Are you saying the bill's wording requires AM in every car tuner, not AM in every car?
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Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
The way I read the bill, it requires an AM tuner to be "standard equipment" on all passenger vehicles, but the rule would not take effect for 5 years after the President signs it. It would exempt low volume manufacturers, so your next Ferrari still might not come with an AM tuner.
Text of H.R. 979: AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 (Reported by House Committee version) - GovTrack.us
Text of H.R. 979: AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act … as of Nov. 12, 2025 (Reported by House Committee version). H.R. 979: AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025
www.govtrack.us
Given that this bill has not been enacted, and has made minimal progress in Congress this year, I remain doubtful that the above language gets enacted exactly as written.
Even if it does, I don't think AM has 5 years left.
Not including FM and postponing enforcement for 5 years? This thing is a turkey.
At the rate I'm seeing posts lately about more and more AMs going dark, I'm beginning to wonder.
Has anyone started an official list of U.S. AM stations that have been reported off-air long-term without explanation, that have gone officially STA, or that have outright turned in their licenses? Something in a simple HTML table format, with columns for callsign, frequency, owner name, last-known air date, shutdown nature (e.g. license surrender), and reason stated by owner (if any)? It would be a good addition to a site like worldradiohistory.com. Wherever it is hosted, there could be an official companion thread here at RD for community reports and updates. The recent hastening of AM stations going dark is historic and strikes me as something that should start getting documented before those that have already fallen get buried under the eventual avalanche to come.
I forgot to add that it also doesn't, and never will, require a subscription of any kind to operate!
I also forgot to mention that it doesn't receive HD radio, but that's not really a deal breaker, since HD isn't really all that widespread, and 99% of all stations have an analog fallback anyway (about the only thing that one could conceivably miss are the HD subchannels, but one can stream that stuff, and anything else, from their phone via the Bluetooth enabled FM modulator).
c
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
My first thought regards the logistics. While a silence STA request has to give a reason, that is usually filed as a PDF in LMS, and you would have to open every such document to get the date the station ceased operation.
And, while a cancellation of license request is reported in the FCC Daily Digest and could therefore be tracked in LMS, the supporting documentation is also usually a PDF. And STAs are not listed in the DD.
I am not sure how you would find stations that went silent without following the proper notification protocols with the FCC. Realistically, even the Media Bureau doesn't go looking for them, because if they issued a Notice of Violation it would likely be met with a hardship request, or not even be served in the first place if the licensee simply vanished.
The HTML would actually be the easiest part of it. The rest of it is manual and intensive research. I can't see anyone undertaking it unless they literally had nothing else to do with their day (... week, month, year ...).
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
At the moment, I would think not. They're still on the air, even if without meaningful content.
Unless they went silent and I missed it ...
"Unless they went silent and I missed it". Another reason AM is irrelevant. Cars made horses irrelevant for day to day transportation and if a horse were as sick as AM radio, you would do the humane thing and shoot it. No AM in cars legislation. No forcing extra cost on consumers for something no one wants*
* not including dinosaurs and people who were alive when they roamed the earth.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
In my case, sir, if you would look at my profile, you will see that I am all the way across the country from North Carolina, and therefore my statement about "missing it" is due to the fact that I am far outside their predicted signal contour. I literally have to take the word of those who live near Charlotte as to whether WBT is on or off the air.
Personally, I hate my posts being quoted to make a different point than the one I intended.
I apologize. I am so used to seeing discussions about stations that are off the are and no one noticed. There are a LOT of those
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Don't worry about the "extra" cost of AM. The component costs of a "chip" for AM is minimal once a production line is set up. My parent's car had Sirius XM which was never used. There last time I listened, the digital compression of satellite radio wasn't that much better than the "old" AM before the "stonewall" audio filters technology kill music on AM.
The real issue for OTA radio is the auto manufacturers not having radio as standard equipment or sometimes not even available at all on cars in the future.
There are thousands of licensed radio stations in the USA. Unless you DX for stations who don't file, read the FCC filings, read this site's postings or read Vance's stuff, and have some kind computer program to keep everything in order, you can miss a silent STL on any band, right now I know of 2 LPFMs and an non profit class A FM that have been off the air for over a year with no filed STAs.
Which is why all the major broadcasters are paying to be on iHeartRadio. They know that is the only way their station will be heard as the radio device goes away. They're trying to transition their listeners to streaming platforms because it is the new "radio."
I didn't know non iHeart stations had to pay to be on the app. I thought iHeart got to play a couple of commercials during one of the breaks. Audacy was really really really stupid to sell radio.com.
I am arguing principal more than price. Maybe the chip manufacturers could better use the AM chip production line for something important, AM can be dropped from cars, except as the option no one will want and legislators can turn their attention to needed legislation in place of a pointless discussion of how important horse and buggy rules are for transportation....er. ah I mean how important AM radio is in cars
Like what? For the past two years, the congress has done absolutely nothing. This is a congress that doesn't believe in legislating. In point of fact, they've made no progress on this AM bill either. There's no indication it will even come up for a vote. The discussion we're having here is more active and more serious than anything they're having in DC.
Agreed. Dinosaurs in Washington are as useless as an AM broadcaster, unless you are privileged to receive insider trading tips
There is no dedicated "AM chip" in a modern car radio. The front end goes straight into a DSP (Digital Signal Processor), and all tuning and demodulation is done via digital code. In fact, it has multiple tuners running simultaneously, which is how it is able to immediately pull up a menu of all the receivable AM and FM frequencies in your area.
I don't know how many markets have their EAS set up with the FEMA trailers at AM stations for really bad emergencies but according to postings on this site, there are several markets. Hopefully this is a waste of taxpayers money. I was CompTIA certified in Web design and networking. Unfortunately the Internet is not bulletproof. AM radio is the "lowest common denominator" of electronic media. BTW in some class B FM areas the class A AM stations have more car "coverage" than the FM stations. Especially when the power grid is down.
Think about you smoke detector. Hopefully it's a waste of money. For less manufacturing cost than the retail price of a smoke detector, Americans have a backup communication system.
But there's no mechanism to incentivize owners to continue maintaining and staffing obsolete AM facilities. Maybe you can legislate car manufacturers to include AM receivers in cars, but if there is nothing meaningful on the band, what use is it? End users won't even think to look there for information in an emergency if it doesn't provide any value the other 99.9999999999% of the time.
Most Class A AMs are still viable* with the exception of WBT but there is a tread on that subject.
IMHO what really should happen with car radios is if the Internet goes out, the entertainment center does scan of the OTA radio stations and shows the OTA signals available on the screen. I am pretty sure this would be a software fix and cost near zero after the code is written.
* The big Chicago AMs got moved to other towers when their land got too valuable. That wasn't cheap. If they moved AM 1000 for less that a quarter million, I would be surprised. There was enough revenue to save the signal.