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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 24 2023, @10:47AM   Printer-friendly

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/ev-advocates-join-tech-groups-and-automakers-to-oppose-am-radio-mandate/

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by owl on Wednesday May 24 2023, @04:49PM

    by owl (15206) on Wednesday May 24 2023, @04:49PM (#1307955)

    I'm not up on the latest in RF front-ends, if they still need tuning circuits, or are they wide enough bandwidth to take in pretty much anything from DC to light and heterodyne to some IF frequency.

    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.

    One of my arguments in this whole dog and pony show is that it will cost MORE to redesign radio receivers to remove AM circuits. IE, cheaper to keep things as they have been.

    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.

    There's more afoot here. Whenever some industry group collaborates on something like this you know it's all about profit, never about people, product or service quality. (I think I'm becoming my dad, which isn't such a bad thing after all.)

    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.

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