I haven't seen much discussion about how AM gets used for local road condition or emergency communication. When you're driving and see a sign that says "TUNE TO 1610 AM" and the car has no AM receiver, what do you do?
This may be a shrinking niche, but it's potentially a last bastion of AM radio usefulness.
Those low power highway information stations are actually required to be low quality audio [1]. My understanding is that back in the day, broadcasters insisted that these stations were low quality so they would not compete with commercial broadcasters.
In my opinion, those stations actually make AM seem much worse than it really is. That scheme backfired in the long run.
In a sample size of maybe 10, every time I’ve seen one of those highway signs and tuned to the station, the quality was so bad I couldn’t make out any words and so got no useful information. If that’s the last bastion of AM usefulness, scrap it and give that spectrum to the wireless carriers. Frankly, for stuff like road closure information I’m a lot more likely to get that from Waze (delivered over a 5G connection) now anyway.
This is the most interestingly line from his letter:
> nearly 90 percent of Americans ages 12 and older — totaling hundreds of
millions of people — listened to AM or FM radio each week, higher than the percentage that watch television (56 percent) or own a computer (77 percent)
Admittedly it seems dubious but if true I'm surprised by basically every one of these numbers
All this requires to be true is that basically all Americans who are in a car weekly turn on the radio when driving, which is very believable. Some people also still have a radio in the kitchen of course.
Does it count those instances where my Ford randomly plays FM radio (sometimes even randomly AM) before I managed to connect BT/Carplay or if that either of those happen to disconnect?
Because that's about the limit of my usage of any terrestrial radio.
No way that's true. Wonder if they're getting selection bias, ex. the 90% of the people who are willing to take an unsolicited survey on their land line phone.
Note the "listened to AM OR FM radio each week", emphasis on the "or".
I can't say how long it has been since I checked the AM dial while driving (basically hit it by accident), but years it he most appropriate unit. What I heard (northeastern US) seemed to support some data I read that it is mostly taken over by religious and Limbaugh-type right-wing talk radio. So, that strongly left- Sen. Markey is supporting it so strongly says something. But, if there are actually high listener ship, then for sure, it could be a critical emergency communications channel, and worthwhile just for that
AM radio broadcasts can reach somewhat farther than FM (and way farther at night on clear channels); that might matter in an emergency.
As a middle-schooler living in the Washington DC area, I would regularly pick up WLS in Chicago, some 700 miles away, on my little crystal set at night.
A crystal set needs no battery power, the signal is enough to power the audio. I had fun making one with those 20 in 1 electronics toys as a kid. I think that one didn't tune so you heard multiple stations at once.
This creates a problem, and even risk, where clear-channel (in the generic sense, not of the firm that appropriated the name, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear-channel_station>) stations whose signals may reach 1,000 miles or further at night will often report on local traffic and weather conditions using entirely generic terminology: "in the local area", "around town", "in the suburbs", "metro area", "twin cities", "tri-city area", "quad cities" (there are numerous of each), etc.
That might work if your station's reach is the typical 10--50 miles of an American FM broadcast (notable exception: San Francisco's KQED which can be picked up by direct line-of-sight at least 120 miles away as one approaches Yosemite on CA-120 near and east of Groveland, CA.
There's a similar issue I find with online news items from local broadcast (usually television) stations, which similarly utterly fail to note the city and state in which a story occurs, though at least in this case it's usually possible to punch the call signs into Wikipedia to find out where the station is located, something that's not always possible traveling remote regions by car at night. (Though to be fair, far more possible now than it was several decades ago.)
I can still get music radio from Algeria on AM, or rock, sport and news from the UK (I believe from stations emitting from Swansea and London)
I used to listen to Deutschlandfunk, France Inter, BBC4 LW on the LW band (only the latter is still active today, others were switched off in the 2010s)
Also, I love that radio is a media that is so hard to regulate. There is always some novelty to what you can listen.
There used to be rock-music pirate radios in the 60s, emitting from the international waters. Some small countries like Luxembourg and Monaco would also have commercial radios to break government monopolies from neighboring countries.
Then there were the pirate FM radios in the 70s and 80s
Monaco is still broadcasting some stations that don't comply with French regulations on music (Riviera radio serves mainstream English pop songs).
It allows you to listen to some different music in your car.
(this one is in FM, tho, so it's very local)
Some authoritarian governments were challenged by the radio too. Nazi Germany couldn't stop the BBC during WWII, for example.
And you can get a lot of American radios all over the world, even when the internet is controlled.
At last, none of the radio you listen to on AM end up in the history that profiles you. You can listen to a radio a night without being served the same music over and over afterwards.
AM radio won't be mainstream. But I'm convinced it still has a role for media plurality, and as a line of Defense for the democracy
(and yeah, I know you can get much more from internet radios, like Anime music and everything, but it doesn't feel the same)
AM radio is a pretty poor standard considering how much power and bandwidth it uses, due much to the very limited modulation technology available in the 1920s.
DRM (no not that DRM--Digital Radio Mondiale) is a modern digital standard that promises much better spectral efficiency, power efficiency and range. See https://www.drm.org/. It is similar in concept to DAB, using an OFDM carrier, but with more robust error correction and equalisation, and lower bit rate codec to handle larger broadcast areas.
There is a hope that this could upgrade existing AM broadcast infrastructure, allowing rapid coverage of large areas without the expense of building out new towers.
The MW/HF bands are great for coverage because of the longer wavelength, relative to the VHF bands used for FM and DAB.
Obviously you know this, but AM is absurdly easy to implement. A pencil, razor blade, some wire and an earphone is all it takes to make a crude receiver.
RE " ....That crackle apparently just doesn't fly with luxury auto brands. BMW spokesperson Rebecca Kiehne told me, "Electric motors cause interference on AM which is why BMW decided to remove this option. While it could be offered, BMW's performance standards are very high and we don't offer a product that meets less than those high standards."...."
Apparently BMW *high standards do not extend to removing EMI* that interferes with AM. It could be done if they really wanted too.
What exactly does he technically want to preserve? Does he really care about amplitude modulation? Or does he care about the frequency band (medium wave, HF) and its propagation properties? Or does he care bout the geographic reach of these stations?
Amplitude modulation is a historically important technology, because it was technically very simple to receive in the early history of radio, and because it was more bandwidth-efficient than FM. But it remains utterly badly suited for mobile reception, because it is highly sensitive for multi-path interference (unlike FM).
We have now far better modern, digital modulation schemes, including DAB and DVB-T2 for VHF and DRM for long, medium, and short-wave transmission. They provide (thanks to OFDM) much better audio quality and interference resistance than the old analogue modulation schemes, and they are also far more power efficient, which substantially reduces the enormous electricity bills of the transmitter stations. They also are very bandwidth efficient, and can be used in single-frequency networks.
Agreed about digital modulation, but I recall hearing multipath a lot more on FM, or perhaps it was just more obnoxious there. Traveling around large buildings or under a metal bridge would bring that familiar rapid flutter as the car moved through places where the reflections would reinforce and cancel. (You can drive through a lot more wavelengths per unit time for FM than AM.)
What a shame. I've lived in a rural areas for most of my adult life. FM reception is notoriously poor due to the terrain. AM repeaters were always a nice touch. Also worth noting that AM radio content is absurdly easy to support and transmit.
I doubt AM is easy to transmit in practice. Complicated modulation schemes cost almost nothing, but high power is still expensive and needs real engineering.
It might be easier on a DIY level, but on a commercial level complexity is free, substance and power are expensive.
> The AM band in the United States covers frequencies from 540 kHz up to 1700 kHz
I wonder if there's something useful to do with that range. It's a big chunk of lower frequencies right there, in the range that reliably does over-the-horizon propagation (although better at night perhaps according to wikipedia?)
The benefit of AM being super simple to build a receiver for is less relevant nowadays, FM is trivial to get radios for now, and ham radio uses SSB for voice for the most part in the lower frequency ranges.
I'd bet that most would conclude that the best use for those frequencies is broadcast.
In Seattle, half a million people listened to KIRO-AM 710 last month [1]. In Boston, 454,600 people listened to WBZ-AM 1030 [2]. In Los Angeles, 625,500 people listened to KFI-AM 640 [3].
It's difficult to justify discontinuing an audio service that is performing as a top conduit for audio (more than Spotify or Pandora, for example) because of a perception that the service is no longer viable.
> I wonder if there's something useful to do with that range.
Non-directional beacons! In Nth America NDBs are 190–535 kHz, but elsewhere they are 190–1750 kHz, overlapping the AM radio band. Keep decommissioning the more expensive VOR stations in favour of satnav (and release the spectrum), but keep NDB transmitters as a low-tech/low-cost backup.
My favourite radio ever is AM 740 in the Boston area— WJIB, a listener-supported station broadcasting hits from the late 30s to 70s easy listening. Where else in broadcast these days can one expect to listen to the Dorsey Brothers, Glenn Miller, or Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass in the original AM sound? Good music for the soul.
I find it funny... here people are afraid their clients (cars) will lose AM support, and in europe, we feer the very-soon coming date when our governments will shut down FM radio, leaving a bunch of cars (those without DAB radios) musicless or tied to some kind of mobile phone connected to AUX ports situation.
After a recent hurricane decimated our area, a battery powered emergency AM radio was, for some time, the only source of information available. Communication resiliency shouldn't be decreased without good reason.
I still listen to AM radio (the CBC). (I mainly listen in the home, not in the car, because I do not have a car or a driving license; however, sometimes when going with someone else in the car, I can listen to radio.)
We need AM radio. AM radio is simple. It is better than having an overly complicated and badly made digital radio needing licensing and difficulty of implementation etc.
> Markey cited statistics from the Pew Research Center News Platform Fact Sheet from September 2022 which said 47% of Americans receive their news from the radio.
I believe that explains quite a bit. Without being snarky, AM radio is home to political opinion that is largely sympathetic to a conservative viewpoint and I suspect that is one reason that Markey wants car manufacturers to keep it (and why perhaps other lawmakers would be indifferent or even eager to see it disappear)
Not an adherent to the views commonly espoused on AM talk radio, I nevertheless see the utility for some kind of low-tech broadcast format which is easy and inexpensive to tune in and broadcast over. AM fits the bill, and has much longer range than FM
One of the reasons why this story has gotten traction is because Ed Markey is considered a progressive and is a member of the Democratic Party. Generally, progressive Democrats don't have an interest in content that is sympathetic to a conservative viewpoint.
Also, to your second point, due to the size of the antennas required, AM is very expensive to broadcast over unless you're using an inefficient antenna. The shortest quarter wavelength antenna (at 1700 kHz) would be 137 feet high. An AM (medium wave) array would take up acres of land.
It wouldn't be a WiFi-like protocol. Higher noise floor, major issues with interference with your neighbor (even beyond line of sight), a total of ~1/20th the bandwidth of a single narrow WiFi channel, and antenna size needing to be many orders of magnitude larger than for 2.4/5Ghz WiFi.
stu2010|3 years ago
This may be a shrinking niche, but it's potentially a last bastion of AM radio usefulness.
RF_Enthusiast|3 years ago
In my opinion, those stations actually make AM seem much worse than it really is. That scheme backfired in the long run.
[1] 47 CFR 90.242(b)(8) <https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...>
aidenn0|3 years ago
quickthrower2|3 years ago
Analemma_|3 years ago
guywithahat|3 years ago
> nearly 90 percent of Americans ages 12 and older — totaling hundreds of millions of people — listened to AM or FM radio each week, higher than the percentage that watch television (56 percent) or own a computer (77 percent)
Admittedly it seems dubious but if true I'm surprised by basically every one of these numbers
sempron64|3 years ago
r00fus|3 years ago
Because that's about the limit of my usage of any terrestrial radio.
cwkoss|3 years ago
andirk|3 years ago
toss1|3 years ago
I can't say how long it has been since I checked the AM dial while driving (basically hit it by accident), but years it he most appropriate unit. What I heard (northeastern US) seemed to support some data I read that it is mostly taken over by religious and Limbaugh-type right-wing talk radio. So, that strongly left- Sen. Markey is supporting it so strongly says something. But, if there are actually high listener ship, then for sure, it could be a critical emergency communications channel, and worthwhile just for that
dctoedt|3 years ago
As a middle-schooler living in the Washington DC area, I would regularly pick up WLS in Chicago, some 700 miles away, on my little crystal set at night.
quickthrower2|3 years ago
olyjohn|3 years ago
dredmorbius|3 years ago
That might work if your station's reach is the typical 10--50 miles of an American FM broadcast (notable exception: San Francisco's KQED which can be picked up by direct line-of-sight at least 120 miles away as one approaches Yosemite on CA-120 near and east of Groveland, CA.
There's a similar issue I find with online news items from local broadcast (usually television) stations, which similarly utterly fail to note the city and state in which a story occurs, though at least in this case it's usually possible to punch the call signs into Wikipedia to find out where the station is located, something that's not always possible traveling remote regions by car at night. (Though to be fair, far more possible now than it was several decades ago.)
hinata08|3 years ago
I can still get music radio from Algeria on AM, or rock, sport and news from the UK (I believe from stations emitting from Swansea and London) I used to listen to Deutschlandfunk, France Inter, BBC4 LW on the LW band (only the latter is still active today, others were switched off in the 2010s)
Also, I love that radio is a media that is so hard to regulate. There is always some novelty to what you can listen. There used to be rock-music pirate radios in the 60s, emitting from the international waters. Some small countries like Luxembourg and Monaco would also have commercial radios to break government monopolies from neighboring countries. Then there were the pirate FM radios in the 70s and 80s
Monaco is still broadcasting some stations that don't comply with French regulations on music (Riviera radio serves mainstream English pop songs). It allows you to listen to some different music in your car. (this one is in FM, tho, so it's very local)
Some authoritarian governments were challenged by the radio too. Nazi Germany couldn't stop the BBC during WWII, for example. And you can get a lot of American radios all over the world, even when the internet is controlled. At last, none of the radio you listen to on AM end up in the history that profiles you. You can listen to a radio a night without being served the same music over and over afterwards.
AM radio won't be mainstream. But I'm convinced it still has a role for media plurality, and as a line of Defense for the democracy (and yeah, I know you can get much more from internet radios, like Anime music and everything, but it doesn't feel the same)
audiofish|3 years ago
DRM (no not that DRM--Digital Radio Mondiale) is a modern digital standard that promises much better spectral efficiency, power efficiency and range. See https://www.drm.org/. It is similar in concept to DAB, using an OFDM carrier, but with more robust error correction and equalisation, and lower bit rate codec to handle larger broadcast areas.
There is a hope that this could upgrade existing AM broadcast infrastructure, allowing rapid coverage of large areas without the expense of building out new towers.
The MW/HF bands are great for coverage because of the longer wavelength, relative to the VHF bands used for FM and DAB.
cbm-vic-20|3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio
hulitu|3 years ago
That's why DAB is crap. Because people are greedy and don't care about quality.
lormayna|3 years ago
asdefghyk|3 years ago
progman32|3 years ago
mgkuhn|3 years ago
Amplitude modulation is a historically important technology, because it was technically very simple to receive in the early history of radio, and because it was more bandwidth-efficient than FM. But it remains utterly badly suited for mobile reception, because it is highly sensitive for multi-path interference (unlike FM).
We have now far better modern, digital modulation schemes, including DAB and DVB-T2 for VHF and DRM for long, medium, and short-wave transmission. They provide (thanks to OFDM) much better audio quality and interference resistance than the old analogue modulation schemes, and they are also far more power efficient, which substantially reduces the enormous electricity bills of the transmitter stations. They also are very bandwidth efficient, and can be used in single-frequency networks.
jejones3141|3 years ago
no-dr-onboard|3 years ago
eternityforest|3 years ago
It might be easier on a DIY level, but on a commercial level complexity is free, substance and power are expensive.
RF_Enthusiast|3 years ago
The characteristics of AM (i.e., daytime groundwave and nighttime skywave) provide service that other services can not.
JKCalhoun|3 years ago
cschneid|3 years ago
I wonder if there's something useful to do with that range. It's a big chunk of lower frequencies right there, in the range that reliably does over-the-horizon propagation (although better at night perhaps according to wikipedia?)
The benefit of AM being super simple to build a receiver for is less relevant nowadays, FM is trivial to get radios for now, and ham radio uses SSB for voice for the most part in the lower frequency ranges.
RF_Enthusiast|3 years ago
In Seattle, half a million people listened to KIRO-AM 710 last month [1]. In Boston, 454,600 people listened to WBZ-AM 1030 [2]. In Los Angeles, 625,500 people listened to KFI-AM 640 [3].
It's difficult to justify discontinuing an audio service that is performing as a top conduit for audio (more than Spotify or Pandora, for example) because of a perception that the service is no longer viable.
[1] <https://radioinsight.com/ratings/seattle-tacoma/> [2] <https://radioinsight.com/ratings/boston/> [3] <https://radioinsight.com/ratings/los-angeles/>
perilunar|3 years ago
Non-directional beacons! In Nth America NDBs are 190–535 kHz, but elsewhere they are 190–1750 kHz, overlapping the AM radio band. Keep decommissioning the more expensive VOR stations in favour of satnav (and release the spectrum), but keep NDB transmitters as a low-tech/low-cost backup.
kmbfjr|3 years ago
They won’t just interfere with medium wave broadcast.
vjulian|3 years ago
ajsnigrutin|3 years ago
chha|3 years ago
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/13/norway-becomes...
windows2020|3 years ago
zzo38computer|3 years ago
We need AM radio. AM radio is simple. It is better than having an overly complicated and badly made digital radio needing licensing and difficulty of implementation etc.
jhallenworld|3 years ago
scelerat|3 years ago
I believe that explains quite a bit. Without being snarky, AM radio is home to political opinion that is largely sympathetic to a conservative viewpoint and I suspect that is one reason that Markey wants car manufacturers to keep it (and why perhaps other lawmakers would be indifferent or even eager to see it disappear)
Not an adherent to the views commonly espoused on AM talk radio, I nevertheless see the utility for some kind of low-tech broadcast format which is easy and inexpensive to tune in and broadcast over. AM fits the bill, and has much longer range than FM
RF_Enthusiast|3 years ago
Also, to your second point, due to the size of the antennas required, AM is very expensive to broadcast over unless you're using an inefficient antenna. The shortest quarter wavelength antenna (at 1700 kHz) would be 137 feet high. An AM (medium wave) array would take up acres of land.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
bilsbie|3 years ago
BenjiWiebe|3 years ago