AM radio app for an AM-radio-less car?

in North America, AM is still alive and kicking but it's harder and harder to get a modern radio that has AM. I suspect that it's still here because the entire band is ~1MHz and it's MW, there isn't much use for the band otherwise.
 
The other thing is that bandwidth is related to frequency, and FM killed the old AM for clarity.Terrestrial AM stereo was proposed, but I am not up to date on it.
Scanning chips, the kind used in digital tuners, were made for AM too, my 80s Kenwood can get AM. New ones?
Maybe the chip can, if you feel like opening your new radio and putting a few links.

You could always rig an old car AM radio in your new car, take the output somehow to the installed radio.
But if you have plenty of data in your plan, the phone app is the way to go. You can listen anywhere, not just in the car.
 
Last edited:
AM radio tuners are bigger than FM. I don't think you will find a cellphone with AM.

AM is KING out on the American Prairie. Hemmingway even has a passage about distant stations coming in one by one as the sun goes out to California. Fringes of Ohio, parts of Indiana, southern Illinois, most of Kansas, there's NO listenable FM for hours of driving.

I hate to hack-up your new car, but get the radio out of a 1990s Cadillac, a cigar plug, two speakers from WalMart. The head on the front seat, the speakers on the back seat.
 
The reason why I asked if it is an electric car is that it is very difficult to get usable AM reception in an electric car - with conventional antenna placement you only hear whether the car is accelerating or decelerating through your AM radio. Radio manufacturers are working on solutions, but I don't know if any are on the market yet.

As an aside, years ago NXP developped a chip meant mainly for FM and AM reception in cell phones, the TEA5777. By the time it was ready for mass production smart phones had come into fashion and for some reason those were all too flat for the tiny ferrite antenna of the TEA5777 standard application circuit.
 
Three simple problems. AM usually requires a decent size antenna. Second is that at least in Cleveland the news and traffic station I am familiar with only streams on the aforementioned service that is not preferred. Then when traveling between cities, with a real AM radio you can scan for and find local stations to give you that regions traffic. Not sure how you locate the best local streaming service in unfamiliar places.

One side effect of the decrease in AM radio use is the change in programming. It is often religious or low cost syndicated (talk or other) show programing.

The upside is that being a bit long wave, the signal travels well and covers larger areas. However for decades now the sensitivity of automotive AM radios has decreased.

My local all talk AM station KDKA (considered the first commercial radio station and predates starting with a W!) sometimes was not technically listenable 30 miles away from its’ 50,000 watt transmitter with a factory provided car radio. With the change in programming, I no longer desire to listen. (Even older was KQV, but it was not a scheduled broadcaster at first like KDKA.)
 
Last edited:
AM740 (the only AM station still playing music in the area as far as I know) comes in so poorly in downtown Toronto that they made a 1kW FM repeater on 96.7MHz.

Zoomer Radio AM740

It's a great station to feed into your old radio sets to hear the music like it sounded back then.

As an aside, I used to have an AC Delco stereo that had AM Stereo and it wasn't bad considering the BW.

I now live in a noise bomb - the entire AM dial is 60 Hz in my apartment.