I know it's the public safety reason. But we all know, it's also a business lifeline for standalone AM operators who don't want vehicle manufacturers to remove in car AM listening.
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Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
This was the lifeline thrown to AM radio. The lifeline was to get off AM. That should have been a clear message:
AM Revitalization
In Docket 13-249, the FCC is making an effort to revitalize the AM broadcasting service through rule changes and the use of FM translator (repeater) stations by AM broadcasters. Changes already adopted include changes to AM daytime and nighttime community coverage standards, elimination of the...
Assuming this law passes, the FCC should use those 8 years to modernize the EAS system and use something other than commercial AM radio stations as its backbone.
How's this:
Broadcasters and Wireless Providers
Local radio and TV stations, along with cable, direct broadcast satellite and wireless service providers, disseminate the public safety messages they receive from IPAWS.
I meant PEP stations for the National Public Warning System. I believe these are mostly AM radio stations and that's formed a key part of the argument that AM radio is essential in an emergency, the narrative used to help push this bill. The FCC should take the next 8 years to decide if using that technology still makes sense in the 21st century.
Isn’t that a FEMA decision?
I don't either in all honesty because the AM section in my Kenwood HD car radio no longer works! But it doesn't matter! My all news station (KNX 1070) is simulcast on FM at 97.1 and I can hear Dodger Baseball on 98.7 HD 2!
And if I really, really need to, which is almost never, I can hear KFI 640 on 103.5 HD 2
I still listen to AM all the time, but I'm an outlier who likes things from a good 20 to 30 years before I was born, so as a datapoint, I'm almost worthless...
However, in my defense, now that I'm up in the far north bay again, the Bay Area FMs I care about (KFRC, aka KCBS 106.9 and KOSF 103.7) don't have very listenable signals, so AM is pretty much it. Can't do anything about KOSF but stream (internet speeds are iffy too), but KCBS still exists on AM, so I listen to that. And as a substitute for 103.7, I have KYNO 940, especially now that their signal is reliably booming in like a local. It's just as well, since I like the playlist better. It's well programmed for an oldies station in 2025. And on AM with 50,000 watts, no less!
I just wish car radios had better AM sections in them. The AM in my '94 GMC truck has excellent bandwidth, but suffers from old age and bad acoustics. My next oldest car radio – a '97 Ford truck – is relatively good too (especially with new speakers). Everything newer sounds like mud.
c
However, in my defense, now that I'm up in the far north bay again, the Bay Area FMs I care about (KFRC, aka KCBS 106.9 and KOSF 103.7) don't have very listenable signals, so AM is pretty much it. Can't do anything about KOSF but stream (internet speeds are iffy too), but KCBS still exists on AM, so I listen to that. And as a substitute for 103.7, I have KYNO 940, especially now that their signal is reliably booming in like a local. It's just as well, since I like the playlist better. It's well programmed for an oldies station in 2025. And on AM with 50,000 watts, no less!
I just wish car radios had better AM sections in them. The AM in my '94 GMC truck has excellent bandwidth, but suffers from old age and bad acoustics. My next oldest car radio – a '97 Ford truck – is relatively good too (especially with new speakers). Everything newer sounds like mud.
c
I like AM for its distance qualities both day and night. And I think a day will come when those who are down on AM now will wonder why we let the band die out.
Wow. I really don't know how to respond to that. "We" didn't let it die out. The marketplace moved on. There was nothing "we" could do.
Nobody is killing it, it's been dying on it's own. Of course there are some exceptions and stations...but in general, there's virtually no one under 65 besides radio nerds listening to AM radio. Especially skywave. If that weren't enough, all the man-made noise and static these days is making the band unusable except for the few local stations in a market that are able to overpower it.
It’s from the future!
Just to be clear: this 8 year sunset pertains to the keeping of AM-capable radios in cars, not AM radio itself per se.
c
The same can be said about cigarette lighters. But smokers can drive cars without cigarette lighters by bringing along their own, handheld lighters. And non-smokers whose cars do have cigarette lighters can derive secondary value from them (charging). So their presence or absence never negatively impacts anyone.
AM is different. Modern computerized cars are AM radio jammers. You can't bring along a portable receiver to compensate for the lack of a factory radio. If you do, it will be plagued with RFI. Only factory-installed radios, whose shielding is designed by the same people designing all the RFI emitting electronics, can compensate perfectly for the presence of all that RFI.
I guess that's the reason I favor this bill not having a sunset clause. I'm perfectly happy with automakers excluding features almost nobody wants anymore. Free market and all. I just don't like when that exclusion in turn precludes the individual car owner's ability to obtain that feature in some other way.
(Before anyone says it: no, I don't consider just streaming an AM station to be one of those other ways. If it were, the AM bill's entire existence would have been moot from day one. AM is still superior to cellular internet and even to FM on account of its groundwave terrain fill-in effect, and its skywave at night. They make reception possible in locales where cellular -- especially during long, wide-area power outages -- and FM cannot.)
You know, in hindsight, this whole controversy would have been easy to resolve had it been approached in the right way. Tax credits. Some industry and government forces (station owners, political conservatives in D.C., EAS/FEMA people) want AM to stay in cars. Meanwhile automakers want to cut costs by eliminating unpopular features. So give automakers tax credits for the per automobile costs of installing it. Now everyone gets their cake and eats it too.
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(Read the next paragraph before laughing at this one.
) What about also using those 8 years to expand the FM band downward (into the low VHF TV region) while simultaneously licensing all existing AM broadcasters to simulcast within that new FM spectrum -- with the goal of getting all of them off their existing, range-and-wattage-shoehorned, suboptimal FM translator frequencies, and off most of their legacy AM frequencies, by the end of that same 8 year period?Yes, I know very few members of the public will ever buy new hardware radios again, even for something like expanded FM coverage. However, I am wondering if the car radios in most modern automobiles haven't actually been SDR-based for a very, very long time now. If so, couldn't simple firmware updates automagically back-install expanded FM coverage into a huge percentage of cars on the road today? This would almost certainly be possible if automakers have been using cookie-cutter SDR chipsets all along -- chipsets internally compatible with the international 66-108 MHz master range yet software settings-limited to tuning only subsets of that master range appropriate to each different country or region.
If magically back-installing expanded FM into a large percentage of existing cars were actually possible, and if it were up to me, I would do all the above, plus allow a subset of the existing 50,000 watt stations currently licensed on AM to remain there, acting as radio "superstations." With the AM dial mostly vacant by day as a result, I would also encourage IBOC AM again, at least by day. And any stations staying on AM would still be entitled to licenses for the expanded FM band, so they could also be where most of their local audiences were actually listening. But all these remaining AM signals would continue for the sake of co-channel interference-free national reception at night, plus for groundwave fill-in during the daytime -- and of course for their immense value during long power cuts and other disasters where AM shines as the "information distribution vector of last resort," courtesy its groundwave fill-in and skywave properties that FM and cellular cannot match.
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While 2) may well be plausible, 1) isn't. Given all of the issues Congress has to deal with, updating a sunset 8 years down the road when that 8 years has passed will be a difficult challenge indeed.
Maybe someone should lobby congress to add preservation of smoke signals and the telegraph. What if that newfangled AM radio stops working and there’s an emergency!!??
The issue isn't the cost. That's not why manufacturers are against it. It's the mandate.
That's what they said about CPB.