Auto Industry Non-Committal to Keeping AM in New Cars

/
Auto Industry Non-Committal to Keeping AM in New Cars

Automakers have replied to U.S. Sen. Ed Markey’s letter urging them to maintain broadcast AM radio as a feature in electric vehicles and other future vehicles. But the auto industry’s response by no means offers any guarantees that the senior band will remain in the dashboard going forward.

Markey wrote in December to all the big automakers: Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, BMW and Kia among them. He asked for a thorough accounting of where AM radio receivers stand in the view of automakers and to inform him of any plans to discontinue access to AM in new cars.

The auto industry response comes from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation and appears to be a resounding non-endorsement of AM radio. In fact, the letter makes no mention of the industry’s intentions of keeping AM radio intact in the dashboard.

Read More

Hackers Disrupt Russian Radio

/

Radio stations in several Russian cities were disrupted on 22nd February 2023 by the sound of air raid sirens and a warning of imminent missile strikes.

The broadcasts were reportedly heard in Belgorod, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Magnitogorsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Novouralsk, Pyatigorsk, Stary Oskol, Syktyvkar, Tyumen, Ufa, and Voronezh, among other cities. Recordings of the broadcast were shared on the social media network Telegram and reported on by Meduza.

Meduza, an independent news agency now based in Latvia, was forced to move its operations out of Russia during the media crackdown that followed Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

EMERCOM, the Russian Ministry for Civil Defense, Emergency Situations and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters, confirmed the broadcasts in a statement on its Telegram channel, blaming an unspecified “hacker attack on servers of a number of commercial radio stations in some regions of the country.” Voronezh regional authorities reportedly blamed “collaborators of the Kyiv regime” for the hack.

Stations reportedly compromised in the hack include Relax FM, Comedy Radio, Humor FM, and AvtoRadio, all of which are owned by GPM Radio, the largest radio holding company in Russia. According to a Telegram post by AvtoRadio, the hack was focused on the satellite signals used by the network to distribute its programming.

NASA Help Wanted: Ham Radio Operators Please Apply

/

NASA recently recruited citizen scientists, and their latest call is looking for help from ham radio operators. They want you Make and report radio communications During 2023 and 2024 in North America. From their website:

The connection is possible due to interactions between our sun and the ionosphere, the ionized region of Earth’s atmosphere that lies approximately 80 to 1,000 km away. The upcoming eclipses (14th October 2023 and 8th April 2024) provide unique opportunities to study these interactions. As you and other members of HamSCI transmit, receive and record signals across the radio spectrum during the eclipse, you will generate valuable data for testing computer models of the ionosphere.

The next eclipse will be in October of this year and in April of 2024, so you have some time to arrange your stop. According to NASA, “It will be a fun and friendly event with a competitive element.” So if you like science, space, or competitiveness, it sounds like you’ll be interested. Now, the big event is the Eclipse QSO Party. There will also be a signal detection challenge, some measurements for WWV, CHU and AM broadcast stations, and ionospheric height measurements. There will also be some kind of very low frequency event. Details about many of these events are still pending.

Hams, of course, has a long history of experimenting with space. Signals routinely bounce off the moon. They also allow radio signals to bounce off the paths of ionized gas behind the meteors using special computer software.

More Information - https://www.hamsci.org/seqp-rules