposed by Herman Potočnik in his 1929 book, publissed in Berlin, Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums - der Raketen-Motor. Arthus C. Clarke, who is usually credited with the idea, cited this work as a reference in his 1945 paper.
Am 18.05.2023 schrieb "Bill Horne" snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com:
There is just one problem: Most modern cars don't have a possibility to exchange the radio.
AM modulation is easy and the band and receivers are there. It would be possible to use FM modulation on mediumwave and shortwave, but new transmitters and receivers are needed. So it stays with AM.
America has freedom of speech. I prefer this solution instead of government-controlled speech like in Germany where only some bad words (calling somebody stupid) about a person might result in a fine.
I know that there are people like Hal Turner who have far right and extremist opinions, but I don't feel disturbed by them. Such stations can be heard on the shortwave station WBCQ.
I like medium and short wave because they offer the possibility to listen to transmissions from other countries - without censorship or spying. I think we should keep them instead of switching all remaining transmitters off and relying on FM VHF and DAB(+), which offers only local stations.
I think Mr. Burstein was writing about *new* vehicles, so I don't feel that's a concern.
You're right about AM being easy: as I wrote before, it was the first method of modulating a radio wave that was discovered, and it has the largest base of "installed" receivers for that reason.
But, the reason that politicians are screeming at electric car makers is simply that large broadcast chains are screeming at *them* - in the face of competition from higher-fidelity FM broadcasts and the concert-hall fidelity offered by satellite systems, AM stations, at least in the United States, have largely swithched to a "talk radio" format. On AM bands today, we mostly hear Basso Profondo announcers who pitch reactionary political views during the all-important "Drive Time" hours when listeners are alone in their cars and willing to hear comforting lies and propaganda.
Be careful what you wish for: our courts have decided that "Freedom of Speech" requires us to suffer the abuse of every self-appointed Socrates or mentally ill stranger whom occupies his day by destroying other riders' quiet enjoyment of a subway ride or a railway seat. Inevitably, the performer’s skills are mostly limited to demanding money from the other riders, with the threat of further croaking or braggadocio to follow if they're not paid to move on to the next car and the next group of victims. You might have heard news reports about a recent death of a developmentally-delayed adult who was talking trash to an audience that had heard - and suffered - enough.
I have a old friend who works at WBCQ: a fellow Amateur Radio Operator whom has forgotten more about practical AM transmitter design and repair than I will ever know.
He reminded me once of a solution to my complaint about a foul-mouthed fool I heard on another station: "Spin the dial!"
That's a double-edged sword: I once stumbled upon a shortware broadcast by a well-spoken man whom was commenting on the day's news, when Donald Trump had said that "Cuba is just an island in the middle of the Atlantic." The announcer laughed at the story, and said that someone should give Donald a map - and then announced that I was listening to Radio Havana. It hurt a little, knowing that the rest of the world could hear the shortcomings of our political leaders, but it hurt a lot more to think of how Donald got to that position.
Suffice to say, I also like shortwave a lot more than medium wave: you hear a better class of people, and better reasoning and more well-thought-out opinions. Plus, if something irks me, I get to spin the dial.
As Marco said, in many new cars, you can't install an after-market radio. One part of me wants to agree with you, that it's the manufacturer's right to not include an AM radio... but setting that precedent will be the death of broadcast AM. Most people only listen to broadcast radio in their cars, and it seems that manufactures want to shut the dial down. I listen to AM radio on a daily basis.
I'm aware that most of AM radio has become talk-radio. I don't care for Mr. Limbaugh, or his programming, but he sure did save the AM band. Now, I still listen to a number of music stations on the AM dial, including many oldies and polkas on Sundays. I still tune into News radio 1020 KDKA in Pittsburgh (first commercial radio station).
Perhaps they are talking about in the case of a flood, fire, or wide-spread power outage, where some might only be able to receive broadcast radio in battery-power units? I've been on plenty of highways with signs "Tune into 1680 (or whatever) AM radio for an important safety message from DOT".
Car makers don’t want to shut down AM, or any other type of signal: they know that car buyers usually expect a new car to have a radio that receives both AM and FM stations, and many new cars come equipped with satellite receivers and free trials of a satellite-based servics.
The question is whether Congress can demand that automakers include the AM band in their cars’ radios, even if it costs them a lot more to do so: to make AM reception possible in an RF-noise filled environment like an electric vehicle, the automakers would have to shield their motors, their control systems, their computers, and their charging systems to lower the noise level to something that AM listeners will accept. That costs money, in an industry where saving $10 on each vehicle coming off the assembly line can make an engineer’s career.
We've been through this debate before, although in another context: when FM broadcasts were becoming popular, many motorists were offered discounts on “FM Converter” units which could be mounted under the dashboard, The converters were built with an antenna connector where the car owner could plug in the same antenna cable that had been in use by the AM radio, and they came with a short extension that connected the AM radio to the converter, so that the motorist could swith between AM and FM bands quickly.
The company that owned the patent on the special type of connector used in automobiles sued to stop the converters from being sold, but I don't know how the case was resolved. No matter; either the radio manufacturers got some extra income, or the courts decided that having access to more signals - and, therefore, more opinions - was too important to let the patent stand.
That's where this current debate is focused: the Congress is claiming that car buyers will suffer by not being able to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump or DIane Feinstein or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez telling them what to think. Car buyers who think for themselves, and decide that the added cost of having AM radios available in electric vehicles isn't worth it, are being denied a place at the table.
No competent public-safety officer ever relies on battery-powered radios. The dismal results which followed the introduction of small, battery-powered AM radios have been known for decades: such sets inevitably wound up on closet shelves when their owners realized that, in the first place, the devices were bulky and heavy and inconvenient, and in the second, that other people didn't like being forced to listen to someone else’s choice of music or news. It wasn’t until the introduction of battery-powered "Boom Boxes," with their cheap chrome-plated "minimum parts count" designs and badly distorted sound, that the public was, once again, able to choose portable vs. AC- or Car-powered receivers. The public chose to shun the children whom were sporting the Boom Boxes on their shoulders, and the fad died down as soon as the Boom Box owners decided that their money was better spent on things other than batteries.
Battery technology has advanced tremendously in the past few decades, due to Cellular Phones: probably the only battery-powered devices which owners feel have justified their bulk and expense in the long term. The companies which make the phones have been leveraging their product's ubiquity since they were first widely adopted, adding cameras, larger amounts of memory, and now even Internet-supplied information services which bypass the broadcast networks and thus, those networks’ hold on the body politic’s sources of information.
AM Radio is a known quantity in Washington, D.C.: our public servants have been serving us plate after plate of rancid tripe for all our lives, using the broadcast stations which depend on Congressional approval for their very existence. This proposed law isn't about AM or FM: it concerns who gets to use the information paths and who doesn’t. There's an election coming.
The entire AM band is not going down at all: in 1971(1), the Emergency Alert System was accidentally triggered when a U.S. Government employee ran a paper tape to send a teletype message which should have been a routine weekly test, but turned out to be an emergency alert.
The tape which was used was right next to the one which was supposed to be sent; the employee picked up the wrong tape. The Pentagon expected there to be widespread panic, immediate mass stampedes toward "Fallout Shelters," and that all but "Conelrad" AM stations would cease operation.
None of it happened. The few people whom heard the alert shrugged their shoulders, kissed their loved ones goodbye, and settled down in their living rooms to await their deaths - or decided that it was a mistake, and went about their business. By and large, no one showed up at any "Fallout Shelter:" in the first place, very few citizens knew where they were or what they were intended to be used for, and in the second, they were almost all aware of the impossibility of surviving a nuclear war, and just decided that they'd be dead in a few minutes and should enjoy the time they had left.
As for the "Conelrad" system, it didn't work. Radio station managers demanded that their employees stay on the air and keep running the oh-so-profitable ads for soap that they'd been running before the alert was sent out. The whole episode was quickly dismissed and explained away by the new and improved generation of blow-dried airheads that has taken over from the real reporters of the World War II era, and the populace was reassured that nothing was wrong and they could go back to buying soap and being obedient.
It was a repeat of the "Duck and Cover" drills my generation of youngsters was forced to undergo during our grade-school years, until a few exceptional young students (including Joan Baez) told their teachers that they didn't want to play the government's game and didn't want to pretend that ducking or covering would make any difference.
In other words, the whole edifice of the "Civil Defense" network and its alerting system crashed of its own weight, in the face of bluntly stated evidene from oh-so-onery free thinkers that it was all psychological warfare, following a military map left over from the days when "right thinking" Americans were expected to do what they were told without question.
The current version of the emergency alert system has been redesigned to carry warnings of tornado, floods, missing children, and (of course) immenent nuclear destruction. That was a clever move, since it both provided some actual benefits to a jaded public, and convinced that same public to actually pay attention to the alerts in the first place. Until, that is, 2018: in Hawaii, a government employee accidentally tripped a warning of an impending missile attack, and caused yet another generation of blow-dried airheads to swing into action and snap to attention and explain it all away again.
Bill Horne, who believes in Ghod and Senator Dodd and keeping old Castro down
You might be surprised how many radio stations, after conditioned analog lines and ISDN ceased to be available for new installs from ILECs, came to depend on the Internet for their studio-transmitter links, especially now when it's audio-over-IP all the way from the mixing console to the transmitter.
Many radio transmitter sites have just a commodity Internet connection that feeds their remote control and the transmitter: no Internet = station off the air. More profitable stations, especially those that haven't moved around a lot, may have an analog microwave path for backup, or even an optical wide-area network, but this costs a lot more money and is hard for many engineering managers to justify to barely-profitable companies constantly seeking to cut costs.
The "primary entry point" stations, of which there are currently 77, have received substantial capital investment from FEMA to support the survivability of their transmitter sites. These stations monitor a FEMA radio system for presidential emergency messages, but most people do not listen to them, and would depend on other stations receiving and relaying emergency alerts. Each of these stations has an emergency studio that would allow station personnel to go on the air
-- if they could get to the transmitter site -- as well as a diesel generator with a multi-day fuel supply.
At the time I retired, Verizon had substituted specialized T-Carrier channel units for the conditioned lines: the T-Carrier links didn't require any equalization, and since most local pairs aren't loaded, there was usually no need to equalize the local pairs beyond seting some computer-generated options in the channel units.
As for ISDN, I'm surprised that it would ever be used for "STL" circuits in the first place: ISDN was a dialup service, and even if the radio station owner was willing to bear the expense of the Nailed-up "data" connections, they would be risking disconnects caused by all of the usual problems that can interrupt both digital and analog connections: T-Carrier failure, etc.
Were you thinking of IDSL connections?
It's been a while since my "First Phone" was renewed as a "General Radiotelephone" license, but what I recall from my days as a radio tech was that even clear-channel stations avoided mircowave like the plague. The siting effort was incrediby expensive, with complementary towers at each end of the path, with the risks of any off-kilter microwave oven killing the link, and with a never-ending need to pay someone to predict what buidings would be built in the middle of the Fresnel Zone.
Of course, we all know the on-again, off-again love triangle that has fiber-optic cable, Ditch Witch machines, and competent fiber splice technicians at the vertices. I've never met a chief Engineer who trusted fiber any more than microwave - but it's been a while, so perhaps the reliability has improved.
There's a funny thing about information: those whom receive it first usually think of their own interests before those of others. As happened in 1971, I think most stations would ignore alerts that would impact their bottom line, and that if there was a serious problem, their employees would spend their time telling their families to beat the traffic jams on their way to anywhere else.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but this is how I see it. If FEMA coughed up money to improve "survivability," of transmitter sites, it was a taxpayer-funded gift to the station owners for use in purchases of political good will from the broadcash industry.
AM radios and their "Alert" capability are just another chapter in the long story of psychological warfare that our government has been using as long as radio has existed. Be afraid, and pay your taxes: the tall white guy knows best, and he'll protect you.
Radio stations used ISDN for events, like school sports and appeareances at shopping malls. STLs were either microwave or fixed circuits.
Nowadays stations do use the Internet for STLs, though it may be accompanied by a microwave channel. One major-market FM station I have worked with is a good example. They have an analog (900 MHz) STL from a high rooftop near the studio to the main transmitter tower on a big hill some miles away. But that's now just a backup. GatesAir has a clever new system where stations can fill in coverage gaps within their licensed contours via booster transmitters. A booster is an additional lower-power transmitter on the same frequency (vs. a translator, which needs its own channel). Obviously a booster can't listen to the main transmitter and retransmit it (on frequency) the way a translator can, but it can use its own STL. The trick is that the STLs to both the main transmitter and boosters are digital and they all have GPS sync. So they all buffer the broadcast for enough milliseconds to make sure that they're all in perfect alignment with GPS timing. The booster antennas are directional, pointing away from the main transmitter, so the signals from both transmitters arrive in sync and don't interfere. For the main STL, it's unlicensed 5 GHz microwave. That can go quite a few miles between decent size dishes, and it's cheap; the dishes not only give gain but help null out all the Wi-Fi noise below the path. The boosters use cable modems for their STLs. If something fails, it falls back to the analog STL on just the main transmitter.
Not true. Aural analog STLs are on 900 MHz, which doesn't get rain fade, and have been there pretty much forever. Microwave in general, though, is pretty easy to make reliable, based on current digital technology, and the radios have gotten quite cheap. Buildings do get put up in the path if you're in an urban core, but you can usually get time to work around them (engineer a new path) before they're done. TV STLs are usually microwave on 7 or 13 GHz. Back in the olden days, stations had to buy their STLs from Ma Bell, who used microwave.
Backhoe fade continues to be a problem. You can't foolproof things -- we keep getting greater fools.
I guess I /am/ getting old: I don’t seem to be writing cogently of late.
I won't labor the point: my objection to Uncle Sam’s determination to have every-single-car capable of listening to AM radio stations is, IMNSHO, just psychological warfare, intended to keep voters "connected" to a Father-Knows-Best era when only tall white men were allowed to lead or make important decisions.
Of course, those who own AM stations want everyone to be able to listen to their programs: that’s a given. The fact that they want those whom buy electric vehicles to pay extra to make that possible is just a time-honored business trick: getting your customers to capitalize your growth, the same way that Internet users paid for the "WiFi Calling" capability that every Cellular provider uses to maximize profits while minimizing the need to buy, build, and maintain cell sites.
I'm guessing that the automakers will take the easy way out, and (as has been suggestd already) include AM receivers in their vehicles, without the shielding which would be required to make them work. It's the same result without making Uncle Sam angry or embarrassed enough to strike back: AM Broadcast will eventually (pardon the pun) fade away.
Satellite radio is built into every new car with subscriptions. I know quite a number of people who use it (anecdotal, I know). Car manufacturers must have something going with the satellite radio people
-- kind of like Microsoft of yore and Internet Explorer. Further, it's easy to disable emergency alerts on the mobile phones; it's right there in the settings. Flip phones tend to not have the emergency alerts. The same can't be said for broadcast radio.
Either way, I'll take your point that it's moot to argue AM radio being vital to emergency broadcast, in general. I'm probably the oldest 28 year old on the planet, but I enjoy my broadcast radio, and I particularly enjoy pulling in distant clear-channel stations at night. You'll regularly find me tuning into 650 AM WSM from Nashville on my 10 PM commute home in Western PA/Eastern Ohio. I'd like to see amplitude modulation and broadcast radio, in general, to live on.
Three of the links to the Primary Entry Point (PEP) transmitters (originally ~33 mostly AM stations) were independent from the internet. There was a dedicated phone line (TDM at the time), a satellite (which I believe is now IPAWS and/or IPAWS over EMNet- it's hard to keep that straight), and a XM satellite radio added later which serves as a parallel distribution chain. One assumes the phone lines were migrated to MPLS, not internet.
At the PEPs these national level alerts are injected into the transmitter audio input- there is no requirement for a remote studio or studio transmitter link (STL) to remain. In fact the original PEPs had a small console at the transmitter so they could originate programming if the studio failed. Most PEP transmitters doubled as fallout shelters. The "fill in PEPs" added post Y2K did not have the fallout shelters, but I think they retained the consoles. They bult out CONUS coverage during daytime, and added Guam, American Samoa, CNMI, and Caribbean coverage.
Some states have the ability to reach their state primaries over satellite or over fixed microwave, or via dedicated VSAT terminals (granted these might not be the direct transmission of the national audio stream). NPR also carries the national level alerts over their satellite squawk channel, so that represents yet another source of injection (and over time, so stated migrated their local primaries to NPR stations since they were two steps closer in the audio chain as long as their satellite was up.
Non PEPs are certainly vulnerable to a STL failure, and the radio stations are almost guaranteed to install their ENDECs in the control room to allow management of required weekly/monthly tests, but the dead air if a station looses it's STL completely is likely to cause users to tune in another station.
When Alabama implemented EAS, we had an extremely robust instate distribution chain, with the EMA being able to inject message into the two state primaries independent of the PSTN, and over two statewide broadcast satellite networks (I suspect two so they could carry both Alabama and Auburn football at the same time), and most stations monitored their local primary, both satellite networks and NWR. But no state primary could actually receive a PEP message 24 hours a day, so it had to be received by a public television station in Mobile (far SW corner of the state) and sent up a fairly robust microwave system across the state. This was latter fixed and Alabama got one of the first "new" PEPs in Birmingham (WJOX-AM).
You may hear (correctly) that stations get their EAS alerts from the internet- this is the preferred path when it is available to preserve audio quality and get the complete Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) message. This doesn't mean this is part of the resilient distribution. For the lest decade, all stations, at least without a waver, must have a IPAWS compliant encoder/decoder with a internet connection, but this doesn't remove their requirement for 2 connections to 2 other sources.
As to the radio stations not passing on the message, it's automatic. A EAN or NIC message opens a live audio path from the president (EAN) or FEMA (NIC) to every participating EAS station. There are problems in the distribution chain, but those PEPs are directly interrupted by FEMA.
Wow, I was just going to point out that STLs don't matter for the 77 PEPs.
In 1978 and 1979, I worked at radio stations in Santa Barbara, California, while I attended college there. The first station I worked at had purchased a Volkswagon "Thing" automobile from a soldier who brought it home from Germany. It had an AM radio that tuned the European broadcast band, around 200 KHz, and every week, I would drive it up to the top of the Los Padres forest to check the station's transmitter.
I could here Deutsche Welle all the way up and all the way back down, all during the ride, on about 200 KHz, which is the low end of the band where aircraft marker beacons operate in the U.S. IIRC, I could even hear the marker beacon at the Santa Barbara airport.
I was the happiest 26 year old in the world. I even learned a few words of German!
In Europe an Asia, 3 bands are used for AM transmissions: long wave (153 kHz to 179, long time ago until ~350 kHz), medium wave (520-1620 kHz) and SW (many bands).
Long wave hasn't been used in all countries, some are still on air. Deutsche Welle is a German foreign station that operated on SW and a little bit on MW, bot newer on long wave (LW).
200 kHz might be the BBC from England. Their TX is still on air on 198 kHz. In Germany, 153, 207 (Deutschlandfunk) and 177 (DRadio, former GDR) were on air. In Burg was 261 on air with a German transmission, but only some years after the soviet army moved out that has been closed. Except for Burg, all other LW TX were demolished in the last years.
Burg is still on air on a lower frequency for controlling power meters.
Now LW is almost dead, stations are being switched off and antennas are going to be demolished.
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