Originally published at: AM radio faces uncertain road ahead as automakers nix it from the dashboard | Boing Boing
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There will be truly unfortunate losses as the AM band starts losing its endpoints on car and consumer receivers. It was the home of a lot of high weirdness and nighttime voices from afar as well as a familiar space for news, sports and weather. However, the losses will be completely outweighed by the benefit to the nation of the accompanying decline of a major distribution channel for right-wing and Xtianist hate speech.
removing AM radio from cars is "a grave threat to future local, state, and federal disaster response and relief efforts.
While I know there are a lot of dead zones for the FM band and for cellular data coverage across the country, shouldn’t improving that situation become the focus of maintaining comms for emergency and disaster response?
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I thought most stations had switched to DAB+ a long time ago? It’s been a while since I heard AM radio in a car
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So does the engine cause interference with the radio, or the radio cause interference with the engine?
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Large swaths of the country are stilk data deserts where data coverage is unavailable.
We need am radio inclusion for information equity during emergencies and diversity of local programming.
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Engine to radio.
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That was my first thought, though this is the group more likely to go out and buy a cheap AM receiver from Walmart and duct-tape it to their dashboard to keep the hate oozing. I don’t know if that will be the same for other diverse audiences.
Perhaps, but there is also FM. In an emergency all available options: AM, FM, TV, cable, phones — they all start screeching about the emergency. My guess is if they are reachable now, they will be reachable without AM radio. If they can’t be reached now, there will be no change.
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As noted above, the former. An automobile can only do without one of those things.
For any given audience it will be a combination of age, income, openness to change, and a bitterly defiant mentality. The duct-taped cheap receiver is the obvious outcome for the fans of Rush Limbaugh’s successors and for the Jesus freaks. Most other audiences will move on to sponsored podcasts (DL or streaming) for their niche content. Live news and sports broadcasters are already moving to FM.
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Indeed!
because it causes interference from electric engines
Author’s grasp of cause and effect seems weak. (Either that or a fundamental grammatical carelessness.)
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The only time in the past decade, at least, that I’ve heard AM In the car is when accidentally switching bands.
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Digital radio is broadcast on FM frequencies, not from cell towers. It should be available wherever analog radio is available as well
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Same. Maybe as a kid i would curiously go through the AM band but i didn’t find anything worth listening to. As an adult i can’t think of a moment where i went to AM on purpose. That said i am all for keeping AM as i’m sure it has of use for other folks
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Same here, with one exception. When I’m driving in L.A. I still switch instinctively to AM for “KNX 1070 newsradio-ooooo” for my news hit. While the jingle doesn’t quite work with 97.1, I recently updated the pre-set to the FM station and cleared the AM pre-set to bolster my new habit.
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FM frequencies are generally line of sight; AM BCB frequencies are “over the hill” by refraction around the Earth and reflection by ionosphere . Makeshift AM BCB transmitters and receivers for emergencies are also much easier to construct. One big CME from this being relevant 
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Do kids even know what AM radio is? Seems this last ditch effort to save it is just a bunch of olds screaming into the dust of passing time.
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The irony is that it was once the cutting edge of youth culture, with signals bouncing off the ionosphere from Tijuana being the only way a kid in rural or small-town America could connect with new music and counterculture ideas. As we discuss the approaching demise of AM radio a look back is in order.
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Yes, mostly because automakers refuse to put in the effort to do proper grounding. There’s no argument against it beyond the cost to make EVs properly grounded.
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No. We don’t. It’s become a breeding ground for hate and the quicker it dies off the better we will be as a society.
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I struggle to recall a time I found one of those roadside transmitters audible and/or informative.
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When I lived in the Bay Area, I used to listen to KGO a lot. They had a very strong signal and in the evenings, people could hear it all the way from the Mexican border to the Canadian border.
I still think of the drive time call: “traffic and weather together on the 8s”.
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