AM radio and cars..

What is going on?

A little history about radio first. Obviously the first radio transmitters were primitive and only put out a carrier wave (CW) signal that could bounce along between ground reflection and the ionosphere and even cross broad ocean expanses. Hook up a telegraph key and one could send a message on CW in “Morse Code” which was a slow way to communicate long messages but still used in many situations- even today. Especially by older ham radio operators - like me, but I am not that fast on the copy - maybe 20-23 words per minute. Some hams can really go fast. I have only been playing with it 60 years!

But along came WWI and then WWII and in between, we figured out how to hook a microphone to a modulator that allowed for the spoken word to be transmitted and received into a speaker! Thanks to a superb lecture I heard in Houston by Dan Patrick.. now Lieutenant Governor state of Texas, we learned about how commercial radio matured as well. In high school we all had AM tube radios in our cars. We listened to 60s music and at night “Wolf-Man Jack!” from Mexico running a transmitter of maybe 100,000 watts! President Roosevelt before WWII set up “Clear Channel” AM radio frequencies so the entire nation could get news broadcasts almost instantly through telephone lines from Washington into Broadcast station transmitters. These Clear Channels had power of 50,000 watts. As the sun went down you could hear broadcasts from WSB (Welcome South Brother!) in Nashville, KOA in Denver Colorado etc. Callsigns east of the Mississippi River generally began with a “W” but not all -for example WOAI in San Antonio, WBAP in Dallas. But they were clear channel. Eventually other licenses were given out for 10,000 or 5,000 watts. Most of those local transmitters had to decrease their power at sunset because the long wave skip would cause a lot of interference as long distance stations came in quite well.

But we the youngsters wanted more high fidelity sound in our car radio and the “FM” band was born. A much higher frequency, more line of sight and rarely any skip condition, but it could be modulated much better and the sound was much purer. So therefore many of the local AM radio channels seemed to lose business to the AM stations, making an AM license and radio station transmitter a very low to modest investment. In Texas, especially San Antonio, the Spanish speaking Texans enjoyed radio en Espanol so the Spanish speaking AM stations opened up. Eventually “talk radio” came about on AM Radio and this guy named Rush Limbaugh popped up everywhere and was on something like 600-700 stations - all around the noon hour. I think there are about 4000 to 6000 AM radio stations. Other talk show hosts were popping up and becoming almost as popular and thus talk radio occurred. Dan Patrick got into that arena in Houston, bought one or two stations and Rush was on one. The listeners blossomed and before long, people were listening to either talk sports radio or talk political radio both on the right (Rush, et al) or the left (National Public Radio- NPR) which was partially funded by taxpayers and leaned heavy to the left. ABC CBS NBC Public broadcasting were of course involved, but kind of dropped the political ball as they focused on television transmissions. that is another explanation.. but those have all fallen hard into the left arena some of us would say..

All these radio licenses (including amateur radio, aircraft radio, police radio, and all the broadcast transmitters ) above are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. It generally is fairly apolitical, but once a Conservative Senator tried to put together a group of people to buy a bunch of radio licenses and the FCC nixed that. So it is not totally apolitical. Look up Senator Jesse Helms..

Point is that both those on the right and left are quite concerned that politically their microphones and voices could be squelched - So strong political pressure clearly steps on “Freedom of Speech” issues.

So - how do the left leaning Democrats turn off the AM talk show radios broadcasting to the millions of peoples cars as they drive around America. Rush may be gone but there are hundreds if not thousands of talk show hosts doing that work now.

Bingo.. out of nowhere the car manufacturers decided there was too much “static” on AM radio especially in EV cars, or even regular gasoline cars.. Most cars today have >6 computers running for everything involved from fuel injection to transmission control, to radios of course, traction control, braking etc.. All of those gadgets do make radio frequency interference.. and YES - we hams have been putting up with this for years and have it well under control thank you very much- without any help from the car manufacturers. So somewhere in some mysterious meeting a decision was made and BOOM we heard all the new cars would solve the radio interference problem by - JUST HAVING NO AM RADIO! - But wait a minute, what about the Emergency Broadcast System and weather alerts and fire and some disaster alerts and traffic alerts etc. The short answer.. it will be on FM - but that won’t won’t work.. it doesn’t go very far. And satellite radio is cool, but expensive. The average guy in a truck driving across Western Kansas or West Texas or the Colorado Rockies relies on local AM radio for safety and traffic information. Political parties will do ANYTHING to get the upper hand including just preventing you from having any information for your personal use.

Fortunately, Several Senators and Congressmen on both sides of the aisle had the sense to put together a strong push for car companies to keep AM radio in vehicles. Ford was first to step up. I personally would not have a car without an AM Radio.

I listen to AM about 90% of time, Satellite about 8% of time and FM rarely. Maybe 2%.

Here is a good article but of course doesn’t include the radio history I gave above and the political impacts.

Please thank Senator Ted Cruz for some common sense across the aisle work.

As we say in amateur radio - for now, 73s.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/am-radio-new-cars/