Automakers Are Starting to Drop Am Radio in New Cars

It's kind of funny to read that because I sometimes browse European MWDX write-ups on the web. DX is a bit of an addicting hobby, not dissimilar to fishing or hunting in a way. It's fun to read about someone in Finland picking up an AM commercial broadcast from Brazil. You can start thinking about watts-per-km and pretty soon you have your own record book or spreadsheet going.

https://www.wbaa.org/general-news/2022-04-26/finnish-am-radi...

Oh they are there, but its not something most young (<40) would ever listen to. Classical music, religious ones, some official state-sponsored ones.

Behind iron curtain people only had the state ones, so some old folks are often still used to have it tuned and never bothered to change.

Yep, my bad :-)

I meant to type DAB, had a mild brain fart & ran with FM for want of a void to fill.

Take my points and prosper.

Forcing everyone to buy new radios will just kill radio. Especially for cars.

It will take que a long time and I don't it will be successful.

It will be easier to sell internet radios then DAB+ ones.

I tried to use DAB+ with the stations I listen to on FM (France Radio ones, west of Paris). I have reception holes while FM is perfect. I did not notice any improvement in the quality of the sound.

They are one and another when it comes to broadcast. Tied in unison until they are dead. As for the LF/MF/HF propagation modes, they are terribly unpredictable as anything other than line of sight. Groundwave <3MHz and lower, if you're lucky.

Non-deterministic propagation is interesting if you're an amateur radio operator or SW DXer but it's not important and is quite frankly a liability if you have to rely on it or have a target audience. Sure you can bash out some CW to Tasmania from Europe and tell a great story but you're probably dead if you need it at a specific time when the sun is sleepy.

For ref, ex CW operator. I use a UHF radio computer unit with a fruit on the back now.

That is a possibility. But the issue with that is complexity.

FM is no more complicated than AM to transmit and receive.

Simple FM discriminators for receivers like pulse counters only require a few components. On the transmit side, it's a lot easier getting decent high power modulation on an FM transmitter than an AM one. The AM transmitter you tend to have to modulate the power to the final amplifier which requires huge great obsolete tubes running in semi-linear modes. The FM one you do the modulation further up the chain, be that at one end something digital or just a simple varactor and the final amps work entirely outside the linear region meaning low power dissipation with filtering on the output. Cheaper and simpler.

Agree with digital radio concerns. That's absolutely no good for anyone.

Analog may be king but don't be too romantic about it. If you've ever actually done any operating on any analogue radios you'll know what I mean. I spent 20 years designing and building them for fun.

Whoops not enough coffee today. Thanks for the prod - have corrected :)

This is one of the wildest analogies I've ever seen.

Yeah aware of that. However I know someone who ran VHF repeaters out there because that was the only viable two way communications out there back in the 80s. He runs rural Wi-Fi now!

To depends on households to have an internet connection is a mistake already. Applying it to cars is even worse as they are on the move and often reach areas with weak or no signal.

> If every vehicle had internet access

Trains in Germany don't even get consistent internet signal when moving through less populated areas so cars having internet-only radio is even more unrealistic.