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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 JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 24 2023, @05:56PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday May 24 2023, @05:56PM (#1307978)

    >Regarding testing: it's pretty easy and cheap to do your own testing before you take stuff to the test lab.

    Yes... ish. (After a couple of spectacular failures involving cross country travel) We built our own metal room, sealed the seams with conductive adhesive copper tape, installed a wall of RF anechoic cones, bought some decent gear and did a great deal of pre-testing before going to the certified house to obtain our compliance certificates. Our devices contained intentional oscillators for the purposes of making precise measurements, so we never really cleared the limits by wide margins. Our pre-testing did help, but even if we had calibrated our gear, I doubt it would have correlated 1:1 with what got observed at the certified labs.

    >BIOS settings to spread the master clock a bit.

    Yeah, first time I tested anything with a spread spectrum clock was a Palm Pilot in the (obviously) late 1990s - you couldn't tell if that thing was on or off by the RF emissions in a shielded room.

    >Companies don't want to hire RF EEs

    Small ones don't. Brash young startups (cough Tesla cough) probably don't. Once you get big and mature enough, you eventually end up building your own calibrated anechoic chambers and whether your EEs studied RF in school or not, you'll have a couple on staff who know enough to make stuff compliant.

    >I have to wonder if the one devoid of ferrite ferrule should have had one?

    Look to the certifications. Of course, I have never, ever, seen any practical enforcement channels that would realistically catch whether we put those two beads on our accessory cables or not. I suppose basic ISO-9001 style compliance audits _might_ look at the finished product vs the design on file from compliance testing, but in reality - especially smaller company reality - I'd bet it would average 20 years or more (maybe 200 years or more) before such an audit would catch such a non-compliance. More likely would be, if the emissions were truly grievous, that an end-user would complain about the interference and it would bubble up through channels that way - audit of complaints logs is the most common audit activity. Thing about our two ferrite design was: we were only a couple of dB over without them, nothing anybody would notice in practice, particularly when our peak was at 288MHz and compliant with 300MHz+ limits. But, non-conformance is risk and as a business we'd rather not risk our reputation over a couple of bucks per copy on a device we barely sell 100 copies a year of, on a good year! Now, an offshore manufacturer of something like power tools sold in big box home improvement stores? Hell yeah, I bet a lot of them cut that corner.

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