[Update: AM is staying!] AM Radio is removed on the 2024 Mustang
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Mike Pfeifer
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W9MHZ here
Dena
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Ford may have tipped their hand on this foul up. I last worked with radio in the late 60s moving into digital hardware and software but a friend of mine tipped me off several years back about something called software defined radio. Warning - the parts don't always work together so if your not sure what your doing, you might end up with a pile of parts that don't work. Anyway, the idea behind it is a receiver about the size of a thumb drive that passes most of the work of decoding the information to a computer. It has been around long enough that there are commercial products that work with this hardware. The beauty of it is that one device can receive from below the AM broadcast band up to the cell phone and satellite bands.
It sounds like Ford just limited the bands that could be received. They could have allowed the receiver to pick up Ham, CB, police, aircraft bands, TV as well as military and government bands. Just think of having a car radio that could receive most any signal that is broadcast. That is a feature I might be willing to pay extra for even though it would cost almost nothing to add to the car.
Why did Ford attempt to eliminate AM? My first guess would be interference from Electric cars. In the early 1900s the countries banned spark transmitters because they made AM nearly useless. EVs are little more than a spark transmitter with wheels if they have brush motors or are controlled with pulse electronics. They could make motors wouldn't have that problem but they would cost more to produce.
This also brings up another question. The FCC pretty much limits transmissions over 100 Mill-watts without a license however there are exceptions such as your cell phone. Why would they allow the destruction of the AM radio when they have spent a century defending and protecting it. Could it be the current administrations desire to push EVs has infected the FCC and they are willing to sacrifice an important means of communication to push EVs? Something else not mentions is some of the ham bands such as 80 and 40 meter and possibly older CB radios will also be affected by poorly constructed EV motor controllers however people using this part of the frequency spectrum are fewer and have less political pull.
Then there is the problem with the satellite providers. The software needed to decode the signals is proprietary and is built into the radio. The contract Ford agreed to in order to use the software probably contains restrictions as to how the radio is to be configured. If this is the case, they probably had to place a good deal of pressure on the satellite providers to enable AM. This would have been in the form of threatening to remove satellite capable radios totally from the product line and switching to an older style of radio from another vendor.
The other reason could be the push to satellite radio. I suspect many people with radios able to receive satellite radio never activate them. Granted they work well but personally for around town driving I don't even turn the radio on. If I did far more distant driving I would consider it but AM radio and my music library is enough for me.
They also mistakenly assume that everybody has an unlimited cell data plan. I don't because I am around enough WiFi that I use a very limited amount of data from my plan. If they rely too much on cell data, they may discover that car features may stop working because the cell phone service is unable to transmit that much data. G5 service is great if you are close to it but G4 will probably handle much of the data traffic when you move away from the population centers.
I think that Ford may have discovered that they don't understand their customers and hopefully will learn from this. They probably depended too much on kids fresh out of school who haven't lived in the real world for a while. I see thing like that all the time when I look at my computer monitor. They use teeny fonts that are difficult for some of us with older eyes to see without glasses.
It sounds like Ford just limited the bands that could be received. They could have allowed the receiver to pick up Ham, CB, police, aircraft bands, TV as well as military and government bands. Just think of having a car radio that could receive most any signal that is broadcast. That is a feature I might be willing to pay extra for even though it would cost almost nothing to add to the car.
Why did Ford attempt to eliminate AM? My first guess would be interference from Electric cars. In the early 1900s the countries banned spark transmitters because they made AM nearly useless. EVs are little more than a spark transmitter with wheels if they have brush motors or are controlled with pulse electronics. They could make motors wouldn't have that problem but they would cost more to produce.
This also brings up another question. The FCC pretty much limits transmissions over 100 Mill-watts without a license however there are exceptions such as your cell phone. Why would they allow the destruction of the AM radio when they have spent a century defending and protecting it. Could it be the current administrations desire to push EVs has infected the FCC and they are willing to sacrifice an important means of communication to push EVs? Something else not mentions is some of the ham bands such as 80 and 40 meter and possibly older CB radios will also be affected by poorly constructed EV motor controllers however people using this part of the frequency spectrum are fewer and have less political pull.
Then there is the problem with the satellite providers. The software needed to decode the signals is proprietary and is built into the radio. The contract Ford agreed to in order to use the software probably contains restrictions as to how the radio is to be configured. If this is the case, they probably had to place a good deal of pressure on the satellite providers to enable AM. This would have been in the form of threatening to remove satellite capable radios totally from the product line and switching to an older style of radio from another vendor.
The other reason could be the push to satellite radio. I suspect many people with radios able to receive satellite radio never activate them. Granted they work well but personally for around town driving I don't even turn the radio on. If I did far more distant driving I would consider it but AM radio and my music library is enough for me.
They also mistakenly assume that everybody has an unlimited cell data plan. I don't because I am around enough WiFi that I use a very limited amount of data from my plan. If they rely too much on cell data, they may discover that car features may stop working because the cell phone service is unable to transmit that much data. G5 service is great if you are close to it but G4 will probably handle much of the data traffic when you move away from the population centers.
I think that Ford may have discovered that they don't understand their customers and hopefully will learn from this. They probably depended too much on kids fresh out of school who haven't lived in the real world for a while. I see thing like that all the time when I look at my computer monitor. They use teeny fonts that are difficult for some of us with older eyes to see without glasses.
lcbrownz
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Are you using Spotify's premium plan (160 KBPS) from your smartphone or the free plan (96 KBPS)? If you are using the free plan, if probably sounds like FM radio.
roket
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premium, i cant stand the ads and skip limits of the standard plan, plus i like having my music offline
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