Congress wants to force AM into every new car for emergency alerts.
The fight over the future of AM radio got a little more heated this week as organizations representing the auto and technology industries told Congress that its plan to mandate this mode of radio wave reception is poorly conceived and will hinder progress.
AM radio has seen almost every other in-car entertainment option come and go—vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs—and it might predate just about everything other than playing "I Spy," but time is catching up with this old broadcast technology. It is starting to get left behind as new models—many of which are electric vehicles—drive off into the sunset, streaming their audio instead of modulating its amplitude.
[...] "As more and more Americans adopt electric vehicles, we must ensure that they are equipped with AM radio. AM radio is—and will remain—an essential communications channel for emergency alerts and for disseminating news and other important information to residents of our district and communities across our country. I am proud to co-lead this bipartisan legislation which would ensure that EVs continue to be equipped with this basic but critical capability," said Rep. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), another co-sponsor.
(Score: 2) by owl on Wednesday May 24 2023, @04:49PM
That partly depends upon how much you want to pay.
Here's a common SDR dongle used by hobbists: RTL-SDR [radioreference.com].
Depending on the tuner chip in a specific dongle, the lower end frequency gores down to 22Mhz. So not down to DC at the $20 price range. And not suitable for receiving AM either at this price range.
The fact that Ford can restore existing car's AM reception with a software update means the BOM for the car has the AM capable hardware parts already present. Now, whether they could remove the AM capable hardware, without also removing FM radio too, none of us know. But a "software update" to restore means they had not yet redesigned the radio circuits to drop the hardware that can receive the AM bands. Of course this could simply mean that they had not yet redesigned the hardware to reduce the BOM by dropping the chip capable of receiving the AM bands.
A "follow the money" analysis will often find an actual reason for some imposed change from some "entity". Even if they don't overtly advertise that reason.