[HN Gopher] Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on...
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Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM
radio station
Author : walrus01
Score : 591 points
Date : 2022-02-09 02:36 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kuow.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kuow.org)
| dncornholio wrote:
| Most car software is rubbish.
|
| So far, everything that my car replaces with a touchscreen that
| used to be a physical switch is a complete downgrade.
|
| My car features a D-pad on the wheel that also works if you swipe
| over it, resulting in bad inputs and causing all kinds of
| frustration. It's my first new car and I'm feeling like I want my
| old car back. I seriously hate touchscreen controls and my only
| physical input is faulty
| JohnBooty wrote:
| My wife has a 2019 Subaru Crosstrek that gets this exactly
| right, IMO.
|
| There _is_ a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple CarPlay
| / Android Auto. Mostly for nav.
|
| But for everything else, there are big grippy analog controls.
| There are also analog volume and prev/next controls for the
| touchscreen. I believe the interior was designed with the
| concept of, "everything should be operable, even if the driver
| is wearing gloves."
| munificent wrote:
| _> There is a touchscreen. IMO, you want that for Apple
| CarPlay / Android Auto. Mostly for nav._
|
| More importantly, federal law requires that new cars _must_
| have back-up cameras. Car manufacturers are doing the obvious
| analysis of, if we need to have a screen in there anyway, may
| as well make it a touchscreen. And if we 're going to make it
| a touchscreen, may as well save some money by eliminating a
| bunch of physical controls.
|
| I don't like it--I plan to drive my 2002 Tacoma into the
| ground specifically to avoid getting a car with a huge
| touchscreen UI--but I kind of understand it.
| pcdoyle wrote:
| Yeah this is how my Hyundai Kona (2020) works and I think
| it's a good bridge between both. Touchscreen for CarPlay
| navigation, knobs on the dashboard, and additional buttons on
| the steering wheel (volume up/down, skip, mute, answer call).
| partiallypro wrote:
| I imagine this is why Apple is wanting to get into the car
| game, it sees this opporunity.
| munk-a wrote:
| To reduce all inputs to a single button that you tap in
| different patterns to trigger different functionality or to
| remove all physical ports (including the fuel tank inflow)
| with wireless equivalent that only work with approved
| hardware? The folks I want to get into the car game are
| mechanics from the 90s that believe a switch with a nice deep
| "click" for feedback is the best thing ever invented.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Siri, brake.
| munk-a wrote:
| "Now playing songs by Drake."
| duxup wrote:
| I wish I could just mirror my phone screen on my car screen.
|
| That's all I need, my phone apps and interface update just fine
| and are pretty good at doing the things I want.
| Tagbert wrote:
| That is essentially what Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are.
| The phone generates a secondary screen with a simplified UI
| and projects that to the car. The car displays it as a video
| and returns touch events to the phone.
| hedora wrote:
| "Simplified UI"? I think you mean the confusing UI that
| isn't the one I learned before I was trying to switch lanes
| on the freeway.
|
| Some day, I hope a lawyer will team up with a UI
| researcher, and then sue car manufactures for "safety
| theater" features like this that endanger people.
|
| One of my favorites? The click through legal disclaimer
| that blocks my view of the backup camera screen every
| single time I pull out of a spot in a parking lot.
|
| A runner up is "we can't let the passenger type a
| destination into the navigation system because the vehicle
| is moving"
| duxup wrote:
| I had a rental with Apple CarPlay, it worked well but I
| still got the impression that the system in the car played
| a big part... it was an interface but I'm not sure it wad
| driven by my phone. That of course means it could be at the
| whim of some silly car infotainment type setup. At least
| that's the impression I got.
| jaywalk wrote:
| It's 100% driven by your phone, what you're seeing is
| just a video stream from the phone. The infotainment
| system essentially acts as a dumb terminal. The phone
| feeds it video, and it feeds the phone X,Y touch
| coordinates. It also feeds the phone some data about the
| car, but there is no way for the car to directly modify
| the interface since it's literally just a video stream.
| aczerepinski wrote:
| But some of the car companies are trying to charge a
| subscription for it anyway if I recall correctly?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Some car companies are trying to charge a subscription
| fee for heated seats, too. They obviously control whether
| it's enabled or disabled, but my point was that when
| you're using it the car doesn't control the interface.
| duxup wrote:
| TY, I didn't know that. Thank you.
| jyrkesh wrote:
| Unfortunately, the devil is in the details of that
| "essentially" and "simplified UI". CarPlay seems magic
| (though admittedly I don't own an iPhone), but Android Auto
| has been riddled with problems around whether the deck or
| the phone has control, weird memory leaks, and critical
| controls or settings missing from the "simplification".
| Every time I've used it as a passenger, I find myself
| unplugging the phone, fiddling with the Maps or music UI on
| there, and then plugging it back in (often only to find out
| that the pairing got reset somehow and the car needs to be
| put in park before I can complete the onboarding again).
| jliptzin wrote:
| I think touchscreen controls are fine as long as the car also
| has voice commands that work well so you don't even have to
| look anywhere else while driving much less touch the console
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I won't trust someone to get voice recognition right when
| they can't even get an on-screen UI right.
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| Mazdas don't have touchscreens, incidentally. It's one of their
| design constraints.
| comrh wrote:
| Mine from 2014 does, did they remove them? It also has the
| navigation nob in the center console that I love.
| jordanthoms wrote:
| Yes, it's removed on newer models, though not across all
| the products yet
| Tagbert wrote:
| They switched to a jog-shuttle knob. I think BMW had a
| similar interface at one point.
| vgeek wrote:
| The biggest disappointment was manufacturers moving away from
| the DIN standard. Companies like Pioneer and Alpine (even
| defunct companies like Eclipse) have had highly functional and
| usable touchscreen DVD/stereo/GPS units since at least ~2005.
| Things like GPS, bluetooth and voice control all seem to work
| without fail on the units I've had (my only issue has been a
| folder limit on USB drives). They also focus on sound quality,
| so you can get higher quality audio from the unit via RCA jacks
| to an amplifier. All of this for <$500 with GPS, <$200 without
| GPS. If the car companies want tight integrations (things like
| OBDII tying into display, climate controls) an OEM developed
| touchscreen makes sense, but as a consumer, using a 20 year old
| OEM touchscreen is painful. Modularity (the DIN standard)
| solved this, by allowing easy upgrades, but I guess that
| doesn't help move newer cars.
| rampant_ai wrote:
| Infotainment systems are one of the biggest selling points if
| you've seen any car ad lately. Why let the customer upgrade
| the unit and keep that same car for a decade, when you can
| make that impossible and then entice them with the latest
| infotainment system so they buy a new car every few years.
| criddell wrote:
| It isn't unheard of:
|
| https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a32254313/1960s-porsche-9
| 1...
| vgeek wrote:
| Right, and that is what I don't get. The "fancy tech" isn't
| really that great relative to alternatives available in the
| past, but everyone is somehow unaware. Aftermarket stereos
| were mainstream during the 80's-90's during the tape->CD
| transition, so more people knew that they could upgrade,
| but in the mid-late 00's, hardly anyone seemed to know that
| you could swap a stereo out relatively easily. For modern
| cars I've looked at, the dash kit for swaps makes it
| insanely expensive. Popular vehicles may have custom
| aftermarkets, but niche cars are out of luck. So many
| people just look for _any_ reason to get a new car, I guess
| that is just a side effect of treating cars like
| replaceable appliances?
| thrashh wrote:
| I mean cars are fairly replaceable. Nearly every part on
| a car wears.
|
| And a car 10 years ago at the same price point seems so
| much more dated.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Most car software is rubbish.
|
| Why is this? You'd think these massive corporations could
| afford the best SWE's in the world. And yet, the average
| infotainment system in a new car today is literally worse than
| an iPad from 2010.
| decafninja wrote:
| Probably the cost center vs. profit center thing.
|
| SWEs working at these companies are probably hamstrung in
| what they can do.
|
| From cheap economobiles to six figure luxury cars, I've yet
| to see an infotainment system that works better than CarPlay.
|
| The last bastion for factory infotainment systems is that
| CarPlay/Android Auto doesn't integrate with factory HUD or
| instrument panel displays (whether the instrument panel is a
| big LCD itself, or a small one nestled between the gauges).
| But I hear even this is changing in some recent models. Once
| that revolution is finished, then I don't see why I'd ever
| use the factory infotainment software ever again instead of
| just CarPlay.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| It seems like the manufacturer is responsible for
| 'integration' of CarPlay into their systems. On a recent
| 2021 Hyundai Sonata rental, the Carplay system crashed
| multiple times while driving and forced me to pull over,
| unpair the phone and reconnect to get it working again. I
| don't think I have ever used any Apple software that was
| this glitchy. Makes me think that there is some screwups
| the manufacturer can still do despite Carplay coming from
| Apple.
| burnoutgal wrote:
| Car companies do a lot of revenue, but margins are slim. When
| you actually have to build something out of metal and glass
| you have to be fixated on cost cutting.
| iso1210 wrote:
| Which is crazy, I've never chosen a car because it costs 1k
| more or less, but I have ruled out several manufacturers
| because their UI is awful, and I'm sure it doesn't costs
| $1k to put half a dozen real switches in
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| It is not their core competency.
| sircastor wrote:
| I worked in infotainment for an Automaker. The engineers are
| fine. The hardware is often limited (because of expense or
| contacts), and the development timeline is 2-3 years.
|
| Also, infotainment is not a make-or-break feature of the car.
| It might nudge people a little, but it's not _the_ thing, so
| it's not as high a priority.
|
| I will say for my former employer that I could get a better
| salary at almost any software company than there. The work
| was interesting though.
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| Do you have information about working for an Automaker? Any
| myths? I'm interested!
| [deleted]
| jyrkesh wrote:
| I drive a 2005 stick shift that sits on a Toyota Corolla block.
| It has a dumb radio with real buttons, and no power windows or
| power locks.
|
| It's amazing. Maintenance is cheap, stuff works. I have a
| Bluetooth FM radio dongle, and the audio quality is less than
| ideal, but my speakers are crap too, so who cares. I threw on a
| dash mount for my phone to do navigation and music, and it's
| wayyyy better than even decks with Apple CarPlay or Android
| Auto (particularly since most of that stuff, until very
| recently, required you to plug in a cable).
|
| I'm going to drive the thing into the ground. Really not
| looking forward to the idea of buying a car full of computers
| to replace it.
|
| That being said, fuel economy isn't _great_. If the odometer is
| to be trusted I get around 25 mpg, but I don't drive all that
| much, and I just don't think a hybrid or electric vehicle is
| worth the price, both upfront (particularly in this market) and
| maintenance (for the hybrids only, electrics seem to be
| maintenance-free).
| userbinator wrote:
| 25mpg definitely doesn't sound right for a Corolla. That's
| roughly what I can get in my fullsize car if I try not to
| "stretch its legs" too much ...and it's got a big V8.
| the_snooze wrote:
| It's probably reasonable to assume that car touchscreens are
| designed more to "look cool" at the time of sale than to
| actually be usable over the life of a vehicle. Car salesmen get
| to show off all sorts of high-tech bells and whistles, and
| that's more immediately impressive to buyers than the long-term
| practicality of physical knobs and switches.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Either that, or cost-savings.
|
| One off-the-shelf touchscreen... vs. lots of little custom-
| molded and printed analog parts that have to be assembled by
| costly robots or costlier humans. Big savings, I think.
|
| Whatever the case, it sure isn't because people _like_ touch
| controls in their cars. Holy shit, what a universally reviled
| "feature."
| koz1000 wrote:
| Touchscreen engineer here. There is no such thing as an
| 'off-the-shelf' capacitive touchscreen.
|
| There is always custom engineering to match the customer's
| housing and bezel, tune the analog characteristics to the
| electrical environment, and handle other requests like a
| safer/thicker cover glass, optical bonding to the LCD, and
| low friction or hydro/oleophobic coatings on the surface.
| jessaustin wrote:
| No one is denigrating this work, but it's obviously
| easier to consistently get right than the fiddly
| processes GP describes. There is a rectangle of a
| particular size, and various substances are applied to
| it.
|
| You didn't mention UI design, which is the worst aspect
| of this technology.
| Cxckers wrote:
| Hopefully, those same customers will know better when coming
| to buy their next car after that, therefore reducing desire
| for touchscreen controls and hopefully, their extensive usage
| the_snooze wrote:
| I doubt that'll happen. It'll probably take the same
| trajectory as (smart) TVs: these crappy designs become the
| industry norm and it becomes very difficult to find
| alternatives.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| On a somewhat related note, Mazda has said a few years
| ago that they will be staying away from touchscreens. I'm
| not sure if they've followed through.
| https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-
| pur...
| Loughla wrote:
| This is the answer. I would prefer to buy physical
| switches and dials, but the options just aren't there.
|
| So I'm stuck with laggy, buggy, bad software and a stupid
| touchscreen full of features that I will never use.
|
| Seriously, who needs to be able to play movies in their
| car's center front console?
| the_snooze wrote:
| At least as of two years ago, Honda pushed back against
| touchscreens dominating the center console:
| https://www.thedrive.com/tech/32797/long-live-buttons-
| hondas... But looking at the 2022 HR-V, it seems like
| they've given up on that design philosophy:
|
| >The automatic climate control system offers a high-tech
| touch-screen interface...
|
| https://automobiles.honda.com/hr-v#interior
|
| I'm of the opinion that the only touchscreen that belongs
| in a car is a barebones non-networked Apple CarPlay /
| Android Auto pass-through for sound and navigation. All
| other controls are physical.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Also, why can't we just have a fucking shelf or a
| bracket.
|
| Ever since radios stopped being a standard rectangle, and
| the dashboard was filled with kevlar sacks and explosives
| there's nowhere to put anything down.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| As of 5-6 years ago some (many? most?) cars still had a
| good old standard double-DIN slot for the infotainment
| unit, if you popped off the dashboard's plastic cover.
|
| No clue if that's still true; I think it has become
| _less_ true over time for sure.
|
| There are benefits to automakers for retaining that
| standard form factor. Most factory-branded infotainment
| systems are made by a handful of OEM manufacturers like
| Bose. Bose makes systems for multiple automakers. So the
| double-DIN form factor has persisted, it's just hidden.
|
| Problem is, for most cars, the climate controls and shit
| are all bundled into that infotainment system. So you can
| slot a standard double-DIN stereo into most modern cars,
| but you need a replacement dashboard panel and fairly
| elaborate kit to replace the OEM climate controls and
| whatever else.
|
| Metra is a company that makes those kits, I think they
| were pretty much the only game in town last I looked into
| this. https://www.crutchfield.com/S-57MGZyBW0Mm/fg_112200
| _FFBrand%...
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think this is part of it, "iPhones are cool, and this is
| like a giant iPhone!", but I think a larger part of it is
| that it's easier to design/program for and actually possible
| to update after the fact if that's required. There's probably
| something here for using the same parts across a whole line
| of cars, too vs testing and fitting buttons.
| 762236 wrote:
| I keep wondering why the car reviews don't mention how bad the
| software can be (like having to wait ages for the system to
| boot).
| yojo wrote:
| When I bought my last car (Honda Fit), I was stuck with the
| base model because it was the only one _without_ a touch a
| screen.
|
| I test drove the upgraded trim package. It was nicer in every
| way but the damn touch screen, which was a non-starter. I had
| to wait three months for a cheaper car to come in, instead of
| buying the upgraded package on the spot.
|
| At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start selling
| manual controls as an upgrade.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > At some point a manufacturer will get wise and start
| selling manual controls as an upgrade.
|
| Will they really?
|
| Most consumers invest very little effort in researching most
| of their purchases, and are remarkably tolerant to specific
| kinds of annoyances. I _wish_ that they invested more effort,
| but based on my observations of my friends and family (who
| will spend e.g. about 20 minutes researching their $600 phone
| purchase), they won 't, with a few outliers.
|
| An imperfect comparison might be the amount of effort that
| the average techie spends on purchasing a MicroSD card or USB
| drive (usually on Amazon). How many people, even programmers,
| will spend time looking for durability or third-party
| performance benchmarking numbers? How many will look for
| child/slave labor in the manufacturing of the device, or rare
| earth materials sourced from areas in conflict?
|
| I, personally, know that I _should_ do the above, but I don
| 't - partially because Google is so incredibly bad at finding
| the information, but also because I know that because most
| _other_ people don 't care, a lot of the above information
| might not exist at all.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The change would more likely be driven by regulation than
| market action as the dynamic is not one which is readily
| assessed by individual buyers.
|
| That said, it's regulation which has driven the present
| problem....
| cgriswald wrote:
| I think most people look at it in a cost/benefit way. If it
| takes them three hours to research, they've spent 3x
| $hourly_rate + $item_cost--which in many instances may be
| more expensive than just selling off an item they can't
| stand and getting a different one. (To the extent that
| people do this even when it would pay for itself, I think
| it's mostly the result of just being in the habit.)
|
| I try to view it instead as being paid (albeit at a lower
| rate) for my off time. (And if you do this for everything,
| you'll tend to spend less, have more in the bank, and the
| amount you get 'paid' will increase over time.)
| dgemm wrote:
| Similar thing with the touch bar on macbooks. I would pay
| extra to "upgrade" to one with physical F-keys instead.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| You can, the new Macbook Pros go back to no touchbar and
| physical f- keys again.
| melony wrote:
| Ironically Mazda _got rid_ of their touch screen for their
| new cars.
| delusional wrote:
| Mazda already wised up and removed the touchscreen in their
| newer models, everything in the infotainment is operated by a
| little rotary/dpad-thing located near the gearshift. I think
| it's quite nice, input wise.
|
| Software wise it's a complete mess. The software itself is
| actually pretty OK, the navigation is just very verbose and
| it's strange that I can't just update it myself. The startup
| is also quite annoying. It's an embedded computer in a car,
| it should be instant.
|
| Android auto support is a trashfire. It occasionally (when i
| drive for more than an hour) crashes the entire infotainment
| system, forcing it to reboot (a 1 minute process). Thankfully
| it resumes from where it left off after the reboot.
| neogodless wrote:
| > Android auto support is a trashfire
|
| Well that's disappointing. As I pointed out in another
| comment, as of March 2020, Android Auto became wildly
| unstable in my 2015 Mazda. However, I put the blame on it
| having a version of Mazda AIO Tweaks from 2018, and
| possible version incompatibilities with the Android Auto on
| my phone. But... perhaps there are software issues at a
| deeper level here, if even the newer ones which officially
| support Android Auto are so unstable!
|
| For me, Android Auto will crash frequently if using maps or
| Pandora, and will almost always crash instantly if I try to
| use both. It wasn't nearly as unstable before March 2020,
| though.
| young_rutabaga wrote:
| I had this issue, too. It helped to replace the AA
| headunit module in AIO with a binary having this fix
| https://github.com/gartnera/headunit/pull/174. Since
| then, AA works great for me
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| really! This definitely makes me note to be sure to
| strongly consider mazda next time i'm in the market. I
| don't want any of that stuff.
|
| All US cars now come with a screen, because backup cameras
| are now legally required. So I guess most of them say if
| there has to be a screen anyway, of course it should be a
| touch screen with controls, or it's just sitting there
| useless when you're not using the backup camera.
|
| I don't want a backup camera or a screen at all, but if I
| have to have one, at least don't make it a touch screen,
| please.
| delusional wrote:
| It's a real shame that "computerizing everything" meant
| taking all the shit we hate from computers, like long
| bootups, complex failure conditions, constant restarting,
| and complicated inferfaces and putting that into
| everything while making nothing better.
|
| I'd recommend giving Mazda's infotainment a chance. It's
| not pretty, but it gets out of your way enough that you
| get to enjoy the car. That was kinda the point of getting
| a miata in the first place.
| hedora wrote:
| I once had a GMC (that was in most other ways terrible),
| that embedded the backup camera screen behind the rear
| view mirror glass. There was a direct connection between
| it and the backup camera. The backup camera was triggered
| by the backup lights, so no head console integration was
| required.
|
| That was nice. Hopefully, some manufacturer will cater to
| the touchscreen backlash crowd,and it'll become popular.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| like it replaced the rear view mirror, you didn't have a
| windshield-mounted mirror anymore when backup camera was
| engaged?
|
| I guess that makes sense -- I'm kind of surprised it's
| legal!
|
| although I guess the windshield-mount rearview mirror
| isn't actually legally required anyway, for instance in
| trucks/vans/other situations with obstructed sightlines
| to back of car.
|
| Anyway, what you describe sounds really cool and subtle
| in a good way, like the kind of thing we imagined we'd
| get in the future, when we imagined the future would be
| designed well, instead of the hacky poorly designed
| terrible UX future we've got.
| malfist wrote:
| They've had those dials since their first touch screens.
| It's the biggest reason for my brand loyalty for mazda.
| Touch screens allow you to make really complicated
| interfaces, but if your screen can only be navigated by a
| dial, they can't. Which is way better than everyone else.
|
| It is a touch screen, but the "touch" part generally only
| operates while stopped and in navigation. I think they
| might also allow touch for android auto/apple car play, but
| I'm not sure.
| theli wrote:
| >android auto
|
| No, they don't allow any touchscreen input on AA even
| when parked.
| mileza wrote:
| The touchscreen is still there on my 2020 model. but I
| always use the roulette to navigate. It's a bit akward at
| times but it's much better than taking my eyes off the road
| to try and line up my finger on the touchpad. It's disabled
| in Android Auto mode, and probably in CarPlay but I never
| used it.
|
| I too had problems with Android Auto when using my old
| phone, it constantly crashed. When I switched to a Pixel 4a
| in 2020 I no longer had any issues. It works like a charm.
|
| So I suspect it could be your phone, or something related
| (the cable, the type of USB plug, etc.).
| neogodless wrote:
| For me, I tried a Pixel 3 and a Oneplus 7 Pro, with two
| different cables, and the instability issues were the
| same. So it's not clear to me that the issue is outside
| of the head unit.
| delusional wrote:
| For the first 2 months of me owning my car (it's a 2021
| mx5), I had to force close spotify immediately before
| plugging the phone into the car (It was like a 30 second
| window) or the car would refuse to output any audio.
| Without any change to the cable or the car, and with the
| same handset, the problem suddenly disappeared. The only
| thing I think of that could have fixed it is an over the
| air update for my phone.
|
| Either way, it's branded "Android Auto". I'm going to
| blame Google for anything that doesn't work optimally. If
| they cared, they could certify their product.
| neogodless wrote:
| Yup - the common element between my phones is the
| underlying Android software / Android Auto software.
| delusional wrote:
| I misread your previous comment has the problem
| originating _inside_ the headunit. Just wanted to clear
| that up since my response probably seemed pretty
| superfluous.
| neogodless wrote:
| No, you read it right. I mean - clearly I don't know the
| origin. My Mazda OEM head unit was slow and unstable out
| of the box, and continued to be so when I installed Mazda
| AIO Tweaks (with Android Auto.)
|
| Specifically running Android Auto _became_ more unstable
| in March 2020, without being the head unit updated. In
| other words, probably the phone (Android Auto) was
| updated. Possibly in a way that was backwards compatible
| with OEM Android Auto, but not the AIO Tweaks version.
|
| That's a long of saying, there's probably multiple
| potential sources of problems and failure; not clearly
| the hardware/software of the head unit, and not clearly
| the Android Auto software. But a bad combination of the
| two.
|
| But it's all guesswork on my end! When I see others
| having the same issues with OEM Android Auto, it does
| make it seem more of a clear Android Auto software issue.
| (And we haven't really ruled out idiosyncrasies of the
| handsets and USB cables.)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| That's the same reason I bought the base model of my last
| car. Besides the steering wheel, you end up interacting with
| the center console the most. It really should be one of the
| top considerations in buying a car vs fancy wheels, a cool
| spoiler or a turbocharger, etc. After all, a lot of body
| components & engine modifications can be added after market.
| You're going to have a much harder time "fixing" that center
| console...
| yojo wrote:
| It's too bad the manufacturers don't just make APIs with
| swappable standard sized hardware instead of integrated
| systems.
|
| An average car lasts 12 years. How many 12 year old tablets
| do people want to use?
|
| My first car was a 15 year old beater with a tape deck. It
| was trivial to rip it out and put in an (at the time
| current) CD player. I pity the poor kids who are going to
| be stuck with these cars down the road.
| stadium wrote:
| It's also on a 5 year supply chain cycle. That brand new touch
| screen was spec'd and designed 5 years before the finished car
| was made.
| josephd79 wrote:
| perfect way to drive up listeners, sell more ads.
| dopamean wrote:
| i wonder if they can send a new image that fixes the problem
| geephroh wrote:
| And more info from the Seattle Times:
| https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thanks-to-a-glitch...
| tomkat0789 wrote:
| I see several comments expressing that they haven't used the
| radio in years. I still use mine every time I get into my
| mid-2000s Honda! I'd be cursing the tech gods if they locked me
| into a single station! I guess I'm not the only one or nobody
| would have noticed the bug.
|
| My knowledge and following of music is spotty, so radio is key to
| my discovery of new songs. On long road trips I tend to find good
| new (to me) songs, as well as get amused by some weird ones. A
| few highlights from the odd but fun stuff:
|
| - Driving through rural Ohio at midnight I randomly seeked to a
| station playing "Clean Up the Ghetto by the Philidelphia
| International All Stars. - On a Sunday morning in southern
| Mississippi I heard some happy old dance music accompanied by the
| jolly but incomprehensible New Orleans drawl of the DJ. - Driving
| through West Virginia I heard "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" 3
| times on the same morning on different stations.
|
| I don't road trip extremely often but surfing the radio is
| something I look forward to when I do! I usually get a taste of
| the local culture and a window outside of my urban tech bubble.
| lightwords wrote:
| There is one amusing bug which might be related to this in Mazda
| 2018. If you add the same station twice to your favourites(easy
| to accidentally do) and then you click the station lower in the
| list the UI kicks you up and down in the list endlessly. This is
| because on each render it checks your station state and just pick
| the station with the same name randomly in the list.
| epivosism wrote:
| Growing up in the 90s you could tell when digitification came in
| - radios and tvs started to take forever to change stations.
| Radios used to be _mechanical_ devices - punch a button and the
| new station would _immediately_ start playing. Same for tvs.
|
| I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and
| radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the
| time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new
| town cause it's too annoying.
|
| More generally it seems like when industries are growing, there
| is competition in this kind of area, but later on this dies off.
| I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?
| spoonjim wrote:
| _EVERYTHING_ has more latency these days. Phone calls. TVs.
| Radios. Computer keyboards. PROFESSIONAL WIRELESS MICROPHONE
| SYSTEMS. It blows!
| ratsmack wrote:
| For an old timer like me, cell phones are about as functional
| for voice communication as the toy walkie-talkie's were that
| I played with as a kid.
| spoonjim wrote:
| The sad thing is even a landline isn't available anymore at
| my house. It's a VOIP shitshow
| eloisius wrote:
| It really is awful, and it seems like most people just don't
| care, or don't even know that they could care. Perceived
| latency was a bit motivation for me to ditch macOS last year
| and go back to Linux. I haven't got benchmarks to prove how
| it felt to me, but it felt like everything has become spongy
| and asynchronous. Even with a decked out iMac and fast SSD,
| it feel like applications don't launch immediately. There's
| enough lag time that I sit for a second thinking 'did I
| double click or not? Did it launch and then crash? Oh, here
| it comes'. Keyboard input feels laggy.
|
| I hate that more and more things are becoming software
| controlled. "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" is not a law
| that I want to apply to machines that can and should continue
| to function instantaneously.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I remember those analog tuners and I hated them, you could
| never get the frequency exactly right and over time it would
| "wander" so you had to retune. I will take digital FM tuners
| over analog ones any day, perfect tuning, no wandering, easy
| channel changing and much better quality.
|
| Also I own a 2012 BMW and its infotainment system works just
| fine. If the car is coming from deep sleep it takes like 5
| seconds to start but it shows the BMW logo and it's a nice
| touch. With a warm start it's on immediately. Channel changing
| is also fast, not instant but with the benefit of not hearing
| any static in between.
|
| Not to say all cars are perfect, I have seen cars with terrible
| infotainment systems which are slow and buggy, that's just a
| thing to keep on your list to inspect before buying a new car.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Our first cable TV "remote" was freaking amazing. Similar to
| this one:
|
| https://www.nj.com/parenting/guest_bloggers/2011/09/the_thin...
|
| Freaking incredible. You could physically switch to any station
| instantly. punch a button and the new station
| would immediately start playing
|
| The digital-enhanced FM stuff in cars now, like what's being
| referenced in the article, isn't laggy in my experience. Not
| quite as instant as a full analog radio, but it's as snappy as
| any other digital FM tuner dating back to the dawn of digital
| FM tuners in the 1970s or whatever.
|
| The FM signal is still analog; there's just some digital
| metadata embedded in it that receivers can optionally
| demodulate. In my experience the audio starts playing
| immediately and then the digital metadata (track name,
| thumbnail) pops up a bit later. So you can still flip through
| stations with little perceptible lag.
|
| FWIW, I'm the type of guy who keeps CRTs around for his retro
| systems because he enjoys true zero-lag gaming.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV
| and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline
|
| In all fairness its partly because of the compression
| algorithms used like Forward Error Correction FEC and
| progressive frames vs. immediate frames which simply takes some
| time to construct an audible / visible representation of the
| digital data.
| jart wrote:
| Did they do that in order to make room for the Internet? I
| assume the channels switched instantaneously because they were
| broadcasting every single one to your home simultaneously. But
| maybe they wanted more room on the existing wires to store
| Internet traffic? So they changed the channel change button to
| ping a server to ask for the other channel to be broadcast.
| Could anyone confirm if my understanding is accurate? Either
| way, it definitely ruined the TV viewing experience. But for
| the Internet, it was worth it.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Digital over-the-air TV works similarly to analog over-the-
| air, but it's slower to change channels because the TV has to
| wait for a frame that isn't a delta from a previous frame to
| display a coherent image. That's just sort of par for the
| course with modern digital compression, you could increase
| the number of such frames but then the compression gets less
| effective and you'd still have more of a delay than with
| analog.
| jart wrote:
| Oh I didn't know that over the air TV broadcasts use MPEG.
| I'm surprised that digital over the air even decodes at all
| considering how poor I remember the quality being in my
| childhood. I was referring more to cable.
| aksss wrote:
| Digital over the air was better quality than cable in my
| area for quite a while. I don't use either now but I
| think cable was 720 and OTA was 1080.
| zargon wrote:
| We're talking about over-the-air radio and tv. There are no
| wires. Or internet.
| hateful wrote:
| A lot of people say this has nothing to do with it. But for me
| personally, even when I started watching TV on the computer -
| which was always a specific Show or Movie, I would still
| "channel surf" the regular TV as a way to kill time. But once
| the digital boxes came out in the late 90s/early 00s, it would
| take 1-2 seconds to switch stations. Longer than I would have
| been on that station at all while surfing. This completely
| ruined it for me and I never channel surfed again.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I channel surfed right up until getting my first TiVo box
| (probably around 2002?). That killed it dead for me, by
| completely changing how I consumed TV (for the better).
| rconti wrote:
| I can't channel surf on YouTubeTV because of the UI.
|
| And I could never have been a Dish/DirectTV subscriber
| because the lag to change channels absolutely kills me.
| Cerium wrote:
| I stopped channel surfing the day we got a digital box. I
| used to be pretty fast on the remote with the keypad, and
| could cycle through a number of channels. I forgot how
| disappointing that digital box was.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the
| new station would immediately start playing. Same for tvs.
|
| There's a UX lesson here somewhere.
|
| Especially in cars I _vastly_ prefer mechanical controls for
| things like the stereo.
| HNSucksAss wrote:
| viraptor wrote:
| > punch a button and the new station would immediately start
| playing. Same for tvs.
|
| I think you're missing the part where the day to day changing
| conditions mean you have to switch the station then either
| accept the static or fine tune the station every couple of
| days. The switching was instant, but I still had to spend time
| tweaking it and count that as latency-to-ready.
|
| Especially in the cars, without the automatic fine tuning you
| needed to adjust the frequency depending on where you were at
| the time.
| oakwhiz wrote:
| It would be very cool to replace the stock radio with a
| software-defined radio receiver. I really doubt vehicle
| manufacturers would be interested in offering that, though.
| Johnythree wrote:
| SDR is not really the answer. To make a good radio requires
| high quality RF filtering, whether it be an SDR or a discrete
| design. The SDR part only replaces the IF stage and Detector.
| oakwhiz wrote:
| If you say so. I'm having a lot of fun with a bottom-dollar
| setup. There is no perceptible tuning delay and there's a
| lot of functionality in such a small space. The parent
| comment was referring to the lack of responsiveness as a
| result of the digital age, and a lot of the real-time
| thinking behind SDRs can be applied to take back control
| and be able to read different competing radio formats and
| receive on various bands. The problems with the data
| parsing are sometimes baked in to ICs and software, but the
| whole idea behind SDRs is to separate the act of receiving
| radio and decoding it so that there is less friction to
| changing how it works.
| yurishimo wrote:
| It's also expensive. The infotainment is the gateway to
| whatever you'd likely want to do and with the emergence of
| CarPlay and Android Auto, your "radio" is updating
| constantly.
|
| The actual circuit to make a radio work is also tiny. Some
| early smartphones included a radio tuner in the hardware.
| PickledHotdog wrote:
| Some still do. Recent model Motorolas still sport FM radio
| functionality
| Johnythree wrote:
| The problem however is the RF interference generated by the
| central processor and the display. Adding an AM or FM radio
| is easy. The hard part is adding the necessary shielding.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It can't be that expensive. The Pioneer Supertuner III came
| out in the 1980s and it is considered a state-of-the-art
| receiver even today. If they could put it in a < $500 head
| unit 35 years ago, it should cost a nickel today.
| p1necone wrote:
| > More generally it seems like when industries are growing,
| there is competition in this kind of area, but later on this
| dies off. I wonder if there's a structural reason for this?
|
| This is the natural end result of a totally free market.
|
| Step 1: Competion, therefore consumers are looked after
|
| Step 2: Some companies are "winning" the competition more than
| others, some of them buy the "losing" companies.
|
| Repeat until there's just one big player and they can charge
| whatever they want for whatever they can be bothered making
| available to people.
|
| You have to hope the FTC steps in and stops one company just
| buying all of its competition forever.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in
| TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline.
| Most of the time I don 't bother even scannig the airwaves when
| I get to a new town cause it's too annoying._
|
| I don't think that's much of a contributor. It's just really
| easy now to bring your own music (or podcast, or audiobook,
| or...) to the car with you via your phone, and I suspect people
| generally prefer to listen to their own curated music (or music
| a streaming service has curated for them) rather than putting
| up with radio ads, songs they don't like, etc. Just about the
| only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon
| new music, but you can do that with streaming services too. I
| guess some people like to listen to talk radio (NPR and the
| like), but most of that stuff is _also_ available online.
|
| I still have a fairly old car with an analog radio, and I
| haven't used it in at least 5 (but probably closer to 10)
| years.
|
| Ditto for TV: the on-demand experience via Netflix (etc.) is
| just so much better than watching regular network or cable TV.
| Why would I subject myself to having to be in front of the TV
| at a particular time on a particular day to watch what I want
| to watch? Honestly, it baffles me that the standard cable TV
| model still even exists. Obviously the Comcasts of the world
| still make enough money off of it to make it worthwhile to
| sell, but it just seems like an entirely poor experience no
| matter how you look at it.
| avisser wrote:
| > ... the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to
| stumble upon new music
|
| This benefit has gone down a lot since the late 90s. There's
| a nice wikipedia article on it.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_homogenization
|
| That said, I recommend listening to college radio wherever
| you are. I truly love the station from my hometown, WHRW
| broadcasting from Binghamton University. What a strange and
| beautiful melange.
| [deleted]
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not aware of any radio stations near me that
| feature J-pop and Metal. Before I had a phone playing
| Spotify, I was burning CDs.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| The mindless chatter of radio hosts is still enjoyable for
| me. After a long day of work, getting to listen to replays of
| which ever prank call they made in the morning while trying
| to merge through traffic is a nice way to unwind and begin
| the evening. Plus I appreciate their small attempts to get
| community together for events and do ridiculous giveaways.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Jeff Gilbert, of Brain Pain fame, is the only DJ I ever
| enjoyed listening to. He was always giving away tickets or
| albums via a contest. One of his contests was "what is your
| name?" The next week, he announced that was too easy, and
| he was going to amp it up with "spell your name". His fake
| commercials were great comedy.
|
| I tracked him down one time, and asked if his shows were
| recorded. He said nope. I had made a few recordings of his
| shows, and sadly the rest is surely lost to history.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I have one very good use for analog radio, which is the 50kW
| AM radio station that does traffic notices in my city every
| ten minutes. It's often more accurate and better described
| than looking at red lines on Google maps for traffic jams,
| and provides other unique local knowledge of construction,
| temporary detours, etc.
| sp332 wrote:
| I have to agree with epivosism about the TV experience.
| Waiting for the digital decoder to catch an I-frame slows
| down browsing immensely and it's just a lot less fun. Tivos
| are better, because they have multiple tuners and can scan
| the channels above/below the one you're on, which helps a
| lot. But it's still not as good as pushing the button on an
| analog tuner's remote and getting a new signal in < 1/15 of a
| second.
|
| Maybe your comparison of live vs streaming TV is skewed
| because it takes so long to start a new stream that it's hard
| to imagine browsing content directly, instead of trying to
| imagine the content from movie posters.
| astrange wrote:
| Streaming video doesn't need to use I-frames for sync,
| there's a technique called intra refresh they can use to
| limit the error. That also helps with the nasty "pumping"
| artifacts you get on static images.
|
| Some codecs do reorder frames for efficiency though (H.264
| can be 10 frames out of order but realistically only goes
| up to 3), which means you have to decode a few before
| displaying the start frame.
| paganel wrote:
| As a counter-point, I also have an older car with an analog
| radio and 100% prefer to listen to it while on the road than
| to listen "to my own music from the phone" (tangentially, I
| don't even have my own music on the phone, nor a Spotify-like
| subscription).
|
| I found out that listening to the radio gets you lots of
| excellent unknown-unknowns when it comes to music, especially
| if you listen to public radio (which, in my country, has
| almost no ads). For example, during my last trip I remember
| that tuning in to the arts-oriented public radio station got
| me the chance of listening to some great tango classical
| music which I would have never thought of purposefully listen
| to.
|
| I'm 100% with you when it comes to TV, the cable signal broke
| or something (some decoding stuff, can't tell) a couple of
| years ago and I didn't bother calling in the TV cable guys to
| look at it and fix it. It is quite excellent. We do have
| Netflix, which we spend some time on but not that much
| lately, plus I do have a TV-sports station subscription which
| I use for major events (like the Olympics right now). For
| sports I have to be careful though not to visit any sports
| website that day in order not to have the results revealed
| too early (I generally do not watch the events live).
| profmonocle wrote:
| I can't count the number of times I had to stop in the middle
| of an interesting NPR story because I'd arrived at my
| destination and didn't exactly have time to sit around in my
| car until it ended. I never looked back from podcasts once I
| got into them.
| djur wrote:
| Growing up in the 90s my experience was that you turned a knob
| until you heard what you wanted to hear, and as you traveled
| you occasionally had to jiggle the knob as the signal shifted.
| I don't remember any time where a delay was introduced for
| terrestrial radio.
| Arainach wrote:
| The degradation in responsiveness happened, but not for the
| reasons you state. In the 90s and 2000s, consolidation of media
| company hit a breaking point where one company owns the vast
| majority of stations in each metro area, they go on commercial
| at the same time, and you _can 't_ surf the way you used to.
| WalterBright wrote:
| When I first moved to Seattle 40 years ago, there was one
| company that advertised on the radio all the time, The Sxxxx
| Company (you Seattlites know who that is). Their ads all
| sounded exactly the same, and I grew to hate TSC. I switched to
| listening to KNHC which never ran ads because I hated TSC. I
| stopped listening to the radio entirely when I could play
| cassettes, and later USB sticks.
|
| Fast forward to today, and I recently bought a streaming radio
| component for my stereo. I programmed in the local station
| URLs, turned one on, and was aghast - TSC was still running the
| same goddamned ads, again and again and again. For 40 years.
|
| So much for streaming Seattle radio stations. Blech.
|
| P.S. You people from California know what I mean. Remember Cal
| Worthington? He drove me away from watching late night TV. I
| moved to Seattle to get away from Cal Worthington. Then he
| opened up a dealership in Seattle. Oh, misery. The DVR kept me
| out of the insane asylum.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Let's not forget Vern Fonk insurance.
| diggum wrote:
| I couldn't stand the Cal Worthington commercials, but I'll
| remember them fondly because a sweet, elderly neighbor with
| dementia misunderstood the repeated phrase at the end of the
| song, and would loudly sing along with some rather improper
| words that were VERY funny to a kid.
|
| In addition to our friends in the diamond business, we also
| had Jack Roberts Appliance who was less offensive than the
| others.
| WalterBright wrote:
| For some reason I never minded Jack Roberts. I can't
| explain it.
|
| But I dearly loved the old Ivar's commercials. That man
| knew how to advertise. I'd always go out of my way to eat
| at Ivar's just because. He was always "fresh" :-)
|
| Rainier Beer also knew how to do ads right. I always picked
| Rainier because of their amusing commercials.
| konspence wrote:
| "Now, you have a friend..."
| WalterBright wrote:
| NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO....
|
| If the KGB ever needed a false confession from me, they'd
| know just what to do. I'd fold like a cardboard box left in
| the rain.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Their ads all sounded exactly the same
|
| They aren't the same. Also some of the ads included his
| daughter too. He seems like a nice guy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The main "friend" phrase sounds exactly the same as 40
| years ago.
|
| I know he sounds like a nice guy. He probably is. But
| overdoing anything becomes torture after a while. I'll
| never buy anything from his company, and I won't listen to
| any radio stations that incessantly run his ads.
|
| The same thing happens when hit radio plays the same hit
| song 3 times an hour. It isn't long before one starts to
| hate the song. Decades later, I still hate those songs. I
| used to like the new "Rasputin" cover. Radio killed it dead
| for me.
|
| Can you imagine being one of those aging rock bands on
| tour, and all your fans want to hear are the songs you
| played 50 years ago? I'd slit my throat.
| astrange wrote:
| > When I first moved to Seattle 40 years ago, there was one
| company that advertised on the radio all the time, The Sxxxx
| Company (you Seattlites know who that is).
|
| That's the trick. Everyone in the country knows them, but
| thinks they're local because the ads are so boring. It's a
| chain!
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV
| and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most
| of the time I don 't bother even scannig the airwaves when I
| get to a new town cause it's too annoying._
|
| While I usually don't bother scanning for new stations when I
| go to a new town, that's because I'm listening to music (or
| podcasts) with my phone. I don't even listen to broadcast radio
| in my home town.
|
| About the only time I listen to broadcast radio is in a rental
| car and that's only because I don't bother pairing my phone
| with the car unless I'm going to be in it for a few days (and I
| always unpair and/or reset the pairing settings when I return
| it).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Radios used to be mechanical devices - punch a button and the
| new station would immediately start playing.
|
| Frustratingly, my Toyota Corolla will start _up_ the radio
| immediately, but the on /off/volume control doesn't work for
| several seconds. If someone in my family left the radio
| blasting, I'm left mashing the button repeatedly until it kicks
| in. Ugh.
| cr3ative wrote:
| That's a pain. My VW stereo is similar, but it has a "Maximum
| start-up volume" setting which gets around this.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| It blows my mind how annoying it is to watch TV nowadays
| meetups323 wrote:
| The "free ad-supported television" offerings are actually
| pretty decent. It's a first-party software profit-center, so
| the teams making them have every incentive and capability to
| give them a halfway decent UX. Then on the flip side no-one
| actually advertises on them, so instead of ad breaks you get
| 2 minutes of relaxing music and nature montages every 15-ish
| minutes. Honestly preferable to Netflix's "go-go-go,
| don't-miss a beat, quick -- next episode is starting!" style.
|
| (My experience is with Vizio's WatchFree+, but the shows are
| syndicated so I don't think there's much difference from one
| offering to the next)
| macintux wrote:
| After the digital TV transition in the U.S. I didn't use my
| set for a few years since I didn't have a converter and
| didn't care enough to do anything about it.
|
| One night we were hit with some severe storms and I decided
| it was worth it to have an antenna and converter for
| emergencies. Did some research, purchased a box from a friend
| and a decent antenna, hooked everything up, turned it on, and
| 5 minutes later tore it all down again.
|
| I'd gone too long without it and lost all tolerance for
| commercials.
| cachvico wrote:
| When you got to a new town, I seem to recall pulling a booklet
| out of the glove compartment, finding the right page, finding
| the right frequency for the station you're after, and tuning
| manually to that frequency.
|
| "Punch a button" was only an option once you'd already saved
| that preset - no difference to the later digital version.
| endgame wrote:
| Mid-late 90s radios could scan along the spectrum and stop
| when they found something.
| walrus01 wrote:
| This is how my 2007 Japanese car functions and it works
| just fine. No extra unnecessary features added.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Off by many years. Ford was shipping "electronic" and
| "premium" radio head units in the 1970s that had electronic
| tuners with scan and seek functions.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Even some 70's era stereos had that capability -- my
| grandparents had a mid 1970's Cadillac with an analog
| tuner, but it also had a button you could press and you
| could watch the tuning needle scan until it found a a
| station.
|
| I was looking for a link to one, and it turns out that even
| some 1950's radios had a "wonderbar" signal seeker:
|
| https://classiccarradiorestoration.com/wonderbar/
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The way you make money on the way down is different than the
| way up. Radio was a sleepy backwater medium that was mostly
| advertising for record companies. When deregulation happened,
| it became a hot, disruptive market where talk and new music
| genres grew and grew.
|
| The train slowed down in the late 90s and consolidation of
| syndication and station ownership picked up. Now a few
| companies own everything and they'll pump every dollar until
| the spectrum is turned over to cellular.
| suifbwish wrote:
| I stopped listening to the radio when I realized I was spending
| half the time listening to commercials. (99% Commercials are
| complete mind rot or appeals to emotion btw; if any advertising
| moguls read this, no one wants to listen to bad jokes and
| jingles. Just tell me about the product and I might buy it)
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is due to adverts being made for
| the Company Execs - not for you.
|
| The Company Execs already know the product and don't need to
| be told about it. But a jingle and a joke might close the
| advert sale.
| [deleted]
| brewdad wrote:
| The worst are the radio ad with car horns. I'd say they
| should be illegal but my local police dept is now running
| anti-DUI ads on the radio complete with 'police are pulling
| you over' siren blips. So that ship has sailed.
| Operyl wrote:
| I absolutely hate when I get an ad with a siren or car
| honk, just makes my anxiety shoot way up. It's one of the
| biggest reasons I've stopped listening to the radio from
| time to time. Even if I'm not driving... :/
| hed wrote:
| There was a great period in the mid-late '90s where TVs just
| worked when you connected to cable or antenna, no set top box,
| tuning was near instantaneous and there was enough enrichment
| that even station ID and program info could come in with the
| broadcast.
|
| Pity it was a complicated modulation and waste of spectrum.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I've got a brand new Kia. The FM radio comes on so fast, it's
| surprising. Every car I've ever had always has had some sort of
| warm up time or a splash screen on the infotainment system
| while it's booting up. This Kia has none of that. Audio is
| immediately present and tuning to other stations is immediate
| as well. It's almost a little unnerving how quickly audio comes
| out since we've always been used to slower FM radios, CD
| players, satellite radio, and music streaming apps that just
| take short moment to go to the next station or song.
|
| Also, one thing to remember is that FM radios have been
| "digital" for quite some time. I'm not talking about HD radio
| or DAB receivers. FM demodulation chips have existed for a long
| time (TDA7000 came out in 1983). They handle tuning,
| demodulation, and amplification all-in-one. The only slow part
| would be whatever microcontroller has to manage the interface
| in the receiver. You can even get FM transceiver chips dirt
| cheap like the one that is in the infamous Baofeng ham radio.
| It's got one chip doing all of the radio work.
| myself248 wrote:
| My Toyota does the worst of both worlds -- the audio portion
| comes up immediately, with whatever volume setting it had
| when it was shut off.
|
| The volume knob doesn't respond until about 8 seconds later.
|
| I'm sure you can imagine situations (like in a driveway such
| as mine, where the neighbor's bedroom window directly
| overlooks it) where what was appropriate at 3pm when I got
| home, is not appropriate at 3am next time I start the car...
| martyvis wrote:
| Sounds like the same system as in my Subaru. I don't even
| know how you can design a system to emit audio and and not
| be volume controllable for like millions of CPU cycles. And
| you'd think with like about two dozen buttons on the
| steering wheel, one of them would allow you to mute control
| the phone mic when your are on a conference call.
| can16358p wrote:
| It's amazing how designers of these vehicles can't think of
| these simple things.
|
| Being able to lower the volume should be immediate, and it
| should be obvious in their testings...
|
| If they ever tested infotainment systems of course.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| A lot of this makes sense when you realize that modern
| cars are designed by engineers who take a bus to work.
| can16358p wrote:
| That makes sense. Though wish it wasn't the case.
| [deleted]
| Arrath wrote:
| This is even worse on my Dodge. Like yours, the audio comes
| in immediately, and the volume knob may or may not work for
| a time. The bluetooth takes absolutely forever to connect
| so it defaults to another input, typically FM radio. The
| bluetooth input also has no volume boost setting so I have
| the volume turned up quite a bit, thus the radio is loud as
| hell.
|
| All in all, this means that I regret it if I forget to turn
| the volume down when I get out of the car.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > I've got a brand new Kia. The FM radio comes on so fast,
| it's surprising. Every car I've ever had always has had some
| sort of warm up time or a splash screen on the infotainment
| system while it's booting up
|
| They simply never power of the Head Units, even if they go
| dark. And I am not talking of the constant power feature head
| units head since forever but the CPU actually doing stuff.
| Most of the time the satellite data is held fresh to give you
| an immediate position fix if requested.
|
| If you completely detach it from power you would notice that
| there is a startup time.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Doesn't that run the battery down?
| op00to wrote:
| It does. I have a Subaru with a head unit that stays
| powered on, and it has ran itself down more frequently
| than any other car I've had. The explanation I got from
| the dealer was that the residual drain on the battery is
| much higher, so there's less capacity to start the car. I
| keep a lithium ion jump starter charged and in the car,
| and I've had to use it a few times. If you can keep each
| and every OTHER draw on the battery down, it's fine.
|
| The biggest thing that helped was realizing that the
| battery dies when the key fob was hung up with our other
| keys. Coincidentally, this was exactly the right distance
| for the car to constantly wake and sleep itself as it
| thought the key fob was entering and leaving its
| vicinity. Between adequate key fob faraday cages, making
| sure the interior lights are in the automatic or off
| position, and making sure all the doors are closed we
| haven't had a dead battery in a while.
|
| What a pain in the ass.
| xattt wrote:
| Manufacturers must be able to do this because of higher
| capacity glass-mat batteries and low power CPUs.
| consp wrote:
| Does your by any chance have remote onlocking or nearby
| unlocking features (or are the radio modules installed by
| default)? Some cars start the boot sequence well before you
| enter the key/car for the infotainment systems.
| thakoppno wrote:
| The Baofengs have two FM chips according to this teardown.
| [0]
|
| AT1846S Single-Chip Transceiver
|
| RDA 5802N Single-Chip Broadcast FM Radio Tuner
|
| [0](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/teardown-tuesday-
| baofe...)
|
| You're totally correct. I just wanted to clarify the various
| ways that radio can decode FM digitally. Please correct me if
| I'm mistaken. I'm still real new to this world.
| kens wrote:
| Maybe you're thinking of a different chip for digital FM? The
| TDA7000 chip is completely analog, with R-C filters,
| oscillators, mixers, a variable capacitor and varactor diodes
| for tuning, and so forth.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I thought by purchasing a car that I owned it but boy was I
| wrong. It will hopefully be the last time I spend more than 40k
| just to rent something from the manufacturer.
| js2 wrote:
| I have a 2016 CX-9. It's been years since I looked into this, but
| the Mazda infotainment system is running Linux. You used to be
| able to login to it over the USB port, but they locked that down
| at some point with a firmware upgrade so that you could only get
| to it over a serial connection that you could get to if you were
| comfortable removing the console.
|
| The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is JavaScript
| based.
|
| Ah, here you go:
|
| https://mazdatweaks.com/
|
| (I retrofitted CarPlay support to mine via an upgrade Mazda
| offered a couple years after I got the car and I think that
| closed off access to tweaking, but I forget. I'm generally happy
| with the UI but I wish it booted faster. It's a good 1-2 minutes
| after starting the car before it's responsive.)
| sircastor wrote:
| I got to meet with some guys who worked on that system at my
| last job. At the time, they were called OpenCar, and the system
| was recognizable as what ended up in the Mazda. I do recall
| that in spite of the name, nothing they were doing was open
| source.
| heywire wrote:
| If you have a navigation SD card inserted (that you likely
| don't use due to the CarPlay), try removing it. It sped up my
| boot times significantly. I also have a usb full of music that
| I plug in sometimes, and I notice it is slower to boot with
| that inserted as well.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| I also drive a 2016 Mazda, and I can confirm that I had the
| same problem with the same fix
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| Sounds like fsck running at boot time
| cestith wrote:
| Could be fsck or could be searching the whole drive for
| media files to index it every time it's inserted or the
| system rebooted. I guess a reasonable test of which without
| better access to the thing would be to have two drives of
| the same size with one mostly full and one mostly empty.
|
| I drive a 2016 CX-5 with the stock in-dash software. If I'm
| bored enough at some point I might test the hypothesis on
| that.
| decafninja wrote:
| IIRC Tesla's touchscreen UI is running React Native?
| coder543 wrote:
| Tesla uses Qt.
|
| Ford is using an HTML-based interface in the Mach-E (and
| vehicles which get infotainment systems derived from that new
| generation of infotainment system). I've seen rumors that
| Ford is using React to power that interface, but I wasn't
| able to pin down any real sources.
|
| This explains to some degree how Tesla is able to have such a
| buttery smooth UI on such terrible Intel Atom hardware (until
| recently.. they're switching to much better hardware now). At
| the same time, the Mach-E interface is not very smooth at
| all, but it is functionally pretty good. I think Ford should
| have a leg up on rapidly improving their infotainment
| interface, given that I would expect React to make some
| things easier than Qt... but Ford has so far failed to
| demonstrate that they can effectively distribute OTA updates,
| regardless of early promises. Hopefully they get that figured
| out soon.
| crooked-v wrote:
| "Buttery smooth" with complicated React UIs is entirely
| possible if you design it right. Unfortunately too many
| people just assume that whatever they throw at it will be
| fine.
| coder543 wrote:
| Yes, but... it is difficult to do that on underpowered
| hardware. Modern browser engines seem to take a lot of
| resources to do anything at all, which gives you even
| less headroom before you write a single line of code. I
| don't think the Mach-E is equipped with a very powerful
| chip for the infotainment system. Since I can't find any
| reference to what it is, I would assume it's nothing to
| be proud of -- some kind of really old ARM chip, maybe.
|
| If they equipped the Mach-E with a reasonably powerful
| SoC for the infotainment system, then I would agree 100%
| that a React-based UI could be implemented in such a way
| that it operates smoothly.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I've written fairly complicated React SPA UIs (certainly
| much more complicated than anything I've seen a car
| infotainment system other than, say, map rendering
| specifically) than run fine on relatively ancient phones
| and Chromebooks, so I think you're excusing just plain
| bad design a little too much here. I have to think they'd
| have the same issues regardless of platform, or if not
| only from using something that takes away control of the
| kind of things that can cause lag issues in React.
| sdoering wrote:
| I did the same. Wouldn't want to miss it on my 2018 model.
|
| Edit: By the way. Thanks for reminding me. I looked at the site
| and they now have support for wireless Android Auto. So I might
| just be able to ditch the somewhat unreliable connection with
| the cable.
| neogodless wrote:
| My 3 is a 2015. Got it used in 2017 and after a few months, I
| loaded Android Auto on it using Mazda AIO Tweaks.
|
| Notably, the UI was sluggish and unstable before (and after) I
| installed Android Auto.
|
| With Android Auto installed, I got a good two and a half years
| out of moderately reliable use, but just as the pandemic
| started in March 2020, Android Auto got remarkably unstable. It
| might run OK for a few songs if I only did one thing, i.e.
| Pandora OR Google Maps, but doing both almost always caused a
| freeze within seconds, required the three button salute to
| reboot the system.
|
| I thought it might be due to the phone (Pixel 3), but I tried a
| different phone since with the same result (OnePlus 7 Pro). I
| suspect something changed on the Android side, but Android 9
| was six months earlier and Android 10 was six months later. The
| updated Android Auto design had been out for several months
| (summer 2019) before I started having issues. Since I haven't
| driven much since the pandemic started, I still haven't tried
| to fix it. (I suspect maybe an updated install from Mazda AIO
| Tweaks might help.)
| koz1000 wrote:
| _The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is
| JavaScript based_
|
| The IVI from that era is an iMX6 hardware platform developed by
| Johnson Controls and was written in JavaScript running on the
| Opera browser.
|
| JCI sold that business to Visteon in 2014.
| zucked wrote:
| Sounds like an excellent time to do a pledge drive with NO
| ESCAPE.
| dihydro wrote:
| 99% Invisible found out that Mazda has a bug in their radio that
| cannot parse special characters. See their article here:
| https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I have a Mazda, and it also parses ogg metadata strangely; if
| you have multiple fields starting with "ARTIST" then it will
| fill the artist field with all of them, but without erasing the
| buffer first.
|
| When I first loaded my music collection, it stuck in a reboot
| loop, so I have a script that sanitizes the metadata for
| exporting to my car
| oasisbob wrote:
| Wow. Not many automakers can claim to have an infotainment
| system notorious enough to get coverage on local public radio
| _and_ a design-oriented podcast.
|
| Weird intersection.
| cipheredStones wrote:
| Maddeningly, that episode never arrives at the actual bug. Via
| a thread the Mazda owner posted on Reddit, I found this great
| writeup: https://github.com/Hamled/mazda-format-string-
| bug#readme
|
| TLDR: The problem is the `% In`, and specifically the `%n` -
| when printf sees that, it tries to store data in memory.
| Failing to do so, it crashes.
| mckirk wrote:
| Oh god. Format string bugs in infotainment systems that can
| be triggered by careless radio stations. What could possibly
| go wrong.
| unwind wrote:
| This is so weird.
|
| I read [1] which someone linked to, and it all seems to make
| sense. But it doeesn't!
|
| I tried compiling this with gcc 11.2.0:
| #include <stdio.h> int main(void) {
| printf("%99 Invisible", NULL); return 0; }
|
| And it won't compile. I get: test.c: In
| function 'main': test.c:5:14: warning: unknown
| conversion type character ' ' in format [- Wformat=]
| 5 | printf("%99 Invisible", NULL); |
| ^ test.c:5:10: warning: too many arguments for format
| [-Wformat-extra-args] 5 | printf("%99
| Invisible", NULL); | ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
|
| which I would expect; you can't have a field width (the "99")
| and _then_ the space-padding flag; flags go first. Also I can
| 't find any coverage of %I (capital 'I', as in "Invisible")
| in the manual page for printf(3) on that system but that
| might just be an old manual page, GCC does seem to recognize
| it.
|
| Removing the cruft and trying plain %In gives a warning, but
| I guess whoever built the car's radio UI ignores warnings.
|
| I guess it's possible that the system doesn't use a standard-
| compliant enough C library, so it's printf() implementation
| does something ... creative with this string.
|
| Anyway, classic case of the lovely foot-gunnery that is %n in
| the wild! Sorry for all the car owners, of course. :/
|
| EDIT: A commenter pointed out that the above are "just
| warnings", oops. :) More oops on me for not spelling the
| freaking title correctly, of course it's "99%" and not "%99"
| .. .need more coffee, clearly. Sorry.
|
| For people less used to C, the error here more or less seems
| to boil down to passing an untrusted string as the special
| "format string" for the printf() function. That function will
| _interpret_ the contents of the string, and the percent
| symbol is how its special formatting directives start.
| Characters following a percent symbol will cause it to do
| stuff. The proper fix is usally to change
| printf(string);
|
| to printf("%s", string);
|
| or use some other I/O function altogether. The above simply
| says "here's a string", by using the programmer-selected
| string "%s" as the format, instead of the untrusted string
| coming from the outside.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Hamled/mazda-format-string-bug#readme
| Goz3rr wrote:
| You should also keep in mind that the string is essentially
| user input at runtime for the radio, so the compiler can't
| throw warnings or errors for it even if it wanted to.
| nickelpro wrote:
| The name of the podcast is "99% Invisible", not "%99
| Invisible".
|
| "99% Invisible" produces the expected result:
| https://godbolt.org/z/Mc9zPKWdq
| Vogtinator wrote:
| > And it won't compile.
|
| Just are just warnings, it builds fine despite them.
| [deleted]
| CSSer wrote:
| Mazda's response at the time was pretty disheartening too. Pay
| us for a firmware update and it'll probably fix it. The owner
| said 'no thanks' because it was too expensive (and honestly
| ridiculous in principle in my opinion). Now Roman Mars, the
| owner of 99% Invisible, releases a separate version of every
| episode with "Mazda safe titles"
| dehrmann wrote:
| > the owner of 99% Invisible
|
| Nit: he sold it.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22403852/siriusxm-
| roman-m...
| CSSer wrote:
| Ah, I see, so host and producer but not owner. Good to
| know!
| pronlover723 wrote:
| Seems like he should do the opposite, Only release versions
| with Mazda unsafe titles with a note "Doesn't work on Mazda.
| Contact their customer support here to complain"
| bink wrote:
| Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
| Talanes wrote:
| It was the % in the show title that fouled up the Mazdas,
| so they were already doing that before the fix.
|
| Even then it was a nearly invisible problem for the podcast
| itself, not something that would have been significant
| enough to investigate and correct for if that wasn't also
| content for the show.
| scim-knox-twox wrote:
| > a nearly invisible problem
|
| 99% invisible
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The % sign broke mazda's infotainment system? That's
| really bad, I mean the % is even in the basic ascii
| character set. Unless they try to interpret titles as JS
| or HTML or something. That too would be bad.
| exikyut wrote:
| Oooooh.
|
| HackRF + open source DAB modulation stack + <carefully
| chosen combination of ASCII characters> = OTA... DoS?
| Jailbreak? Other miscellaneous interestingness?
|
| In an age where everything's a computer, FM radio is just
| just another source of unsanitised input.
| fredoralive wrote:
| The % bug is a separate bug to do with a Podcasts's
| title, I suspect you just need a phone and an MP3 file
| with a suitably prepared title tag.
|
| The original articles issue is a HD Radio (not DAB) issue
| to do with images, although it might still be a string
| parse issue of some kind as it apparently involves "image
| files with no extension", so presumably filenames? So the
| RF side can indeed be _fun_ on consumer electronics with
| modern digital standards. Another example is this claimed
| RCE over DVB-T: https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1
| 481963959532011520
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Even more sadly, HD Radio is a closed, propretiary
| format.
|
| Unlike DAB or DAB+ which are open standards with FOSS
| implementations out there.
| jaywalk wrote:
| HD Radio is closed and proprietary, but there is at least
| one FOSS receiver out there: https://github.com/theori-
| io/nrsc5
|
| The protocol itself is actually standardized:
| https://www.nrscstandards.org/standards-and-
| guidelines/docum...
|
| It's just the audio codec that's proprietary, but it's
| basically just a slightly modified version of AAC so it's
| been decoded.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| My understanding was that the implementation was
| protected by patents. And can one call something a
| standard if the codec is not documented and needs to be
| reverse engineered?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Like I said, it's the protocol that is standardized. HD
| Radio as a whole is not, because of the codec. I think
| it's absolute BS that the FCC went down the path of a
| proprietary format, but it's the way things are. And the
| fact is, we do have at least one FOSS implementation.
| Since it's not DRM, I believe (but IANAL) that it's
| perfectly legal to reverse-engineer it.
|
| I doubt Xperi really cares, since HD Radio is a trademark
| so it's not like you could build, sell and market an "HD
| Radio" device without licensing from them anyway.
| fredoralive wrote:
| % is used in C style format strings, which are famously a
| source of footguns.
| CSSer wrote:
| Although I don't disagree with your thought here and that
| was actually the podcast host's/other contributor's
| original hunch too, this wasn't actually an issue with
| interpolation. I know it sounds bizarre, but the
| paraphrasing of the podcast hosts and comments from the
| infotainment system code author suggest that he was
| treating all strings as percent encoded[0] without any
| checks or guards in place. Since "% I" isn't a valid
| character reference, it chokes on it.
|
| [0]:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.1
| im3w1l wrote:
| Primer on how to exploit it
| https://medium.com/swlh/binary-exploitation-format-
| string-vu...
| terom wrote:
| That sounds like you would be able to exploit the bug...
| does it happen to use a libc that implements %n?
|
| If so, just include a payload in the title that fixes the
| bug by patching the code :)
| BoorishBears wrote:
| You don't need to exploit it, at least you didn't
| before...
|
| They used to autorun specifically named files on a USB
| stick.
|
| Then some busybody journalists picked up on that and
| Mazda was forced to lock it down despite the fact that
| there is complete physical separation from safety
| systems, and that situations like this article are
| exactly where it helps.
| CSSer wrote:
| You're sort of on the right track if you're familiar with
| URL/percent encoding, actually. I have no idea why, but
| paraphrased comments by the podcast hosts from the code
| author (they contacted him) suggest that he was
| attempting to decode all incoming strings as if they were
| percent encoded[0] without any failsafes in place. Since
| "% I" isn't a valid character reference (or even
| hexadecimal), it chokes on it.
|
| [0]:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.1
| jdmichal wrote:
| Given other people saying there's Javascript and Opera
| involved, my guess is that the % is ending up unescaped
| in a URL.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's right. When a podcaster forces their stuff to not
| work on my car, I spend my time contacting the car company
| to get collective action through for change. I don't hit
| the next button and listen to something else. This is how I
| and most other humans function.
| gspr wrote:
| He wasn't forcing it. He was just accurately using the
| title of his damn podcast. The suggestion is that he stop
| issuing a special Mazda-safe version.
|
| I agree, this is a problem for the makers of the broken
| radio. But Roman Mars is just a nice guy.
| scim-knox-twox wrote:
| Probably.
|
| I started to unsubscribe every podcast with annoying ads
| or hosted at megaphone.fm, but I'm in minority.
| hughrr wrote:
| My Citroen does that. If you connect to it with BT and play
| anything with Cyrillic characters in the title from Apple Music
| it trashes the display trying to render it.
| rwmj wrote:
| My Toyota - a Japanese car - cannot display song titles in
| Japanese. I kind of assume this is a localisation issue
| rather than something that would happen in Japan though,
| although the car entertainment is terrible in many other ways
| too so who knows.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| My Garmin watch is like that. If you want Japanese language
| support you have to buy the japanese model which is
| obiviously only for sale in Japan. So dumb that I can't
| just flash the japanese firmware on. Instead I have support
| for Russian which I have no need for.
| yftsui wrote:
| Most likely because the embedded system does not use UTF-8,
| just like the phones before iPhone, a Nokia phone sold in
| US sometimes cannot even be flashed to display CJK
| characters due to CJK support require more ROM space.
| xwz7611 wrote:
| My Mazda3 2019 now shows an mpg at about 15, yet with a full tank
| of gas I can still drive about 300 miles.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I recently went car shopping and the only aspect of the software
| I was interested in was how hard it was to activate Apple
| CarPlay. My assumption is that Apple/Google will have infinitely
| higher software quality standards than any car manufacturer, so
| I'll outsource to them as early as possible.
| delusional wrote:
| Seeing the quality of android auto, I'm not sure you're right.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Fair enough, I've only used Apple CarPlay and assumed Android
| Auto was comparable.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This headline is just the best.
| AdamN wrote:
| KUOW ftw!
| thebeardisred wrote:
| My initial bet would be that something is causing a kernel panic
| in the control plane side of the radio. This is then leading to
| the UI not being able to pass any messages before the system
| locks up. Watchdog timer expires and resets everything.
|
| This is based on the line "...causing radios to reboot when they
| connect to KUOW's 94.9 FM signal."
| rconti wrote:
| Love the self-deprecating humor:
|
| "So who, or what, is responsible for trapping these Mazda owners
| in a public radio echo chamber they can't escape, even by car?"
| novaurora wrote:
| Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oR79ja1u-o
| danrocks wrote:
| Mazda MX-5 Miata. Best card I've ever had.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Some further info: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/youre-listening-
| to-kuow-like-i...
| coleca wrote:
| As someone who just traded in their 2019 Mazda CX-5, this doesn't
| surprise me at all. I couldn't wait for my lease to end. The car
| was great, but the infotainment system was horrible. It would
| take 5+ minutes to boot up from a cold start during which time
| you couldn't change the volume, mute the radio, change inputs, or
| even change the station. I learned quickly to always change the
| station off Howard Stern when exiting the car in case my daughter
| was a passenger on the next trip. On long trips you would have to
| three finger reset the head-unit because it would just stop
| responding, play at full volume, only play out of one channel
| after a GPS announcement, and other random oddities. I brought it
| back to the dealer multiple times to get firmware updates only to
| be told "Yeah that's how it was designed".
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Yet another of the disadvantages of switching from analog to
| digital ;->
| whalesalad wrote:
| Not that big a deal, just need to find the UART port and get out
| your old reliable RS232 cable, reverse engineer the device, then
| you should be able to change the radio station.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| You can probably just use Forscan to program the change
| already.
| consp wrote:
| Does it now support non ford based models as these are of
| Mazda's own design and at least the infotainment is not
| comparable to ford sync which runs qnx (or Windows CE
| embedded for older versions). The relationship ended in 2015
| afaik.
| aksss wrote:
| You laugh but tapping into the UART on the Mazda CMU is totally
| a thing. https://mazdatweaks.com/serial/
|
| I think people have even managed to side load electron apps on
| it.
|
| Mazda's CMU may be the closest thing to DD-WRT in a car that
| you can get, but confess I'm not too familiar with what else
| might compete for that title.
| grej wrote:
| I would have loved to hear the Car Talk guys chat about this one.
| Rest in Peace Tom Magliozzi.
| CHB0403085482 wrote:
| noughtme wrote:
| They can't XD. Someone in public radio zero dayed the Mazda
| infotainment by sending an image in the RDS feed.
| [deleted]
| cbsks wrote:
| Source? That sounds like a really cool hack if it's true
| noughtme wrote:
| see above
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30268294
|
| (HD Radio, not RDS)
| myself248 wrote:
| I don't think RDS/RBDS can do images, can it? I'm pretty sure
| that's an HD Radio/NRSC-5 function.
| tedivm wrote:
| It's not even that they sent an image, it's that they didn't
| put an extension on the filename of the image.
| [deleted]
| SilasX wrote:
| Funny you suggest that -- I ran into a similar frustration with
| a Ford running Microsoft SYNC (voice command system) in 2008.
| If you hit the phone button while a phone was not set up via
| bluetooth, that would disable the rest of the sound system
| (i.e. anything other than telling you it can't find a phone).
| No matter which button you pushed, it couldn't switch away from
| the phone.
|
| Only by stopping and restarting the engine could you get out.
| [1]
|
| But these Mazdas can't even get out that way!
|
| [1] See item 8:
| http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2008/07/setting-sync-strai...
| sodality2 wrote:
| > "At this point I think it's almost a safety issue. I don't
| have my backup camera or my navigation system. It's just
| weird."
|
| This seems like a pretty serious issue. Not just the radio.
|
| https://www.geekwire.com/2022/youre-listening-to-kuow-like-i...
| jthrowsitaway wrote:
| These are conveniences. Yes, backup cameras have been
| mandated for ~7 years now in the US. One can surely still
| drive safely without looking at a screen.
| YLE118 wrote:
| The flashing at full brightness, then dimming, then
| brightening again before rebooting isn't exactly fun at
| night.
| peeters wrote:
| A backup camera is more than a convenience. It gives you
| visibility that you simply cannot get without it. Unless
| the rear half of your car is transparent, every time you
| back up you do so with a blind spot directly where you're
| driving. There's a reason these cameras are mandatory on
| new builds.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Yes, but _less_ safely. Hence the mandate.
| macintux wrote:
| Modern vehicles have _very_ high belt lines for crash
| safety, but that also makes for even larger blind spots.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Definitely a safety issue IMHO. It's common on the road to
| see signs that say "accident ahead, tune to XXX AM" or
| similar emergency warnings. If you can't tune in to be warned
| of danger ahead it's a bit of a problem.
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| Talk about a captive audience....
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| If your car radio ends up stuck on an FM station you could do a
| lot worse than having it get stuck on KUOW.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> A few weeks ago cellphone companies -- and KUOW -- switched to
| a 5G signal. But many cars are still only equipped with 3G and
| glitch when faced with the newer 5G_
|
| Sorry but what? FM radio station switched to 5G phone standard?
| And supposedly the 3G receiver in the car is affected? _shakes
| head_
| nonfamous wrote:
| It's not what happened in this situation, but it's not hard to
| imagine one that might. Perhaps the receiver software requires
| a regular data update via the 3G network, and when 3G shuts
| down the receiver doesn't work anymore?
| minusSeven wrote:
| So could this be because of 5G because if I remember right the
| latest 5G roll out caused a lot of problems for airlines?
| pigbearpig wrote:
| Well, maybe they can try to listen to the 99% Invisible podcast
| in the meantime. Oh wait,
| https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-....
|
| 2016 was apparently a good year for Mazda infotainment systems.
| GrifMD wrote:
| For those curious, I skimmed the transcript and basically a "%"
| followed by a "I" in an audio file name cause a weird shutdown
| behavior on the infotainment system.
| CSSer wrote:
| It's just bad code and even worse error handling. The program
| runs a heartbeat that lets the rest of the car know all is
| well when things are running smoothly. When the program
| hangs, the heartbeat stops. When the heartbeat is interrupted
| for long enough, it's programmed to reboot. With that in
| mind, when the owner queues up the podcast the system
| attempts to decode an unsanitized string (the podcast title)
| as if it were percent/URL encoded. When it encounters an
| error because "% I" is not a valid character reference, it
| hangs.
|
| The worst part is that the car owner was told that a firmware
| update would "likely" fix it but they would have to pay for
| it.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| This seems like grounds for a class action lawsuit. Owners
| have been harmed by loss of car function and they are
| reasonably numerous.
| jmgao wrote:
| No, it's a format string vulnerability.
| CSSer wrote:
| Go read this section of the transcript[0]
|
| [0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-
| mars-mazda-....
| david_allison wrote:
| https://github.com/Hamled/mazda-format-string-bug#readme
| derbOac wrote:
| I have a different model car and I've been noticing a similar
| thing since getting a new phone, where sometimes it will just
| freeze and reboot when bluetooth is being used, and I can't
| quite figure out why. I thought it was random but am now
| wondering if there's a pattern I haven't noticed yet.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Now someone like Taylor Swift just needs to title a song with
| a whole bunch of known exploits to infotainment systems and
| we're all set.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Wait, people are using the cell network for car radio now?
| ale42 wrote:
| The page reads "A few weeks ago cellphone companies -- and KUOW
| -- switched to a 5G signal." What's the link between 5G and an FM
| radio station, anyone has an idea?
| jweather wrote:
| Per the geekwire article linked above, one of the local Mazda
| dealerships blamed 5G for causing the issue. Apparently that's
| the popular thing to do these days.
|
| Tangentially related, an old ham radio operator related his
| advice for putting up an antenna on your house: "Put the
| antenna up, but don't connect it to anything for a few weeks.
| Don't even run the cable yet. When people complain about it
| making their fillings vibrate or garage door open or whatever,
| you can show them that it isn't even connected to anything.
| This helps filter out the people who have nothing better to do
| than to complain."
| wickedsickeune wrote:
| None they are extremely different frequencies, plus FM radio is
| not even digital.
| srj wrote:
| In this case it's an HD radio broadcast, which is digital.
| trelane wrote:
| It's digital, but still in the broadcasters FM allocation.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio
|
| It has nothing to do with 5G, which is a cell technology.
| 5G has low (600-900MHz) medium (microwave) and high ("mm
| wave"), and is far away from broadcast FM frequencies (USA
| is 88-108MHz)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G
|
| https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/fm-frequencies-end-odd-
| decim...
| srj wrote:
| My wild guess would be that there's something in the HD
| broadcast causing the issue. Something as simple as a
| metadata field being too long could trigger a bug in the
| headunit firmware. The HD broadcast spec seems non
| trivial and largely closed off so it wouldn't surprise me
| that there'd be buggy implementations.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Growing up in mid 90s Seattle the debate was always between KUBE
| 93.3 for hip-hop or 107.7 "The End" for alternative (KNDD). This
| debate destroyed friendships. Getting stuck on KUOW would be a
| kafka-esque purgatory.
| tomcam wrote:
| I was bi. I listened to both. And KUOW
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| What about KEXP? I love listening to that station though I'm
| sadly not in Seattle.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I dunno. NPR has good variety and a little something for
| everybody.
|
| Just make sure to adjust your schedule so you're on the road at
| the appropriate half hour time slots for your tastes and I'd
| say "bug closed"!
| kortilla wrote:
| > NPR has good variety and a little something for everybody.
|
| NPR listener demographics disagree. http://mediad.publicbroad
| casting.net/p/wnmu/files/MasterMedi...
| grayfaced wrote:
| Can you explain your objection? It looks like a sample area
| that the population has very little diversity and the
| station has more diversity then the population.
| [deleted]
| bagacrap wrote:
| I don't get how you're reading that there's little
| diversity.
|
| What I get from the bar graph is that not listeners skew
| male, educated, old, affluent, etc relative to the
| population. But I'm not sure how this even relates to the
| original question of whether there's something for
| everyone... even if there were no skew, what matters is
| what percent of the population listens. If it's less than
| 100%, there must not be something for everyone. Or if you
| look at it from another perspective, no demo is
| completely missing from the listener base therefore
| there's something for every demographic.
| micro_cam wrote:
| Can't forget KCMU 90.3 (which latter became KEXP)
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| KEXP Kevin Suggs is a demi-god of sound engineering.
| jeramey wrote:
| But us pop kids still stuck to 101.5, annoying everyone with
| our bad taste.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I was one of the weirdos that listened to 89.5, a station ran
| by a high school.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Run by Nathan Hale I remember it well. My buddies and I at
| Lakeside were inspired by this to try to get our school to
| run its own station, when that got denied we looked at
| options for building a pirate radio station but ultimately
| decided against it. We ended up building a recording studio
| at Lakeside instead.
| darknavi wrote:
| Dude, C89.5 was the shit. No shame in that.
|
| What a cool program if you think about it. I wish more
| highschool was tangible skills like that.
| RyJones wrote:
| I still listen to it!
|
| Also KBRD 680, when I can. A radio station playing public
| domain music picked by a parrot? sign me up
| clemailacct1 wrote:
| Remember the T-Man show in the morning on KUBE93?
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Oh man of course I do!!
| darknavi wrote:
| Mid 2000s here. It was a fight between The End and C89.5 for
| us.
| gigel82 wrote:
| We own a 2014 CX-5 near Seattle, and it doesn't appear to have
| been affected. Perhaps you needed to be tuned to that station in
| that time-frame to get the bug.
| wvenable wrote:
| The 2014 model has an older infotainment unit. It's a
| completely different implementation from later models.
| neallindsay wrote:
| The Ars Technica story has more useful info:
| https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/radio-station-snafu-in-...
|
| Apparently the radio evaluates image files based on the extension
| on their name, and not by looking at the image headers. If you
| send a radio station logo with no file extension it gets stuck in
| a permanent reboot loop. :-(
| tomhunters wrote:
| Are all of our Mazda cars are sluggish?
| mey wrote:
| I wonder if the FCC is going to get involved.
|
| 47 CFR SS 2.1(c): Harmful Interference. Interference which
| endangers the functioning of a radionavigation service or of
| other safety services or seriously degrades, obstructs, or
| repeatedly interrupts a radiocommunication service operating in
| accordance with [the ITU] Radio Regulations.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| From a press release geekwire got: "Between
| 1/24-1/31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent image files
| with no extension, which caused an issue on some 2014-2017 Mazda
| vehicles with older software," the Mazda statement said. "Mazda
| North American Operations (MNAO) has distributed service alerts
| advising dealers of the issue." The statement goes
| on to say that "dealers are currently experiencing parts delays
| due to shipping constraints" and that MNAO plans to "support
| impacted customers with replacement parts. These customers should
| contact their local Mazda dealer who can submit a goodwill
| request to the Mazda Warranty department on their behalf, order
| the parts, and schedule a free repair when the parts arrive."
| The Mazda representative did not reply to GeekWire's follow-up
| questions about what actually malfunctioned in these vehicles and
| what parts would need to be replaced.
| driverdan wrote:
| What does that mean? Sent image files where? How did those
| image files impact car radios?
| Humdeee wrote:
| I imagine this could be anything like song album art, station
| icon, etc. for any car that has more than the scrolling led
| type radio display
| jlack wrote:
| HD radio can broadcast images for the radio station, etc.
| that is displayed when you are tuned to that channel.
| tcskeptic wrote:
| I suspect they are talking about this:
|
| https://radiodns.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/02/Guidelines-o...
|
| Essentially small images sent OTA that allow stations to
| "Brand" themselves on automotive receivers.
| dmix wrote:
| So a bug in the HD Radio app which has some very poor
| process architecture/sandboxing if it can take over the
| whole interface.
| dymk wrote:
| Good concept for a Black Mirror episode
| benbristow wrote:
| Go go gadgetmobile
|
| https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/8/8e/Gadg
| etm...
| patja wrote:
| I think they can also do useful things like traffic maps
| and album art over nrsc5
| rbanffy wrote:
| And buffer overflows and RCE as well, I assume ;-)
| kevincox wrote:
| Maybe they could use an RCE to patch the firmware.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Eventually some Mazda owner will get frustrated enough to
| actually do that.
| dgrin91 wrote:
| How does a radio station even send an image file? What does
| that mean? What is suppose to happen when a radio station
| sends an image file?
| stuff4ben wrote:
| HD radio is a lot more advanced than the old AM/FM stuff
| you may be used to.
| qubitcoder wrote:
| I'm surprised you haven't seen this before. Even as a
| consultant way back in 2012, many basic rental cars had
| this feature. It shows album art and other metadata about
| the currently playing track or show. I believe it's part of
| HD radio.
|
| At least that's the case in the USA. I seem to recall
| seeing the same in European vehicles as well.
| koz1000 wrote:
| In newer cars with video displays and HD Radio capability,
| the screen can show a small image next to the song
| information. It's typically album cover art for the song
| that is playing, but a lot of stations just put their
| station logo up and keep it there.
|
| https://blogmedia.dealerfire.com/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/56...
|
| Satellite radio had this capability very early, and HD
| Radio seems to want to keep up with that.
|
| The data itself is sent on a sideband data channel that
| rides along with the traditional FM channel. Lots of links
| to read up starting here:
| https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/HD_Radio_(FM)
|
| The signal specification can be read here:
| https://www.sigidwiki.com/images/f/f6/HD_Radio_FM.pdf
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| If you asked drivers "would you like a brand icon shown
| on your screen for the radio station, the trade-off is a
| couple bucks more expensive car and more opportunity for
| bugs to crash your radio" -- who would say yes? Does
| anyone actually want this "HD Radio" technology, did
| anyone ask for it?
|
| Who are the car manufacturers (and radio standards
| setters for that matter) working for?
| koz1000 wrote:
| "Would you like a car that updates its entire control
| panel, unannounced, with a software upgrade and will hide
| familiar buttons on you when you need them the most?"
|
| https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1488030592880967680
| xxpor wrote:
| Yes, my last car I specifically looked for HD Radio
| support. The metadata is nice to have, but the audio
| quality is genuinely much better. _Especially_ on AM,
| where a lot of sports broadcasts still are, depending on
| the market.
| OvidNaso wrote:
| And its where the stations hide their good content. it's
| no spotify of course, but a way more diverse offering on
| many stations hd2 and hd3 signals, still without ads on
| several as well.
| thrashh wrote:
| Sure, your point stands if you pose it that way.
|
| But if you pose it as seeing album art for music that you
| listen to (and titles!), that's going to get a yes from a
| lot of people (myself included).
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| It's also possible to decode this data with an RTL-SDR
| receiver:
|
| https://www.rtl-sdr.com/displaying-live-weather-and-
| traffic-...
| koz1000 wrote:
| What's interesting is that this traffic map is also
| loaded on Mazda cars, but shown in a different
| application. Somehow the system searches for a HDRadio
| signal in the background to update this map from an
| independent receiver.
|
| I've had AM radio on for long periods and then load this
| app, and the traffic map is up to date. I've also driven
| to a different city and the map is now showing the new
| city.
| wfleming wrote:
| I don't know the technical details of how it's encoded, but
| digital radio stations can embed metadata in their signal
| that the car radio can display. That includes text, like the
| station name, and also images, like a logo, that's usually
| shown next to the station name. I believe it's part of HD
| Radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio.
| hedora wrote:
| Wait. They're not fixing this with a firmware update?
|
| So, any radio station intern will be able to take out a city's
| worth of Mazdas moving forward?
|
| Nice.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > So, any radio station intern will be able to take out a
| city's worth of Mazdas moving forward?
|
| Well if the server exploded because someone passed a wrong
| get parameter I'm not blaming whoever that did it.
| [deleted]
| meshaneian wrote:
| Risk was already there. Have you seen the way interns drive?
| asveikau wrote:
| I've _never_ seen a car stereo get a firmware update.
| Manufacturers seem to treat these as throwaway components.
| They 're made once and forever sealed. Kind of crappy from
| the perspective of consumers and the environment.
|
| I guess what I've heard about eg. Tesla is a counterexample.
| bmelton wrote:
| Jeep Cherokee does so periodically, but Mopar is relatively
| well known for having a high quality infotainment system.
| This may be generally true for any infotainment systems
| running Android Auto / Apple CarPlay because they need to
| keep up with the features there, which almost necessitates
| having a developer team which will almost necessitate
| putting them to use sometimes
| yupper32 wrote:
| > Kind of crappy from the perspective of consumers and the
| environment.
|
| This is also how you get subscription services to keep it
| updated.
| xxpor wrote:
| My ford focus did! For free! Shocking, I know. They added
| Android Auto and CarPlay support.
|
| There's at least a little bit of a spectrum between Tesla
| and the total dinosaurs.
| tclancy wrote:
| Well hang on there! When the Camaro v5 first came out
| (2009) there was a pretty decent online community and what
| we discovered was dealers were completely unready to handle
| software updating and versioning. At the time, iPod/
| iPhone/ general mp3 player software kept having breaking
| updates, so being able to obtain car stereo updates was
| important but impossible for large portions of the user
| base.
|
| Which is how I wound up downloading 2 files from a person
| who apparently wrote the C# code for the radios and was
| saddened by the situation. The weirdest part was doing the
| upgrade: stick the files on two usb keys, turn the car on,
| stick the first key in the one port, remove it, open the
| driver side door as an indicator and then finish with the
| second key.
|
| I've thought about that level of ... security every time I
| read about some malicious car hack.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| I just got a firmware update, actually. It was categorized
| as a recall, which spooked me before I realized what it
| actually was.
| m463 wrote:
| tesla doesn't have wonderful software updates though...
|
| The fixes they make are controversial and many times make
| things worse especially wrt the infotainment system.
|
| for example, the current system is just SO broken I don't
| know where to start.
|
| Ok, the USB audio system. You can listen to audio off of a
| USB flash drive. This is great because they came out with
| an expensive high fidelity sound system a few years back,
| and allowing FLAC or ALAC supported high quality
| uncompressed audio.
|
| otoh the USB software is _horrendously_ broken, and updates
| have frequently made things worse. reference:
| https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-
| bu... (a thread with > 2000 comments)
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I worked at a place that did headunit software for like
| 15m. My understaning, most of the headunit software updates
| happen over cellular and aren't covered under the customers
| billing, the company eats those costs so they like those
| updates to be as small and as infrequent as possible.
|
| Tesla maybe gets around this by using wifi when it's in the
| garage? Or perhaps the contracts on the tesla says that
| customers bare the cost of firmware updates that happen
| outside the service center setting.
| davewritescode wrote:
| This is really not true at all anymore. Mazda definitely
| does update their infotainment system. I actually upgraded
| my wife's 3 year old Mazda with CarPlay.
| quanticle wrote:
| My Subaru has received at least two OTA firmware updates.
|
| I think the reason most people don't think their cars get
| firmware updates is because a lot of cars hide the wifi
| connection dialogs and update download controls behind
| three or four layers of menus, so if you don't know to look
| for it (and aren't especially interested in poking around
| through the menus of your head-unit), it's off by default
| and you don't know it's there.
| xattt wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be an intern. You could set up a
| pirate radio station with a DAB/HD Radio transmitter on a
| frequently-listened station at an overpass and see what
| happens.
| Cd00d wrote:
| I think "take out" is unnecessarily hyperbolic language. It
| seems they're stuck on a radio station, not inoperable or
| dangerous.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Indeed, it seems like an effective way for a radio station
| to "capture" more listeners!
| willcipriano wrote:
| WKW 93.4 FM, all ads, all the time.
| hedora wrote:
| Also, nav is broken, and presumably emergency broadcast
| features are hosed as well. I wonder about backup cameras,
| and various driver assist things.
|
| If a Model 3 had an analogous bug, then everything from the
| windshield washers to the climate control and rear view
| mirrors would be borked (I'd guess phone-based unlock would
| be too, at a minimum.)
|
| Many Priuses integrate parts of the power train into the
| radio. I suspect they'd have serious issues too.
|
| Of course, what matters is how integrated all this stuff is
| in a Mazda. That, I don't know.
| jon-wood wrote:
| > Many Priuses integrate parts of the power train into
| the radio. I suspect they'd have serious issues too.
|
| I'm sorry, they do what now? Why would you even do that?
| Beta-7 wrote:
| If something like this was present on a web app it would have 10
| different tests so it wouldn't happen. How come the
| car/infotainment system isn't subject to the same requirements
| like other softwares? Is there something obvious i am missing?
| jakear wrote:
| This is the first time I've seen "a web app" used as a shining
| beacon of stability.
|
| In short, you can't test a negative. It's easy to test "when
| the car receives a transmission in X format, Y happens", but
| not "there does not exist a transmission format X such that
| when the car receives it, Y happens".
|
| Memory safe languages can help here, as would fuzzing. But the
| only true test would be a formal verification, which is a real
| pain (and even then you're only testing against a single Y).
|
| What you really want is "there does not exist any transmission
| that could result in any bad behavior", which can only really
| be tested in that large scale fuzzer we call Production.
| Beta-7 wrote:
| Fair enough, what i meant by "web app" was a project with a
| 100th of the budget of a car company.
| jll29 wrote:
| We're already in the dystopian world of Brazil - modulo the 27B-6
| and Harvey Tuttle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosrujtjJHA
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I'm thinking somebody forgot a "." in their station logo and this
| is the result.
|
| >Station Logos use file-naming conventions with version numbers
| (this is accomplished in the image client). This is useful for
| storing and cataloging station logo images in the receiver.
|
| https://hdradio.com/broadcasters/engineering-support/station...
| mbreese wrote:
| Probably more related to this line:
|
| _> It is critical that the station call sign be transmitted
| correctly. Station Logos follow a file-naming convention that
| includes the station call sign. This way the receiver can
| quickly read the call sign and determine if the Station Logo is
| already archived for immediate display. The filename for a
| Station Logo includes the station call sign, the program
| number, and the version number. _
|
| Sounds like they didn't sanitize their inputs. This is going to
| be a huge hassle for everyone involved.
| nomilk wrote:
| I hope for Mazda's sake there aren't any stations called
| bobby tables.
| zeusk wrote:
| bobby tables; rm -rf / --no-preserve-root
| JoBrad wrote:
| Weird that other car models aren't affected, though.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| I think someone might have found a way to deliver malware over
| the air just like tv's can get updates over the air. Unless you
| have a SDR listening and logging you wont spot the hacks, but
| digital transmissions make it easier to deliver multiple
| signals so you can deliver fake radio stations, tv programmes
| all sorts.
|
| Hacking digital equipment is a very creative job as many will
| know and the one's who have the most experience are the
| military, been doing to other country's before consumer
| electronics made it possible to hack their own population.
|
| I cant even say follow the money because alot of countries can
| and do print what they like.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Seems like the receiver should use values it can trust to index
| the logos. Some kind of simple hash would be trivial to
| implement and likely as effective.
|
| If this is what could happen when you omit a dot, good luck if
| there's a malicious payload. Infotainment systems generally
| won't get the safety critical audits/oversight that other car
| systems would get.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| Mazda's entertainment system has had interesting bugs before.
| Like... it used to crash if your song title accidentally looks
| like a printf statement
|
| https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/brh8jm
| CSSer wrote:
| It's interesting because this is all over this thread, but it's
| not actually a string interpolation issue. It's an issue with
| percent encoding[0]. They talk about it likely being an
| interpolation issue at first but end up ruling it out.
|
| [0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-2.1
| glonq wrote:
| I had a 2014 mazda with this system; it's my son's car now.
|
| The infotainment system is not great. Lots of little bugs and
| quirks and uglies, so I'm not surprised that it suffered this
| glitch.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Interesting, see 3.4.2 Data Inputs.
|
| NRSC-5 In-band/on-channel Digital Radio Broadcasting Standard:
|
| https://www.nrscstandards.org/standards-and-guidelines/docum...
| jbirer wrote:
| This is really needed for me who is a channel change maniac.
| donatj wrote:
| My radio in my 2005 Chrysler Crossfire has a weird bug where if I
| set it to 92.5 KQRS it works fine for about a minute and then
| suddenly changes station to some country station ~105 that I
| don't have as any sort of preset. It's done this since I bought
| the car in 2010 and never had a similar behavior with any other
| stations. It's really bizarre.
| silverlyra wrote:
| Might be a bug involving the station's broadcast of and/or the
| stereo's support for
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_frequency
| donatj wrote:
| Interesting... I wonder if maybe they are wrongly
| broadcasting an alternate frequency. I wonder if there's an
| easy way to inspect the radio stations "metadata".
|
| I have done some basic fiddling with SDR but am not at all
| competent.
| can16358p wrote:
| I have a Ford Ranger 2020 and I never listen to radio, always
| listen on Bluetooth. For some reason it switches to an AM
| station (that I never listen to) from my Bluetooth and shows a
| TA icon (even when TA is toggled off, and it's not even used in
| my country, and the AM station has nothing to do with TA).
|
| After reading this I started to wonder if it might be something
| similar/related.
|
| I even thought of removing the antenna as I never use radio
| anyway. Have you done anything about your issue that you can
| recommend?
| pzduniak wrote:
| I'm certain the TA toggle is broken in my 2019 Hyundai i30N.
| Disabled every radio-related setting, somehow an FM station
| managed to force the system to switch to it from Android Auto
| every 5 minutes. TA is also not used in my country.
| Infuriating.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> then suddenly changes station to some country station_
|
| My God, the horror.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Sounds like an RDSB issue where the station is broadcasting an
| alternate frequency AF and the radio is switching to, because
| the field strength of that AF is stronger than the one you are
| coming from. There are three fixes:
|
| * You enable "LOCAL" mode, this should ignore those AFs
| broadcasted by stations which would switch to another station
| broadcasting a different program (it's actually more
| complicated, for brevity simplified). Not all head units HU
| offer this setting.
|
| * You disable the AF-feature of your HU.
|
| * KQRS should stop broadcasting this AF
| donkarma wrote:
| where did you learn this?
| jhoechtl wrote:
| I am a licensed ham radio operator. But besides that from
| studying absolutely broken junk chinese head units.
|
| Not saying they are all bad but most of them
| steelegbr wrote:
| To add another bit of anecdata, if either station has their
| PI mis-configured, you can get handoff without being in the
| AF list. 1st and 3rd character matching rings a bell.
|
| Seen it happen in the UK with RDS and head units tuning to
| the higher powered (mis-configured) station.
| divbzero wrote:
| > _"Luckily I am an NPR listener so that's fine," Smith said._
|
| Many Seattleites would also be happy if it were stuck on KEXP.
| dihydro wrote:
| I love the Song of the Day podcast from them. Highlights so
| many good artists.
| greyface- wrote:
| > "Between 1/24-1/31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent
| image files with no extension, which caused an issue on some
| 2014-2017 Mazda vehicles with older software," the Mazda
| statement said.
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| Maybe a Russel Crowe gif saying "are you not infotained!?"
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It's going to require _hardware replacement_ to fix the
| unsanitized input vulnerability failure. Very unfortunate,
| quite the bug.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I think press releases say "replace hardware" when often they
| mean "you have to bring the car in and we're going to flash
| new firmware".
|
| Sometimes though, firmware can't be flashed by dealers (due
| to not booting), and then they'll swap the unit, and the old
| unit will be flashed and given to someone else.
|
| Might be worth hiding an airtag taped to the circuit board!
| astrange wrote:
| Asking every customer to come get a firmware upgrade is
| also called a "recall", which sounds like they have to stop
| selling the car and literally ask you to give it back. A
| lot of confused people were making fun of Tesla for that
| recently.
| silon42 wrote:
| Hopefully this is a car where a stereo can still be
| replaced... (even if you need an angle grinder/chainsaw).
|
| Cars where it can't are inferior.
| throwaway3kmv9 wrote:
| "radio station in the Seattle area sent image files"
|
| If that's not a sign that people are making the simplest things
| Way More Complicated Than Necessary(tm) I don't know what is.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'll let the inventors of television know they were making a
| mistake.
|
| And ID3.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Ironically.. HD-Radio PSD (Program Services Data) is just a
| set of ID3 tags injected into the stream.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I mean, yes, but at the same time, album art is a pretty
| normal thing to have along with music. And actual cellular
| data is just radios, but on different wavelengths and
| whatnot. So it's not really a stretch to imagine sending
| arbitrary data along with music over a radio wave. And some
| of that data is actually very useful, like the track name or
| artist name.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You are supposed to look at the road when driving, not a
| screen full of album arts.
| akira2501 wrote:
| My car has four seats. Sometimes there are people in the
| other ones.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| My car not only has four seats like this commenters, it
| also allows you to be in it while stationary.
| pjerem wrote:
| How lucky you are. Mine requires me to leave before
| stopping itself in a tree.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| My wife's car has the HD Radio stuff, and it's pretty neat to
| see album art for songs playing over the radio.
|
| I don't find it distracting. I treat it like everything else
| on the dashboard and I don't look at it unless I'm at a
| stoplight or whatever.
| consp wrote:
| I don't know if that is true. Considering one of the issues
| with Mazda is text parsing. My ford doesn't transfer all the
| epg data from the radio module to the media unit and it
| requires a several hundred mb update when radio stations
| change their logo as people now expect radio station images
| since it is part of the dab standard.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Wait, what? The station logos are preloaded as part of
| software updates, not transferred over the air?
| myself248 wrote:
| "sent image files" is an HD Radio function, and HD Radio is
| also known as NRSC-5, the standards document that describes it.
|
| There's an NRSC-5 encoder floating around on Github, if you
| want to try your hand at it. Notably, it was implemented by an
| infosec firm, presumably because more garbage code like this is
| lurking everywhere, and it never gets proper testing because HD
| Radio is proprietary and its creators never intended an open-
| source encoder to exist. (To the point of hiding all sorts of
| details about the codec, but some educated guesses and
| comparison to similar codecs seem to have paid off.)
|
| So, in this case it just crashes the radios so they boot-loop,
| but how long until someone figures out a payload that can do
| more damage?
| avs733 wrote:
| I'm less worried about somebody attacking more radio and more
| annoyed that radio stations have taken to using an
| information mechanism designed to tell me what I'm listening
| to and used it to serve ads.
|
| Unless we are calling serving unwanted ads as an attack.
|
| But in a broader sense, I am absolutely unsurprised that
| there is terrible security on automotive hardware and
| software. Things like this are one of my major personal
| concerns about self driving cars.
| nicbou wrote:
| Car ownership has become pretty interesting in the last few
| years.
| crystalmeph wrote:
| At some point, I think we have to start asking if the
| addition of non-critical features like having a favicon for
| each radio station is worth the increased attack surface.
| mbreese wrote:
| Mixing the car radio and actual critical systems (backup
| camera) doesn't seem like a great idea. Especially when the
| car manufacturer doesn't control the entire system. I know
| nothing about the supply chain for car radios, but I
| wouldn't be surprised if it was all made by some secondary
| supplier, so Mazda doesn't even necessarily have the code
| to the section they need to patch.
|
| But, I'm honestly more surprised that it's a Mazda specific
| issue. I would have expected for the same bug to hit
| multiple infotainment systems.
| walrus01 wrote:
| This may be pedantic but I wouldn't call a backup camera
| critical, people need to learn how to drive and parallel
| park without those aides.
|
| I sure would be pissed if I had a car with a backup
| camera and something like this bricked the big center
| screen in my car, however.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| Some cars are designed around having that camera in
| exchange for rear visibility. Generally for better
| aerodynamics. It likely pays for itself in fuel pretty
| quickly.
| klyrs wrote:
| My understanding is that it's partly motivated by
| rollover crash safety -- with smaller windows in the
| back, they can make those pillars sturdier.
|
| That said, I'd much rather have a backup display in my
| rear-view mirror than a giant touch screen
| tessierashpool wrote:
| you're getting a ton of criticism, but I have two cars,
| and only one has a backup camera. I reverse more safely
| in the car with no backup camera.
|
| I've caught myself just backing up without thinking about
| it in the car with the backup camera. never done that in
| the old-school mirrors car.
|
| I don't know if there are any studies that back up backup
| cameras.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I've read that people ride more dangerously, and are
| tested by car drivers less carefully, when wearing a
| cycle helmet. Perhaps there's a similar effect here -- I
| think we do tend to rely on safety equipment and ignore
| due diligence.
| avidiax wrote:
| A backup camera is required safety equipment (at time of
| sale) on new cars.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Great, another unneeded feature forced down our throats
| at additional cost to who? You guessed it, consumers!
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Well, you could also say the same about seat belts and
| ABS. I very much prefer cars with cameras at this point.
| [deleted]
| jacobolus wrote:
| Great, another feature that will save dozens to hundreds
| of lives (disproportionately of young children) every
| year, while adding only a few bucks to the bill of
| materials for cars that already have a display screen.
| Moru wrote:
| I do wish parents would stop teaching kids to take the
| short route over the carpark on the way to school. They
| save a couple of meters but walk behind cars backing out
| of the car garages... The back camera is handy but you
| won't see them if they walk on your side of the lane, too
| close to the 90 degree edge of the car.
|
| And to make it more fun, our car has an overlay on the
| left edge with a top down view of the sensors around the
| car. That one blocks the view completely in that edge.
| And has a black background window that slowly fades away.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Also demanded by customers. A well implemented backup
| camera is much better than trying to use a small rear
| view mirror or twisting around to look out a small rear
| window. The backup camera can give you a wider field of
| view including low down where a small child might be. It
| is also much brighter in the dark than your eyes normally
| see.
|
| This doesn't mean that I am not also checking the
| surroundings but the backup camera is such a big
| improvement that I would not buy any car without one.
| Teever wrote:
| I think parents who have lost their children to cars
| backing out of driveways while children are playing on
| the sidewalk would disagree with your description of
| 'unneeded'
| lmm wrote:
| It wouldn't be an issue if we went back to making cars
| small enough you could see out of them. Legally requiring
| a certain level of rear visibility would be a good thing
| (and, sure, in some cases a camera might be the best way
| to achieve that) - and throw in some pedestrian collision
| safety requirements while you're at it. Legally mandating
| the expensive gadget-based way of doing things seems
| horribly shortsighted.
| MertsA wrote:
| You'll never come close to getting the visibility that
| you can with a backup camera. With a decent backup camera
| the only blind spots are actually underneath the car
| itself. You can't possibly match that without a camera on
| anything other than a motorcycle. Setting the legal
| requirement of visibility without mandating a camera
| would either make it completely impractical to avoid a
| camera or you'd be sacrificing visibility by making the
| mandate achievable with only mirrors and windows.
| wowokay wrote:
| Idk about this, I am tired of people trying to blame
| their negligence on other people. If kids are allowed to
| watch TV, use computers and have ipads and smart phones,
| they can be taught to look before crossing a driveway.
| Some people propose waiting to assign gender and names to
| kids, if we are going to offload those responsibilities,
| you can't make the claim that a backup camera is a
| necessary safety feature.
| elevader wrote:
| That's classical victim blaming. We are all humans and
| make mistakes.Some mistakes only result in some property
| damage or money lost and some, like running over a person
| (doesn't even have to be a child, don't forget that there
| are handicapped people who might not be able to react
| fast enough to get out of that situation), can't be
| corrected afterwards. Handwaving that away because some
| people like to save a few dollars is not a great idea.
|
| By your logic we could also hand everybody heroin and an
| assault rifle and abolish most laws, people watch TV
| after all and therefore can be taught not to do bad
| things.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is true. Any kid who is capable of naming themselves
| has also opted out of child safety. The two
| characteristics are irreversibly linked.
|
| In addition, the existence of kids who are capable of
| naming themselves must mean that other kids should be
| bumper mush. This is the only way to preserve the
| American Way.
| tom_ wrote:
| If anything, it's the drivers who are the real victims
| here.
| krallja wrote:
| Actually, it's the shareholders, who have to bear the
| costs of these expensive lawsuits from the parents of
| these irresponsible children! Won't anyone think of the
| shareholders?
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Don't get me started on turn signals! Who's paying for
| these features? That's right, Joe Consumer. People just
| need to learn how to use hand signals.
| bregma wrote:
| Turn signals are not what makes a car expensive. Look at
| BMWs.
| Arrath wrote:
| You could tell me BMW's ship without turn signals and I'd
| believe you.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's not unneeded, it's there to prevent you from killing
| someone, just like every other required safety system.
| myself248 wrote:
| Yeah, drives me nuts. Some cars have really great rear
| visibility and should be exempt from the requirement. I
| understand it on SUVs and stuff though.
| astrange wrote:
| Do they still sell any cars with good rear visibility?
|
| My hatchback has about the best you could get (and they
| don't sell it here anymore) and I still added a backup
| camera, it's very useful.
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| I used to pride myself on my ability to fit into small
| parking spaces and parallel park even big vans pretty
| precisely, and a backup camera blew all that out of the
| water because I can fit anywhere now.
|
| My little GTI with a backup camera made me an invincible
| parking machine.
| rswail wrote:
| Why? You have a screen, the cameras are so small as to be
| undetectable, they add safety and they provide much
| better coverage than mirrors do.
|
| It also enables auto-parking and other enhancements while
| not inhibiting anyone that wants to perform those
| functions manually.
| zelos wrote:
| Wouldn't the entire rear of the car and the rear seats
| have to be glass to exempt a car from having the camera?
|
| A bigger rear window wouldn't have let me see the toddler
| who'd wandered a short distance off from his parents in a
| car park and was standing right behind my car.
| brewdad wrote:
| Backup cameras are going to become critical beyond "learn
| to drive properly" very soon. My college aged son has
| literally never driven a car without a backup camera. I
| taught him to use his mirrors after checking the camera
| for obstacles the mirrors can't see but I'm sure he's
| already developed the habit of simply relying on the
| camera. I'm pretty much there and have 30+ years of
| driving without them.
| bregma wrote:
| Where I live you could fail your driver's test if you
| look at the rearview camera while reversing. You can
| glance at it before you start the manoeuvre but if you
| take your eyes off the road while the vehicle is in
| motion, you get the silent note taking.
| jessaustin wrote:
| I usually look at the mirrors rather than the road?
| nanidin wrote:
| > I know nothing about the supply chain for car radios,
| but I wouldn't be surprised if it was all made by some
| secondary supplier, so Mazda doesn't even necessarily
| have the code to the section they need to patch.
|
| You are correct that in general the automotive OEM's farm
| out the various components of the vehicle to suppliers.
| In that case, they probably also have some sort of
| support contract in place that ensures the supplier will
| address issues like this in a timely manner for the
| duration of the warranty period for the vehicles it is
| included in.
| tjohns wrote:
| At least in my car (2013 Chevy Volt), the backup camera
| is on an internal KVM-type switch.
|
| The moment I switch into reverse the camera forcibly
| takes over the infotainment screen. You can occasionally
| see the signal flicker when the switch happens.
|
| But also... a backup camera is hardly critical equipment.
| It's there for situational awareness (and a good idea),
| but doesn't replace the mirror. And since nobody drives
| in reverse at high speed, stopping is always an option if
| it malfunctions.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| On many newer cars, the backup camera is approaching
| critical equipment. With the rising safety standards, the
| visibility in cars, especially out the back, has gone
| down significantly. Incidentally, this is very apparent
| on the Mazdas that I've owned. My old old Protege had
| good visibility out the back, an early 10's 3 had
| passable visibility out the back, and the now handful-of-
| years-old 6 has atrocious visibility out the back, to the
| point where more than half the field of view is obscured.
| kortilla wrote:
| That's still not critical. The backup camera is not used
| as a rear view mirror replacement and the ability to back
| up, let lone back up safely, is not required for safe
| operation of the vehicle.
|
| Brakes are critical, steering is critical. Reverse and
| everything that entails is not.
| nix9000 wrote:
| Federal law in the US considers backup cameras critical
| enough to mandate them in all new vehicles since 2018,
| with penalty for non-compliance.
|
| I think that take precedence over your idiosyncratic
| definition of what is critical.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Federal law also requires manufacturers to use too little
| water in all your home appliances. That's clearly not
| "critical."
|
| Edit: I really don't understand why I'm getting downvotes
| on this. Is it because people are so glad the federal
| government is in their bathroom making these "critical"
| decisions for you?
|
| My point is that the federal government makes all kinds
| of decisions that are obviously not "critical," and that
| includes in the auto industry.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because we have to agree on some authority, and almost
| everyone is going to prefer the government's authority to
| yours.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| In the vast majority of the US, being able to safely back
| up _is_ required for the safe operation of a vehicle. I
| recall my drivers license test included a driving-in-
| reverse section. You will also frequently need to be able
| to back out of a parking spot, or a driveway. Even if its
| not critical, its as close to critical as can be. When
| your rear view mirror and your side mirrors combined
| cannot give you enough visibility to safely back up, a
| rear-view camera quickly becomes critical.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| > Brakes are critical, steering is critical. Reverse and
| everything that entails is not.
|
| The statistic is that every year, in the U.S. alone, over
| 2000 kids are run over by vehicles reversing. I had to
| read what you wrote a half-dozen times, but in hindsight
| the dissonance makes perfect sense.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Rear view mirrors aren't critical. Vans don't have them.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| The geekwire article confirms it is disabling the backup
| camera and gps nav. You can only listen to npr while it
| boot-loops.
| morpher wrote:
| My Seattle Mazda was hit by this bug. The backup camera
| still functions for the most part, although it does
| flicker and occasionally blank for a second or two
| (presumably while the system reboots). Annoying, but not
| horrible.
| koz1000 wrote:
| The backup camera isn't critical, but it's been required
| in the USA since 2018.
|
| https://www.fleetowner.com/safety/article/21687582/nhtsa-
| to-...
| tremon wrote:
| _And since nobody drives in reverse at high speed_
|
| That's my cue ;)
|
| The Netherlands used to have national championships
| reverse driving for many years on the official race track
| at Zandvoort (part of the Formula 1 circuit).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn-v2pLBx_s
| myself248 wrote:
| Yeahbut, they both need access to the same screen. And
| yes, it's all made by suppliers, and therein lies most of
| the trouble with cars today.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Electronic KVM switches are pretty ancient tech. So
| getting access to the screen/input between different
| hardware modules shouldn't be that complicated. They just
| don't want to pay for the parts and additional
| complexity.
| berkes wrote:
| I'm quite certain the dev teams here did ask themselves
| this.
|
| And decided it was worth it. (If my experience told me
| anything: Probably under some pressure of marketing or
| C-level)
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| The idea that an embedded system would validate files sent over
| the air using a filename extension is baffling to me.
| Extensions as a separate field from the name are a relic from
| the 70s. How much can checking the file for identification
| bytes really cost you?
| sircastor wrote:
| I read a lot of people in these sorts of threads mention how they
| hate their car infotainment systems, and how they just wish it
| were Android Auto or CarPlay. I wanted to offer a little insight
| into it. I worked for an Auto Manufacturer for 7 years.
|
| Infotainment systems are developed as a partnership (usually)
| between a vendor and the auto company. The hardware is often
| developed by a different company, I like to think of them as old-
| school stereo manufacturers: Bosch, Pioneer, etc. The development
| cycle is somewhere between 12-36 months, and that's still quite a
| bit before the vehicle actually rolls off the assembly line.
|
| Many customers like CarPlay or Android Auto. Both represent a
| cost to the manufacturer, and require ceding the design space to
| another company which is very visible to the customer. Brand is a
| big deal for car makers, and giving that space up is hard.
| CSSer wrote:
| > are developed as a partnership (usually) between a vendor and
| the auto company.
|
| Depending on the manufacturer this is true for most of the car
| nowadays, right? I watched an engineering teardown of the new
| all-electric Mustang Mach E recently and they even used
| different vendors (which produced parts of vastly different
| calibers of quality) for the rear and front motors[0].
|
| Point taken about ceding the branding power to the vendor,
| especially when that vendor is big and scary like Apple or
| Google.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/jWOPMtejm_Y?t=768
| sircastor wrote:
| >Depending on the manufacturer this is true for most of the
| car nowadays, right?
|
| I believe so. I was thinking specifically of the OS work and
| how it would be contracted out to a provider, and the
| hardware for the Infotainment would go out to another.
|
| > I watched an engineering teardown of the new all-electric
| Mustang Mach E recently and they even used different vendors
| (which produced parts of vastly different calibers of
| quality) for the rear and front motors[0].
|
| One of the interesting things about EVs is that a lot of
| traditional OEMs don't have the expertise in-house, so things
| like motors (which would normally be something in-house) end
| up being designed and manufactured by someone else.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My most recent auto purchase is approaching 20 years ago. At
| the time, a dealer option was to have a GPS installed. That
| would have cost well north of $1,000 and occupied most of the
| available glovebox space.
|
| My reasoning in rejecting the option was:
|
| - That's a lot of money, and a lot of maps.
|
| - External hardware (a smartphone, laptop, or tablet) is far
| more likely to provide both that functionality _and_ be
| independently upgradable.
|
| Instead I opted for a standard mains electrical outlet, which
| has proved its worth in recharging (or powering) any electrical
| device, even before USB charging became prevalent.
|
| I feel much the same way with entertainment systems.
|
| A tuner _by itself_ is compatible with an external device
| having a small FM transmitter dongle. With 3.5mm or 6.35mm
| audio connector, any line-in device can feed the audio system,
| with controls on that device used. Bluetooth pairing is
| somewhat more complex though mostly works. It 's about the
| extreme level of intelligence I'd want, and I'd avoid it if at
| all possible.
|
| The present level of complexity is a major regression.
| Aperocky wrote:
| I don't understand why car infotainment system is a thing
| honestly.
|
| If you really need a touchscreen that badly, just buy an ipad
| and tape it to the dash, would probably offer way more feature
| and flexibility.
|
| My truck had dials and audio jacks, what else do you really
| need? The car navigation systems I've seen are universally
| worse than google map.
| massysett wrote:
| My car has CarPlay and I've found it to be very
| disappointing, so much so that mainly I now do as you suggest
| and simply use the iPhone with a dash mount. I get the audio
| over Bluetooth, which seems to work well enough - it seems
| the Bluetooth implementation is older and better debugged.
|
| The car's Bluetooth is satisfactory for taking calls.
|
| Part of the problem is the car's unit, as it's Android and it
| crashes a lot when it's running CarPlay.
| astrea wrote:
| I'm constantly surprised by comments on a tech-savvy site
| such as HN by people who'd rather live in a slide rule world.
| I enjoy infotainment systems because I can listen to Spotify
| and podcasts and easily call/text people safely while driving
| on long haul drives, which I often find myself on. I have
| zero complaints about my system other than not having the
| level of customizability a nerd such was myself desires.
| TheReveller wrote:
| Me too, after using Android auto on one car it's a must-
| have on any new car for me. Better nav system, Google
| assistant, Spotify, podcasts, messages. Turns my car into a
| drive able phone.
| mdoms wrote:
| I have to ask, why do Americans always refer to radio stations
| with a 4-letter code? Most places are just the frequency and the
| station name (94.2 The Rock, 98.8 Radio Hauraki, etc) but I'm
| pretty sure every single time I have seen an American refer to a
| radio station they say something like "KUOW 94.9".
| alexb_ wrote:
| The FCC mandates that stations have either a 4 or 3 letter call
| sign. Ones on the west coast start with K, east of that is W.
| Since they all have to identify themselves to the FCC with
| these call signs, it's convenient to advertise the channel with
| that name as well. Not every station does this, some like to
| not talk about the call sign at all in their name, but most
| advertise with it for simplicity.
| oblio wrote:
| > east of that is W
|
| Because of course it is. Facepalm moment right there.
| astrange wrote:
| The name standard is international, so we didn't get E.
| oblio wrote:
| Damn, that's sad :-(
|
| I guess they could have just used them the other way
| around, to simplify things a bit (West Coast - W, East
| Coast - K).
|
| The thing is, I realized now why people care about this
| stuff:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_St
| ate...
|
| > Other stations downplay their call letters, in favor of
| an easily remembered slogan. This is also the standard
| practice in most other countries.
|
| I have NO idea what the radio call letters are for any
| radio in Romania. Nobody I know does. We just know them
| as RockFM, MagicFM, EuropaFM, RadioZu, whatever.
| alexb_ wrote:
| It probably has to do with the US requirement to announce
| the call sign at least once an hour. Regular listeners
| will associate it with the station due to this.
| oblio wrote:
| Ok, but... why?
| alexb_ wrote:
| There's probably a good reason for it but I don't work
| for the FCC so I couldn't tell you. Iirc TV stations have
| to do the same thing every hour by showing the station
| name briefly.
| oblio wrote:
| In Europe I think they say their name, maybe hourly but
| the name doesn't have to be KTSA...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Since they all have to identify themselves to the FCC with
| these call signs, it's convenient to advertise the channel
| with that name as well
|
| Not just that, it's required by federal law to announce the
| callsign once an hour, in both radio and OTA television. http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_identification#United_...
| (If you watch sports broadcasts on OTA TV you might notice a
| subtle overlay pop over the content at the top of the hour)
|
| Made more sense in the analog era, when tuning was done by
| twiddling a potentiometer and you never quite knew exactly
| what frequency you were on.
| terinjokes wrote:
| Though the identification you hear may be that of the
| originating station in the case of a simulcast.
|
| Many years back Clear Channel would simulcast hurricane
| coverage across most of their stations in Florida,
| resulting in them all identifying as "Newsradio 610 WIOD
| Maimi". (Though a YouTube search suggests iHeartMedia now
| pitch- and speed-bends to say all the legal identifiers
| very quickly.)
| seszett wrote:
| In many places you can't even use the frequency as a reference
| because it changes depending on region. On my regular 100-km
| drive in Belgium Classic21 gets three different frequency. But
| it's just Classic21, it doesn't have a code name.
| billatq wrote:
| Not all American stations have names aside from their call
| sign. In the Seattle Area, KUOW is just KUOW. The dance station
| at 89.5 calls itself C89.5, and almost nobody uses their call
| sign of KNHC.
|
| On the other hand, the dance station in the Miami area calls
| itself "Revolution 93.5". It really depends upon the station
| and the market.
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