… everybody who’s ever learned of an emergency via an AM radio in your car, raise your hand 
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::crickets::
[This is def more than 5 characters, WTH Discourse]
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“Companies must be allowed to make business decisions based on commercial return! It’s the capitalist way!”
“Let’s get rid of useless, costly AM radios.”
“NOT THAT WAY!”
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Given that it’s a tweet from the CEO I certainly wouldn’t trust it; but my interpretation was that
"For any owners of Ford EVs without AM broadcast capability, we’ll offer a software update. " was a specific statement of intent to add AM broadcast reception via software update; while
"Customers can currently listen to AM radio content in a variety of ways in our vehicles – including via streaming – and we will continue to innovate to deliver even better in-vehicle entertainment and emergency notification options in the future. "
was irrelevant marketing slurry about ‘content’ intended to make “we sell a nontrivial number of vehicles without AM reception” sound like less of a deficiency because you can still get your ‘content’ and, god help you, he intends to continue innovating in your direction.
I’d be less than totally surprised if this ends up being walked back or left in a ‘your mileage may vary’ state when it turns out that the antenna and analog aspect of AM reception that was never intended to be used were…not showered with love…during design, testing, and manufacture and the reception proves to be nearly unusable even after the firmware changes are made; but the first sentence looks like it specially refers to “AM broadcast capability” rather than “AM broadcast content capability” or “AM content” or the like, which would have given them a lot more wiggle room in terms of choosing just about any mechanism that can deliver audio that is also delivered via AM broadcast at least somewhere and calling it good.
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I’ve never heard of an emergency via AM; but I have used TIS/HAR in response to specific signs on a few occasions. There’s nothing, in principle, stopping the same objective from being served by just about any low power broadcast option; but even FM seems markedly less common; and I can’t say I’m holding my breath for a BTLE implementation to actually reach maturity before I reach EoL; though you could stamp out a proof of concept in an afternoon, maybe a lunch break if you had the right hardware on hand.
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.
Emergency alerts on AM? I have. The provider of such services where I live was CKUA (Alberta, Canada) who had transmitters all over the province. CKUA was primarily supported by this income, along with donation drives. The opposite pretty much of right wing radio, I haven’t listened to them since they disabled AM because I’m out of FM range… My current AM station of choice is CBC, also hardly right wing. The reasons AM is well suited to emergency notifications was covered extensively in “the other” thread on this topic.
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Do you mind sharing which app that is? All I can find is streaming apps like iHeart Radio which restricts certain broadcasts like football and baseball games.
It’s stupid that a $5 transistor radio can get the local NFL game on Sunday but my $1000 smartphone cannot (without paying for NFL Sunday Ticket bullshit).
You can just plug the tape end into the 8-track adapter and you’ll be all set.
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Hey, I wonder if we can get USians to reveal how little they know about anywhere and everywhere else in the world, and declaim the need for some universal standard based on what things are like from where they’re looking out of their window right now.
Like how Australia, just for instance, does not have a free-for-all of right wing Christian theocratic nutjobs on the AM band. (We have them on Sky News After Dark and all the Murdoch newspapers instead.)
We do, on the other hand, have SEN Sports radio for those who are interested in that sort of thing while they’re driving, which for some reason is quite a lot of people. (I never listen to it myself, and don’t really understand it, so I vote we just do away with it altogether. That’s how this works, right?)
We’ve got things like 3CR Community Radio, which is almost the antithesis of the bible-bashing lunatics. But just because AM equipment is cheap and easy and AM broadcast licences are cheap, and this is the only way it’s economical to do something like have something crazy like inclusive multicultural community radio, that’s no reason why some people on the other side of the world shouldn’t decide to get rid of the technology altogether. It’s not like they’re using it.
And we’ve got the AM station which broadcasts Parliament, live. By legislative requirement. And when Parliament isn’t in session, it’s ABC News Radio, just playing news broadcasts when it’s not repeating content from CBC, BBC, or DW.
But no, sure, you’re right. You’re not getting value out of it, may as well de facto just get rid of it for everyone on their behalf, from a position of pure ignorance.
To that point:
I sincerely hope you forgot your /s tag, because:
FFS.
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Conversely, of course, BMW and VW haven’t gotten rid of AM radios in their cars because of some plot against Christian talk radio but because
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Traffic and weather on the 8s.
We still have 2 big AM stations in Detroit. One is conservative talk radio the other is 24/7 news. The news station is pretty good.
I’ve been known to tune in to the news station for the traffic report and local news.
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It’s not streaming, it’s real AM radio. They can enable it in software because it’s SDR (software-defined radio). Basically the radio reception is done by high speed software processing of the EM spectrum rather than a fixed set of passive inductors and capacitors. Most car radios work this way nowadays. It’s real radio.
Nope, you don’t need particular hardware to receive particular radio signals anymore. SDR for the win.
The claim of “emergency alerts” is still bullshit though because if nobody is listening to the band, then an emergency alert on that band serves no function, now does it, Ford?
Neither. Ford patched their SDR firmware to enable AM. It’s real radio reception, and no zombie hardware was needed.
I’m learning in this thread how few people are aware of SDR and that it’s basically how all radio spectrum reception of all types is handled nowadays. Hopefully my post helps. It’s done this way because it’s cheap. You buy one chip and you can receive anything you want. No need for variable capacitors, big inductors, special passives for European vs. North American FM offsets, etc.
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Do you know offhand what parts Ford, or any of the others, are using for the purpose? I mentioned firmware because I was looking at ST Microelectronics’ lineup of receiver ICs for examples and some of them specifically mentioned(either as a virtue of the product, or as an optoin within a product family) parts that had particularly small external firmware download requirements to place nicer with being driven by low-power/low-capacity microcontrollers rather than full-fat hosts that would think nothing of shoving multiple megabytes of blob into a peripheral at boot time.
They definitely all gave the impression that it was mostly SDR(albeit on dedicated hardware in-package, not with the default expectation that the host device was going to take care of that, though some appear to be able to provide fairly raw output if you want that flexibility); but that you’d need to feed them the correct firmware to enable all the functions they were capable of; and that you’d need host device support for things like an AM tuning dial UI and the host instructing the tuner IC to actually do AM on the given frequency; even if that’s just a matter of sending a few commands over i2c.
I’m also open to further information, RF stuff is not my area of strength; but my impression was that (while you don’t have all the cool but inflexible analog widgets anymore) an antenna and filter design intended to bring 88-108MHz in loud and clear for the SDR to chew on would not necessarily overlap with one where bringing in 540kHz-1700kHz is a necessity; so there would be a real possibility that a radio that wasn’t intended for AM use, while the receiver IC could be readily updated to cooperate, would potentially be pretty grim in terms of sensitivity and SNR.
Is the SDR witchcraft just good enough, compared to the early 20th century receivers that AM was originally built around, that you really have to mutilate the signal to put it beyond recovery? Are the odds good that Ford and friends simply didn’t modify the receiver design much between nominally AM capable and originally AM incapable cars because change and inventory complexity cost more than a few commodity passives; so the receivers are likely to be qualified even if the firmware didn’t ship with them?
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No, I certainly don’t have part numbers or anything like that. Ford included in one of their announcements, though, that it was an SDR software patch. It may have been in trade press so that detail is getting less attention. It wasn’t surprising though, since SDR is the norm in newer cars now.
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Hide/bury them where future archaeologists will find them, but add a couple of other items that imply that this device was part of some sort of religious ritual.
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I use NextRadio, which works on my Samsung Galaxy J2. It requires you to use corded headphones because that serves the function of the antenna. I’m guessing that it may not work on certain iPhones.
I think it offers some kind of streaming function too but I’ve only ever used the tuner.
Sometimes hardware has a capability it is decided not to enable it in software. Sometimes it is a lot to test, so ignore it or make it a 2.0 feature. Sometimes there was an attempt but for whatever reason the hardware is a little glitch or so rather than “put up with it” or find all the right software workarounds you just don’t complete it. Sometimes the problem isn’t the “working” but fitting it in the UI (sure “just add an AM button, but do you have space for it, or do you need to shrink buttons below 40px to fit it? Don’t forget to design the whole screen that comes up when you press “AM”), not so likely to be the case for AM radio, but it could be.
It could be as simple as the edutainment software was a few weeks behind schedule and to “catch up” they threw out anything used by free then 5% of the owners.
Or they want to start saving money in the future so they will stop looking for AM capabile hardware, but they ditched the software first maybe in part so if needed they could “listen to the customer” and “change course”.
Or maybe the hardware really doesn’t do it (maybe a COVID supply chain issue, the AM parts actually were hard to get or cost notably more…which pre COVID many radio parts had AM even if you didn’t care about it, back when iPhones used cellular parts designed by other companies the hardware included FM radio, apple just didn’t bother to hook it up in software or include an antenna)
The smartest thing the Democratic Party (or their proxies) could do is buy up AM radio stations and start fighting the alternative facts with real facts. Far cheaper and more effective than ad buys at election time.
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I don’t need one of those any more because my car is fancy (for Gilbert Wham values of fancy). It has a cd player that plays MP3 CDs. 2007 - what a time to be alive…
[ETA: Upon further reflection, I’d swap now for 2007 in a fuckin heartbeat]
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Yeah, I was just responding to the market-speak above, that was ambiguous about what some of Fords radios were doing. I’m definitely aware of SDR, since I’ve been messing with this doohickey for the last couple of years:
Yeah! But I’m still calling bullshit on manufacturers that remove a reasonably expected and traditional capability from hardware when it costs them nothing to include it with software, and the hardware supports it. It’s an awful lot like rent-seeking behavior.
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