You are talking of the USA?
I would think that there are areas over there where FM in cars does not work, and people have to use AM.
It happens in Spain, which is far smaller, so surely it happens in the USA.
The other day I had to tune the station I was listening to in AM instead of FM, because the car would not find the local station or it did not exist. And the area is very populated (south-east of Spain).
Not the first time.
Yes, I might tune it on internet instead, but it is a pain. Stations want you to use their own app instead of a generic one, and the generic often fails (probably because they change the url). I refuse to use the specific app that requires us to login, so the station can track its listeners by name.
This is one of those bonkers US lawmakers laws. I expect the geriatric senator proposing it has a crystal set manufacturer in his state.
They will be demanding compulsory use of semaphore next.
Most in car radios are generally FM or today DAB/FM. AM never really got on well with the spark transmitter under the bonnet of most petrol cars. When I worked in radio astronomy all of our cars were doctored by the local RF electronics guru to help suppress vehicle RFI on site. That had the side effect of making AM radio much more useful.
More likely the antediluvian politicians wanting stone age technology.
To some extent they *DO* have a point for AM/FM analogue vs DAB digital.
A typical DAB radio in an emergency situation with no mains power will last about 8 hours on a full set of batteries. A basic AM/FM radio will last for about a month used 8 hours a day under those conditions.
If there is a real emergency, it's crazy to require people to be listening to the radio all the time or die.
This is a US law in the making. Those electric cars generate a lot of radio interferance that can be mostly eliminated but it will cost the car makers money to do that.
They remind me of a car a friend had about 50 years ago. He replaced the resistor wiring with regular wire. You could tell when he was about
3 blocks away by the way the TV set was messing up. When he was about a block away most TV sets would be totally useless. This was back when most all TV sets were using outside antennas as there was not much if any cable around.I hate to think of what it would be like for my hobby of han radio if there were many EVs on the road. Would probalby make most frequencies useless.
There is a local radio station that plays songs of the 50 to 70 era that I like to listen to when in the car if I am not using the recordings on the USB drive.
Actually it isn't a bad way to update people. You would actually say listen in every hour, three hours or fixed time daily (much like the UK met office shipping forecast) if there was a truly cataclysmic event.
Cell phone network is dead after at most 2 days without mains. Main phone network after about a week but VDSL and DECT go down immediately. The latter caught a lot of people out in Storm Arwen Nov 2021.
AM/FM analogue radio is about the best solution and lasts well if used sparingly. DAB radios eat batteries *very* quickly.
The alerts here are fast and brief, for traumatic events, tornadoes, kidnappings, whatever. Listening to the radio hourly won't catch them.
Phone alerts make more sense. AM radio is repulsive here, and FM is not much better, so listening constantly for an emergency alert doesn't make sense.
A battery powered AM radio is useful during a sustained emergency without power, like a hurricane or earthquake, assuming that the AM stations have power.
We don't have serious tornadoes or anything like the endemic violence of the USA here. Most UK car radios these days have FM RDS which sees local radio station traffic news RDS tagged automagically for updates of crashes, traffic congestion and major incidents in the region.
UK also has phone alerts. They tested the system a while back. I got mine about 40s *before* the alleged transmit time (not impressed) but my wife with her Apple iPhone never got one at all! Probably due to the network she was on rather than a serious attempt to cull iPhone users.
Analogue really has the edge when it comes to low power frugal radio reception in adverse conditions - power consumption is miniscule. Sustained emergency is becoming an increasing risk with tensions in the Middle East and Putin's Russia looking at who to invade next.
I don't see any endemic violence, but then I stay out of rowdy pubs and bad neighborhoods at 2AM. The big crime threats around here are occasional double parking and Tesla charging cords on sidewalks. Not many people waving swords around.
(Lots of construction is done without permits, another heinous crime, but we ignore that... live and let live.)
I did experience one tornado and many hurricanes when I lived in New Orleans. On Mardi Gras Day, the burglarly rate went down, because all the criminals were in the French Quarter partying too.
We might get a 30-second warning of an earthquake, which won't help much. The real life-saver would be a warning of a tsunami, which might wipe out the west coasts of Oregon and Washington and Canada. Even a couple of minutes heads-up would let people get to higher ground.
Firestorm-type forest fires deserve warnings too. Hazards are caused by people building death-trap towns in badly-managed forests.
Life spans have more than doubled since 1900, so I shouldn't complain.
It does happen in the US, particularly in rural areas and/or mountainous areas, because the short-wave stuff (FM band and above, including TV bands) is line of sight, while AM follows the ground over the mountain into the valley, and so on. This effect is quite strong, and many rural communities in valleys paid to have a repeater atop the highest local mountain, to send the FM and TV signals down into the valley. Which doesn't work so well from a car driving through the mountains.
I had a friend many years ago who lived in rural Virginia, and had the valley problem, and some makes and models of car didn't have good enough AM radios, and/or had too much interference from the ignition system.
Joe Gwinn
here in the Netherlands
My meek observation - even with low-quality handheld MW/LW 30-year-old receiver, when I went out of the house to the nearest local park at the evening (essentially
100-200 meters from large and radio-noisy buildings etc) - I hear broadcasting from Hungaria (MW), from Poland (LW) and BBC (LW) - all of them being 1000-1500 km away. Quality is of no much practical interest though, but in Netherlands they should be heard much better and probably in daylight too.And SW bands are pretty buzzing - mostly with Chinese stations (though not only in Chinese language) - but as there are really many of them and they work within specific hours they are more difficult to identify.
AM radio is a century-old technology. It makes more sense to push microwatts of light over a fiber, or a few watts from a gen6 cell node, than to spray tens or hundreds of kilowatts of RF out into the universe.
I wonder what fraction of AM transmitter power winds up in receiver front-ends. Surely way below 1e-9. Electricity keeps getting more expensive so operating an AM station may be bad business.
What I hear is bad music, dumb politics, and very boring preaching.
I had a friend who was a DJ in an AM station. It was a very boring, low pay job. He killed himself.
The cell network is very vulnerable to disasters, you can not rely on it.
I have seen radios with a hand spun dynamo.
I saw some electronic magazine publishing one such radio made using the motor from a floppy drive (if memory serves) as generator.
I wonder if modern ignition is better than old for this. I mean, now there is a coil per plug, so that the distribution works at low voltage.
Heh. The power needed is not that related to being old technology, but to the frequency used. The lower the frequency, the more power is needed.
AM at MW can work without batteries, with a totally passive receiver and high impedance headphones.
...
I suspect I can light an LED from local RF fields. Gotta try that some time. Free illumination!
A lithium battery is a more sensible idea for an emergency AM radio.
People keep inventing silly micropower energy-harvesting things, when a Tadiran battery will last your lifetime.
Or just keep a bunch of AA batteries in your fridge.
[...]
I'm pretty sure that the power consumed by modern telecoms infrastructure exceeds that of broadcast radio manyfold.
Jeroen Belleman
I do not know about the LEDs but the older florescence tubes would light up if close enough to an transmitter.
I have seen plans for a simple transistor receiver that was hooked up to another antenna that was used to power it if close enough to the local transmitter.
I like the very small ( around 750 watts ) generator that Harbor Freight and a few other plaves sold. I bought one on sale for under $ 100 a few years back. There are also propane versions. Tey run a long time on very little fues.
If they did not cost so much Those solar cell recharable power stations are a good idea.
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