What People Are Saying About Ford, Its Decision to Keep AM

RadioWorld.com ^ | May 24, 2023 | Elle Kehres

[dhouston]

Yeah, went dark after losing Rush and banning Michael Savage, who I like just as much as Rush.

[Myrddin]

FM requires a stronger signal to achieve "full quieting". In the FM world, the strongest station always "wins" by capturing the receiver. AM signals can co-exist at very weak levels. That is why aircraft communications use AM. You can hear strong and weak signals at the same time. The advent of software defined radio allows application of digital filters and demodulators that are superior to what an all RF hardware solution can achieve.

[Vaduz]

Guess nobody at Ford Motor Company knew of the emergency broadcast system.

Conelrad ?

[vortigern]

Agreed. Software-defined radios (SDR) combine traditional analog radio techniques with modern digital signal processing (DSP) capabilities. These specialized techniques are fairly common in professional-grade radio receivers.

[Flying Circus]

They can restore the AM radio band with a software update. Maybe it doesn’t work as well if they didn’t put enough shielding or filtering in but activating it in software tells us that there is something other than cost driving the decision to remove it.

As far as the cost of noise filtering, I would think all computer and communication systems in the vehicle would benefit from have good power filtration to protect from the electric motors’ noise. Given the average cost of a new vehicle is north of $40k, $100 for noise filtration seems trivial.

[Deplorable American1776]

Thank you Ford! First the decision to keep ICE vehicles and now this.

[Flying Circus]

You sum up my thoughts on the matter. So much of what happens in a modern car needs filtering from the noise of the drivetrain, that AM needs it too seems like just an excuse. Some something else is the real reason behind removing it.

[Myrddin]

The RFI case on the boat occurred in 1979. The fishing fleet in San Diego was large. It ranged from poor fisherman on very old boats to multi-million-dollar tuna seiners. Not every customer had a budget to do proper maintenance. The guy with the RFI from his alternators paid the price for being too thrifty.

You would be surprised at how cost conscious the automotive suppliers can be. I did some work for Ford around 2001. The engineers went through board schematics with a fine tooth comb and removed anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. A single resistor times 250,000 vehicles is significant money. The kind of resources necessary to mitigate RFI problems is often orders of magnitude more than a few resistors. Taking the AM radio off the table to dodge the mitigation costs is certainly an economic consideration.

[linMcHlp]

AM SW radio bttt

[HonkyTonkMan]

Joshua Giampa, a cloud infrastructure architect at Amazon Web Services commented: “I have been driving for nearly 20 years...."

He prob can't drive a manual transmission either.

[Magnatron]

This is like keeping land line phones for old people. With streaming these days, there’s no need for AM. The spectrum should be freed up for other uses…

[raccoonradio]

Ironically the man I was talking about with the unique stations died earlier today. Bob Bittner...
Many of us are turning to streaming for talk shows.
It costs them less than buying stations to run these shows. You can travel and hear a Boston talk show in western PA—and they run local (PA) ads in, make money.