We’ve been going on at length in this space about the death spiral that AM radio seems to be in, particularly in the automotive setting. Car makers have begun the process of phasing AM out of their infotainment systems, ostensibly due to its essential incompatibility with the electronics in newer vehicles, especially EVs. That argument always seemed a little specious to us, since the US has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to making sure everyone works and plays well with each other on the electromagnetic spectrum. The effort to drop AM resulted in pushback from US lawmakers, who threatened legislation to ensure every vehicle has the ability to receive AM broadcasts, on the grounds of its utility in a crisis and that we’ve spent billions ensuring that 80% of the population is within range of an AM station.
The pendulum has now swung back, with a group of tech boosters claiming that an AM mandate would be bad, forcing car manufacturers to “scrap advanced safety features” like “advanced driver-assistance systems, autonomous vehicles, and collision avoidance systems that actually reduce car accidents and fatalities.” That last part is a bit of a reach considering recent research (second item) showing the iffy efficacy of some of these safety features, but the really rich part is when the claim that continuing to support the “outdated technology” of AM radio would prevent engineers from developing “future safety innovations.” Veiled threat much? And pretty disrespectful to the engineering field in general, we have to say, given that at its best, engineering is all about working within constrained environments and supporting conflicting goals.
While most of America was celebrating the Independence Day holiday last week with raucous pyrotechnic displays, one town in Washington State was enjoying a spectacle of a different sort: watching a swarm of drones commit mutual suicide. For various reasons, the city of SeaTac decided to eschew the more traditional patriotic display and plunk down $40,000 on a synchronized aerial drone show, which despite the substitution of chest-thumping explosions with the malignant hornets-nest buzz of 200 drones actually looks pretty cool. Right up until 55 of the drones went rogue, that is, and descended toward the watery doom of Angle Lake below. It wasn’t clear at first what was going on; video of the incident shows most of the drones gently settling into the lake, with only one seeming to just crash outright. That pretty much lines up with the official line from Great Lakes Drone, the outfit running the drone show, who blamed “outside interference” for the malfunction. A costly malfunction, by the way; at $2,600 a copy, the 55 drowned drones total nearly $100,000 more than the contracted price for the show. Forty-eight of the lost drones have been recovered, which points to perhaps the one bright spot of the story — the local diving club probably got a lot of bottom time thanks to the recovery effort.
Ten months is a long time in the rapidly changing technology world, but to go from expensive IoT doodad to brick in less than a year has to be some kind of record. And in a strange twist, it’s actually not Google this time, but rather Amazon, who just announced that their Astro for Business robots will cease to function as of September 25. The device, which is basically a mobile Alexa, was initially targeted at consumers who wanted something to roll around inside their homes to collect data for Amazon monitor security and keep an eye on your pets. Last November, Amazon announced an Astro for Business version that did much the same for the small and medium business market. Amazon seems to have made the decision to unfork the market and concentrate on the home version, which seems to make more sense. Business owners will get a refund on their bricked devices and a $300 Amazon credit for their troubles, but there’s no word on what will happen to the devices. Here’s hoping some of them show up in the secondary market; we’d love to see some teardowns.
And finally, if you think there’s nothing interesting about a big steel box, you’re either reading the wrong website or you haven’t seen the latest video by The History Guy on the history of the humble shipping container. We’ve always been a bit of a shipping container freak, and we’ve long known that the whole idea of containerized cargo reaches back to the 1950s or so. That’s where we thought the story started, but boy were we wrong. The real story goes back much further than that, all the way to the “lift vans” of the early 20th century, which were wooden boxes that could be hoisted from a wagon onto a ship and move a lot of items all in one go. We also had no idea where the term “ConEx” came from in reference to shipping containers, but THG took care of that too. Fascinating stuff.
“We’ve always been a bit of a shipping container freak, and we’ve long known…” is this a pronoun confusion or the royal we in the sentence. I’m bit confused…
probably the hackaday staff?
On HAD, there is the presumption of the royal we.
(Side note: A good friend of mine was an early port engineer for SeaLand. He ended his career with the SL-7’s, which are still in service for MORAC. He is a big part of why I have spent WAY too much of my professional career repairing, and later redesigning, cell guides on container ships)
It sounds like a reasonable middle-ground for the AM debacle would be to require that AM reception works when the car is not moving. Easier to eliminate interference, and already covers most of the emergency needs. If you then happen to have strong enough signal to hear it on the go, all the better.
Certainly. It might not even be necessary for the AM radio to be integrated in the infotainment system. Where it could just suffice for every car to be shipped with a basic world radio.
No, the cars need to not interfere with everyone else’s reception of the broadcasts. If they do, there’s no compromise, that’s a complete win for the noisy cars. But if the cars don’t interfere enough to cause a problem in numbers, then it shouldn’t be that hard to let them receive too.
Anyway, they should be able to receive Traveler’s information station / Highway Advisory Radio transmissions while driving, and those are still using the AM band. Low power FM does exist and would probably suffice in many cases if we changed a lot of stuff around to make it happen, but we haven’t done that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_information_station
How about transition the AM band over to something more interference resistant such as NBFM or some digital mode?
If I had to take a flying guess too many business owners have lawyers on retainer to read the fine print that comes with all cloud connected devices and boils down to something like “we may at any time record your video, audio, and data streams for improving our services and those of our partners and associates” and “while we’re transparent about this in theory, there’s no practical way you can find out if, when, and what we streamed back to our opaque cloud services, and even if you could and found a way to get a human and ask exactly what was done with the data in question they wouldn’t be allowed to provide a useful answer because if it’s improving our systems it’s almost certainly a trade secret”.
Mere consumers generally don’t keep lawyers on retainer to review those giant terms of service documents and not being in the habit of speed-reading legalese and translating it to human language in real time as some point their eyes glaze over and they click “I accept”.
Exploitive or sketchy B2B services tend not to last very long, while similarly exploitive and sketchy consumer services stay profitable much longer…
Consumers have the option to opt-in to a product and companies will do anything they can to make a profit. Companies, governments, and people who have enough money to control the products and services they consume will create PWS/SOW/Service Agreements that are directly between the vendor and the consumer. The general Terms of Service doesn’t have any strict requirements about informing the public about your nefarious actions (Amazon and Facebook actively datamining children etc.) thanks to deregulation, so it’s just become a popularity contest. Tik Tok is the perfect example – We’ve seen countless ways the company and app have been stealing data and sending it ‘home’ and even setting up entire surveillance networks, but boy do those kids gotta meme, risks be damned!
I’m still trying to grasp why carmakers and some others are so intent on killing AM. There might be cost savings of a quarter per car? That doesn’t explain it. Just so they can slack off on controlling RF noise? Still seems less than satisfying as an explanation. So… what else is behind it? Eliminate competition for paid services? Maybe. I can’t imagine that drivers consider AM an alternative to XM Sirius or cell streaming, but the greedy have learned to nibble away around the edges for years and decades.
And why did George Soros recently buy up a number of AM stations?