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In an emergency, when you have a million people evacuating a city, you can put up signs that say e.g. “tune to AM 850 for emergency broadcasts”. To be honest I

In an emergency, when you have a million people evacuating a city, you can put up signs that say e.g. “tune to AM 850 for emergency broadcasts”. To be honest I thought this part was kind of obvious and I don’t know why you made such a sarcastic comment about power buttons. Realistically speaking, every car on the market has a sound system anyway. You just need an antenna and AM radio, plus the user interface. It is not a major expense relative to the price of the car.

vel0city 2y ago
In an emergency, when you have a million people evacuating a city, you can put up signs that say e.g. "tune to FM 90.1 for emergency broadcasts". We're in cities, not the middle of nowhere in this scenario. The idea that we need an AM station to cover a few hundred square miles doesn't really apply here. > You just need an antenna and AM radio, plus the user interface And ensure all the shielding is good enough so your AM radio is actually useful, and designing all that shielding, and potentially having to change the placement of antennas on the car, etc.
- klodolph 2y ago
  The majority of emergency radio station in the US happen to be AM stations. This is a fact. Sure, you could phase out AM and do all your emergency broadcasts on FM. We haven’t done that. Do that first. Here is more info about EAS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System There are 77 PEPs, which are commercial radio stations that double as emergency broadcast, as primary interfaces to FEMA. They are a mixture of AM and FM. You want to get rid of the AM requirement? Fine. Just switch all the broadcasts to FM first.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Sure, lets do that. FM is where most of the listeners are anyways. We can start with every AM EAS station which also transmits on FM also get their FM stations up to standards and grants to make that happen. Sounds good to me. In the end though it still kind of sucks. We're expecting people to know about AM radio and then also bother to look around to find the right station. While stations will automatically trigger on an alert, its not like your radio is designed to listen and find these alerts and automatically alert you. Even better with requirements for car radios, how about we require WX radio and have it set up to by default alert drivers when an alert goes through? So many cars these days are now a part of the cell networks as well, how about we require emergency alerts broadcast over cell networks?

vel0city 2y ago

In an emergency, when you have a million people evacuating a city, you can put up signs that say e.g. "tune to FM 90.1 for emergency broadcasts". We're in cities, not the middle of nowhere in this scenario. The idea that we need an AM station to cover a few hundred square miles doesn't really apply here. > You just need an antenna and AM radio, plus the user interface And ensure all the shielding is good enough so your AM radio is actually useful, and designing all that shielding, and potentially having to change the placement of antennas on the car, etc.

klodolph 2y ago
The majority of emergency radio station in the US happen to be AM stations. This is a fact. Sure, you could phase out AM and do all your emergency broadcasts on FM. We haven’t done that. Do that first. Here is more info about EAS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System There are 77 PEPs, which are commercial radio stations that double as emergency broadcast, as primary interfaces to FEMA. They are a mixture of AM and FM. You want to get rid of the AM requirement? Fine. Just switch all the broadcasts to FM first.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Sure, lets do that. FM is where most of the listeners are anyways. We can start with every AM EAS station which also transmits on FM also get their FM stations up to standards and grants to make that happen. Sounds good to me. In the end though it still kind of sucks. We're expecting people to know about AM radio and then also bother to look around to find the right station. While stations will automatically trigger on an alert, its not like your radio is designed to listen and find these alerts and automatically alert you. Even better with requirements for car radios, how about we require WX radio and have it set up to by default alert drivers when an alert goes through? So many cars these days are now a part of the cell networks as well, how about we require emergency alerts broadcast over cell networks?