A popular bill will force car companies to put AM radios in vehicles at no extra charge, despite decreasing interest from drivers and potential electromagnetic interference.
Ability for AM radios to interrupt other playback for announcements has been around at least since the 90s. Back then it was commonly used to pause cassette playback when traffic announcements were made.
This just requires for the device to monitor radio when on, and to be on - and with how integrated it is in modern days cars functionality I’d say the chance for them to be on is higher than it was in the 90s. So having that functionality is a pretty good way to reach a lot of car drivers.
I believe they are simply smoking facts. Maybe you should look stuff up before being so adamantly incorrect.
The RDS-enabled receiver can be set to pay special attention to this TA flag and e.g. stop the tape/pause the CD or retune to receive a Traffic bulletin. The related TP (Traffic Programme) flag is used to allow the user to find only those stations that regularly broadcast traffic bulletins, whereas the TA flag is used to stop the tape or raise the volume during a traffic bulletin.
RDS and related protocols like TMC have specifications for both FM and AM transmitters. Those are used to stop playback if an urgent message comes. I’m assuming you have AM stations with such signals in the US (I don’t think we have in the EU) - otherwise the AM radio mandate would indeed be stupid.
edit: did some digging (it’s been almost 30 years since I cared about that stuff) - seems the US was pretty late to the party for radio data channels, and side channels for AM (which wasn’t of that much interest here due to the FM heavy radio landscape in Europe) only was discussed in the early 90s for the US specific variants. I couldn’t find any details if that actually ever got implemented. Given that most documentation available on that topic is heavily focusing on EU I’d guess it never got that much use in the US.
Ability for AM radios to interrupt other playback for announcements has been around at least since the 90s. Back then it was commonly used to pause cassette playback when traffic announcements were made.
This just requires for the device to monitor radio when on, and to be on - and with how integrated it is in modern days cars functionality I’d say the chance for them to be on is higher than it was in the 90s. So having that functionality is a pretty good way to reach a lot of car drivers.
That is straight up not true.
AM radio cannot, has not ever, and will not ever be able to pause a cassette.
Wtf are you smoking?
I believe they are simply smoking facts. Maybe you should look stuff up before being so adamantly incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_announcement_(radio_data_systems)
RDS and related protocols like TMC have specifications for both FM and AM transmitters. Those are used to stop playback if an urgent message comes. I’m assuming you have AM stations with such signals in the US (I don’t think we have in the EU) - otherwise the AM radio mandate would indeed be stupid.
edit: did some digging (it’s been almost 30 years since I cared about that stuff) - seems the US was pretty late to the party for radio data channels, and side channels for AM (which wasn’t of that much interest here due to the FM heavy radio landscape in Europe) only was discussed in the early 90s for the US specific variants. I couldn’t find any details if that actually ever got implemented. Given that most documentation available on that topic is heavily focusing on EU I’d guess it never got that much use in the US.