AM radio going away

Subaru did exactly that back in the late 1990s with the Outback.

It worked so well they put it on all their cars and licensed it to other brands discontinued it in the early 2000s for lack of demand.

 

I remember seeing it on a higher level trim option than I was willing to pay for. It wasn't on the version I bought.

 

Yes, I have used one of those a few times.

 

Around where I live I don't get any of the NOAA stations, so I guess maybe that's proving I'm wrong, that the internet is the future whether I like it or not.

 

Here is a map of NOAA Weather Radio transmitters:




Despite very significant transmitter density, not all places can receive it. For terrain-aware maps of estimated coverage, see here:
NWR Coverage Maps

This shows coverage only on a state by state basis, not an overall national coverage map. As a sample, here is Washington:



The flatter side of the nation seems to generally have better coverage.

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P.S. I believe Canada uses the same weather station frequencies, but I'm seeing only provincial lists of stations by city and frequency, not a terrain-aware reception map similar to what has been computed for the U.S.

Weatheradio: find your network - Canada.ca

 

Ya, I'm in the middle in the mountainous portion. The closest one is just over 40 miles away as a bird flys with lots of mountains between here and there. The map shows it's very spotty where I'm at, but maybe if I climb up on certain hills it could work.

Too bad NOAA doesn't transmit over MF like AM does. I get AM stations from farther away than the closest NOAA stations.

 

At the risk of taking this into FhoPurgatory.....

It turns out that some cars not having AM radios is all a GIANT CONSPIRACY. Because of course it is.

New electric cars won’t have AM radio. Rightwingers claim political sabotage | Media | The Guardian

It's actually a really interesting article about the history and use of AM - get past the initial political nonsense and it's well worth reading.

 

My local state-affiliated government-funded public radio station uses their FM signal for their all-classical-music programming, and their AM signal for everything else.

Several years ago they bought a dinky FM station outside of town to use as a second FM frequency repeating their AM programming, but I still get the AM signal better.

I think, since going to HD Radio, they also have at least one digital subchannel of their main FM signal, carrying some other stuff. (I have an HD Radio tuner at home, but not in the car; I have a 2010 and that came with the 2012 refresh.)

 

That article used Sand Point, AK for a lot of its references.

Thing is, there's maybe 25 miles of road on that whole island. Counting private driveways and airport runway. People may be listening to AM in that town, but probably not much while in cars.

 

I was thinking adding AM radio to a ship is easier than to a car.

 

That is some very useful context. Thank you!

 

@Isaac Zachary, I believe it is a conscious decision to not broadcast weather alerts at those lower frequencies. Just as you say they would be heard at much longer distances. But their information is inherently local. Confusion would follow.
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Nope no Guardian for me.

 

Good point!

The thing for me is sure, maybe some day everything will run just fine off of 4G, 5G or whatever G we have in the future. But cars are losing AM radio, phones are losing FM radio, and so far Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G haven't shown me they are as trustworthy as good old broadcast radio.

Of course maybe it's just me. I just finally got an unlimited data plan for my phone just a month ago. I finally went back to a smartphone just this year. I can't for the life of me, get anything Bluetooth to ever work.

 

My mom’s landline fails every February and the telephone company blames her wastes 3 weeks then fixes it.

She has the oldest line in the town

 

The joy of AM radio for me has always been 'propagation'. Hearing faraway things and somehow visualizing how electrical properties in high atmosphere reflected them. Those fail at wavelengths shorter than about 10 meters which seems to teach something about those electrical properties' physical scales.

'Data rates' through low-frequency transmission could never approach what now gigaHertz accomplishes locally. It was a different time, with noise and fading but felt very 'organic'. Receivers built around galena crystals were both the last stone age for humans (I guess) and the first use of semiconductors that now do nearly everything.

Maybe somebody will mention over-the-horizon radar. Spooky stuff.

 

ah, but then I'd be second to do so...

Possibly the best known example? The дуга, or "woodpecker" radar in Northern Ukraine.

I enjoyed setting up a crystal receiver and listening to a newscast for half an hour. It was one of those "100-in-one" educational circuit panels in a wooden box. I figure I'm probably the last generation to have experienced those as a new item.

I learned a lot about super long distance, low-bandwidth data transmission over the past few years playing around with amateur radio stuff.

 

Last night the wife and I tuned into a SW station around 7.33MHz. I think it was a baseball game in some place in the Caribbean.

 

There are websites allowing remote users to tune HF receivers. They are not secret but I'll pretend they are, so y'all don't get in line in front of me. This is the most recent way for short-wave listening where computers' audio cards do things I don't understand and there it all is.

 

read a great book on marconi, the development of wireless. even though the radio waves were misunderstood, the phenomenon drove the research and development

 

just went thru a storm that knocked out power to 200,000 people and turned on the local AM station, it was playing some nationally syndicated show and the typical AM radio 20+ minutes of advertising every hour. Maybe they break in with local news every now and then, i didnt have the patience to wait around and find out.

i got my news from my phone. the alarm for the storm was on the phone, the updates were on the phone, when cable internet went out, i used cellular data. when i was in another area where the cell tower went out, i switched back to wifi. video and audio news from the city officials on my phone, notes from my workplace on my phone, news from local news organizations on my phone, family contact on the phone. People who lost power charged their phones from their cars. etc etc. I went to a crowded waiting room and basically everyone had a phone out, i saw zero people with a tiny AM radio.

as far as cars go, i think AM is going to end up like cd players, cassette players, 8 track players, analog tv, etc etc.