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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Modern cars in the US, especially EVs it seems, are not only dropping AM radio but also now SiriusXM satellite radio. I was shocked to discover that the "Sirius" radio on many cars I have been looking at recently was merely an app that streamed over the cellular connection.

I find this mildly terrifying. In an emergency, cellular will be the first to go. It doesn't even work reliably when everything is well.

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I think it'd be fine if Sirius didn't require a subscription. The subscription nature turned it into a niche business.

(And gosh Sirius's salesmen are annoying a-holes when they call you up to get you to subscribe. The last time I bought a car with a Sirius radio I had to insist that I wouldn't get any calls from Sirius to subscribe.)

Yea, even if the major space powers Kesslerize all the satellites (like Starlink) in low-Earth orbit, the civilian geostationary sats like Sirius XM will likely be flying. (Geostationary sats can, I think, only be brought down individually with anti-satellite weapons, and that would presumably be prohibitively expensive for all of them.)

Sure, but who's going to pay for this? Satellites (especially geostationary ones) are expensive. And SiriusXM doesn't provide a worthwhile service that compels enough people to subscribe; it's a wonder it's still in business. The main function of a music subscription service is to listen to music, but have you ever listened to SiriusXM? The audio is so compressed that it sounds terrible.

Yea I agree. AM seems like the most viable.

Exactly: AM doesn't require a network of satellites and terrestrial repeaters to be maintained just to provide some emergency public-service info with lousy audio quality. AM does this just fine, for very little cost on both sides (transmitter and receiver).

Not sure if anyone would ever consider doing this due to the collateral damage, but I think a retrograde GEO orbit would work fine for destroying a lot of GEO Sats. You would need to spread out your impactor by detonating it but the fragments would have 6 km/s relative to the GEO Sats.

Hmm, thanks, that sounds plausible enough. Have you seen this possibility discussed anywhere?

Not really, and I couldn’t find something like that from a quick googling. Maybe it wouldn’t work as good as I would think. I’m not sure if it’s really a realistic threat anyways, because polluting GEO is basically half way to a nuclear war. Kesslerizing LEO is probably bad but not forever and more easily avoided by picking another orbit. Making GEO impossible would really annoy every country out there.

Is there a realistic scenario where cell phones are down and there is meaningful coordination being done over SiriusXM?

I don't particularly expect that there would be any effort to lean on AM either.

Maybe not meaningful coordination, but if the whole citys power shuts down, you'd still like some news about what happened, why is there no power, no internet, no nothing.... war? farmer plowing too deep? ddos attack on the infrastructure? In such cases, having long distance broadcasting service is great.

AM radio then. If you want internet, get a starlink.

So a localized total outage? Weird that the farmer had no idea everything was in the one spot.

Yes, wouldn't be the first time

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman... (not a farmer but still)

That doesn't say that power is out, which is what is described up thread and what I meant by "total".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

No power, so no internet, cell service was overloaded and didn't work because of that, and well.. all that was was left was the radio.

I lived through that.

I don't remember how I found out what was going on, and the university I was near still had their power station up, so I may have had better local comms (it was small and not real tied to the grid, mostly used for heating).

I certainly didn't spend time huddled around an AM radio.

Evacuation notices can be, and are, announced on AM radio during emergencies.

Having lived in disaster prone areas, people tend to be glued to the TV and radio before, during and after to get updates on the situation. TV and the internet are the first to go with the power, and even if you have a generator, that doesn't mean your internet connection will work. Radios will.

I don't think the OP's point was that SiriusXM was being used for emergency coordination, but the lack of a traditional radio in the car forgoes the existing emergency radio infrastructure.

Having lived in (and still do) disaster prone areas, people often don't even own radios outside of that thing they get annoyed by when their car turns on before bluetooth/Android Auto/Carplay connects and don't bother with any way of watching TV that doesn't involve the internet.

Pretty rare to have people actually listen to AM radio or OTA TV for a massive chunk of the population.

I was in a disaster zone without internet (or electric, except for my car) for two weeks. You are right, but neighbors end up sharing information pretty quickly when their preferred means of communication (ie internet, mobile phones) stop working. (AM radio still worked and could be received from a great distance, and TV might have been working, but I'm not sure because I didn't have a generator for the first ten days and after that it was for refrigerator and clothes washer.)

Backup powers on cell towers lasts hours at most. After that they have to be individually reconfigured for generator powers and regularly refueled.

TV and radio stations are centralized, there's no millions of AM cell towers distributed throughout regions. You tow the power car or a fuel truck next to the station and it'll be good for multiple days minimum.

The scenario you ask about is exactly why I subscribed to Sirius XM in the first place.

During the time I had Sirius XM, the entire point for me was to continuous radio coverage as I drove across remote parts of Appalachia where cellular, AM, and FM coverage inconsistent.

My family's newest car came with Sirius radio and a free subscription that lasted a few months. We let it lapse. Chances are, the lack of market interest is what kills subscription radio. AM and FM are free.

Sirius wants $40/m for their space radio and most people have unlimited data plans without coverage gaps.

I'd bite if it was around $5 per month. Alas, their lowest $10 plan is going to use my data plan on cell networks

I had a new car that also came with a Sirius radio and 3 months free. I tried it, but found it often dropped out while driving through forested roads in my area. That made it annoying to listen to. I stopped using it.

One thing I've found with the subscription services is that their "stations" are too homogeneous. I mean, I like jazz and classical, but I can't listen to just one style within those genres for hours -- especially while driving. And if you've got unlimited data, then there are free online "FM" stations, including NPR. WFMT out of Chicago rarely disappoints.

And the threat of having to pay for it limited my interest in exploring it any further.

>In an emergency, cellular will be the first to go.

As will all bank transfers.

I'm starting to sound like a crazy prepper for keeping enough cash and batteries to run my life for a week.

It's like people assume that if the internet dies they will too so there's no point thinking about it. Makes me wonder if living in areas what have natural disasters which knock off power once every few years vs ones that don't makes people think differently about this.

The main argument for satellite radio is to have it out in the big receptionless areas expanses, so relying on cell signal defeats a major part of the purpose!

>Modern cars in the US... are not only dropping AM radio but also now SiriusXM satellite radio

What's wrong with that? It's utter garbage. Only a fool would spend money on a subscription to it. You'd get better audio quality from a 1970s-vintage tape deck.

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