WKRP reference, love it.
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(pocket) AM Radio in car - AM Antenna outside car
- Thread starter kfbkfb
- Start date
The owners and FCC are on different sides on that issue. The owners want it, the FCC wants to require AMs to stay on air.
What happens in Florida? The entire state is awakened at 4:45am Officials apologize after ‘Emergency Alert’ test sent in ‘error’ to cell phones at 4:45 a.m.
Something similar happened in Hawaii a few years ago. A staffer playing around with the State EAS box sent a 'missile is on the way to Hawaii'-alert.
Good suggestion, but again, looking at it from a business standpoint, you're asking in this case Tesla to put their engineers to work to design an EMI mitigation scheme and a plan to include AM as an option, then the need to draft documentation and train staff on how to do the install in the rare case a Tesla customer actually orders it, plus spend $$ to do a run of parts and components to enable this option to be installed, for something that, in the end, few of their customers would most likely request, especially if it means forking out extra cash and increasing the time it takes for them to take delivery of their car in order to do so. I'm sure there are those who believe auto makers should still include the option to install all kinds of things, some more practical than others, but in the end automakers, like broadcasters, do research and surveys and speak to customers to find out what options and equipment the majority in their key market want and expect. If only a few "outliers" in the demographic Tesla sees as their "core" even mention something like AM radio, it's just not worth their time, money and trouble to include it, even as an option.
There's another thread on Radio Discussions about Netflix discontinuing their 25 year old model of DVD movie distribution via US Mail. It's another case where, for them as a company that makes solid business sense, as probably more than 95% of their customers access Netflix and stream movies via the internet, a smart TV or mobile device. It just doesn't make solid business sense anymore to "press" DVDs, have the staff required to take the orders, stuff the envelopes, pay the postage, chase after people to return the DVDs or pay extra charges and all that goes with that, for a model and technology that few use anymore. Similar to AM radios in Teslas.
And the car radio was worse than those crappy plastic headphones connected to a crystal set sounded better? Antique Vintage Headphones For SaleMy family used to own a '56 Rambler station wagon. Great little car but its radio wasn't a big selling point. I built a crystal set and carried it along on trips. No static at all.
I suspect your recollection is more nostalgic than accurate.
The conversation concerned interference on the AM band, not the fidelity. No, those old plastic headphones were not great but neither was the single 6" speaker underneath the rear view mirror.
As I've said before, when FM MPX came along I was greatly surprised at the music I hadn't heard on those old AM signals.
If you are referring to the later 60's when FMs were forced by the FCC to separate from simulcasting their sister AM, there was a simple reason why a lot of "new" music was heard:
Most FMs were sister to an AM. When they had to end simulcasting, they wanted formats that did not directly compete with their own AM. So we got "progressive rock" and all oldies and lots more Beautiful Music and other formats to played songs the big AM station did not play.
By the early 70's, some owners figured out that they could steal audience from their competitor's big AM, so we started getting Top 40 and Country and R&B on FM, as well as some of the new formats like AC that developed in the earlier 70's on both AM and FM, depending on the market.
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EAS remixes
In the mid-1970s, IIRC, KRNA FM played a unique [but legal] EBS test - a few notes on a synthesizer led into the emergency broadcast tone and the spoken part sounded like rap - I told a friend and he called the station and requested they play it, but they said they couldn't play it on request - I haven't found it yet on YouTube et al.
Kirk Bayne
No, wasn't referring to that. I was referring to two identical songs - one played on AM and one played on FM. The AM sounded incomplete by comparison, sometimes to the extent they could have been different takes.
Gotcha!
Remember, back when AM was king for Top 40 labels often released radio versions that were different from the album version, both in mix/EQ and length. That's why studios had a pair of "small speakers" that emulated the sound of car radios, transistor and clock and kitchen radios so that the mix would sound good not just on the kilobuck JBL speakers in the studio.
A number of stations use an intro to the tone that was done on a kazoo or flute, followed by the regulation tone and the notes again.
In the later 70's I was notified of a violation of the FCC rules for doing a singing version of the EBS test on 11-Q, WQII, where our jocks, accompanied by a kazoo, rapped the text of the test and the kazoo segued into a perfect match of the tone. "Against the spirit of the rules" was the reasoning for the notice. It was fun to listen to, though.
For anyone who's never heard it before, here is the infamous singing EBS test of WHEN Syracuse. It only aired a few times -- once while I was listening to the station -- in 1975 before the FCC notified Meredith Broadcasting that it was against the spirit of the rules, just as WQII's was. Did you and the folks at WQII not know about the WHEN ruling when its jocks tried to get away with their arrangement?
I think a bunch of us did this all at about the same time. Most were not published notifications, just as having exposed ground wires at the transmitter site are not published.
At WQII I was likely the only person who read English well enough to look at Broadcasting and other trade magazines, and this, today, is the first time I heard of the WHEN notification.
Notices of minor infractions were not published, so it's unlikely that any of those situations became "public knowledge" outside of the particular station unless the station itself reported to Gavin or Hamilton or FMQB or even Broadcasting.
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