Comment Frustrating (Score 2, Insightful) 262
The money behind this doesn't give the slightest crap about emergencies. They're just using that as their lever. They care about all the money they've sunk into AM. The people arguing for this are right wing talk radio. (Clear Channel, Salem, etc.)
And it's frustrating because the straw man they are using is actually RIGHT. I really hate to agree with them, especially when I know they're not acting in good faith.
BUT we could solve everyone's issue here (from an emergency standpoint) but just making a reliable emergency carrier, on a few chosen AM frequencies. The car companies wouldn't have to get all AM frequencies working, or even support analog signals. The emergency carrier could send out analog on one frequency in the AM area, and digital on others. You could use old AM radios to get the analog one (or two or three with a good spread for a little more reliability/avoiding interference) or buy a new radio for the same info (plus maybe pictures, downloads, etc) on a slow digital signal, also in the AM spectrum.
The car companies would only support the digital, which is fine, since it means they don't need to keep AM un-noisy. People could still use old AM radios, and companies could make money selling trivial digital radios for clear (lo-fi) AM data. The same emergency data could also go out on FM, as that will work most of the time, anyhow. Everyone wins.