Ford Dropping AM Radio From SYNC

[Chrisgb]

On 10/17/2022 at 8:40 AM, jasonj80 said:

Also electrochromatic mirrors are a safety feature, (even get awarded NHTSA points for them) by the time you flip the mirror you have noticed the glare which has caused a change in your vision and ability to see. With auto-dimming that never happens as it reacts progressively as the glare is occurring, they are especially nice on the exterior mirrors.  

One baffling thing thing about the 5G Rangers is that the auto dimming mirror is standard on the base XL100A package, but upgrading (?) to the 101A High package it is replaced with the manual flip day-night mirror. Something to do with having Sync or Sync3 (incl.on STX SE pkg), but XLT and Lariat have the auto dimming mirrors with Sync/Sync3.

[River Wild]

Well if they get rid of AM how am I going to listen to Art Bell radio when I'm pulling an all nighter? 

 

I do agree that in rural and remote areas, AM is nice to have. Obviously old enough to appreciate that part. I wish satellite radio was optional.  I got rid of it on my last truck with forscan and have not and will not activate on the current one.  Too many trees where I live so it's worthless.  CD player isn't needed and never used in the 2017 SD.  Seems like auto dimming mirrors should be standard across the lines for safety.  Lots of tech in these trucks, some needed, some nice to have, and some unnecessary for me which is why I stuck to Lariat and not a KR.  

[jasonj80]

3 hours ago, Chrisgb said:

One baffling thing thing about the 5G Rangers is that the auto dimming mirror is standard on the base XL100A package, but upgrading (?) to the 101A High package it is replaced with the manual flip day-night mirror. Something to do with having Sync or Sync3 (incl.on STX SE pkg), but XLT and Lariat have the auto dimming mirrors with Sync/Sync3.

Base 100 use the rear-view mirror to display the backup camera, on High package it is displayed in the dash. The rear camera vision would be obscured if the mirror was in night mode and the vehicle would fail to conform to rear visibility standard from NHTSA. When a vehicle is in reverse an auto-dimming mirror will not dim to comply with the same rule.

[AGR]

15 hours ago, jasonj80 said:

I'd take the Auto-dimming mirror, I haven't used a CD player in my car in 12 years and the last time I used AM radio was to check traffic when I had to drive cross town and that was 20 years ago. 

Also shows the issues companies have when removing features, to some they are necessary others never use them. 

 

I use AM radio occasionally, and hardly ever listen to FM. I've used the CD player like maybe, once. But I listen to Sirius XM quite a bit and have about 6000 songs downloaded to my phone. But I have no use for an auto dimming mirror.

Agreed on the second part.

[silvrsvt]

21 hours ago, River Wild said:

Well if they get rid of AM how am I going to listen to Art Bell radio when I'm pulling an all nighter?  

Hasn’t he been dead for years now?

[j2sys]

38 minutes ago, silvrsvt said:

Hasn’t he been dead for years now?

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/obituaries/art-bell-radio-host-who-tuned-in-to-the-dark-side-dies-at-72.html

 

Quote

Art Bell, Radio Host Who Tuned In to the Dark Side, Dies at 72

 

 

22 hours ago, River Wild said:

Well if they get rid of AM how am I going to listen to Art Bell radio when I'm pulling an all nighter? 

 

https://www.coasttocoastam.com/art-bell/

[Chrisgb]

19 hours ago, jasonj80 said:

Base 100 use the rear-view mirror to display the backup camera, on High package it is displayed in the dash. The rear camera vision would be obscured if the mirror was in night mode and the vehicle would fail to conform to rear visibility standard from NHTSA. When a vehicle is in reverse an auto-dimming mirror will not dim to comply with the same rule.

It would seem simpler to put the camera display in the 100A's 4.2 in. display, and make the AD mirror standard, eliminating the manual mirror from inventory. Ah, well, the 5G is a lame duck now, anyway.

[ice-capades]

1 hour ago, j2sys said:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/obituaries/art-bell-radio-host-who-tuned-in-to-the-dark-side-dies-at-72.html

 

The New York Times article is behind a paywall. 

[j2sys]

38 minutes ago, ice-capades said:

 

The New York Times article is behind a paywall. 

 

Quote

Art Bell, Radio Host Who Tuned In to the Dark Side, Dies at 72

April 17, 2018

Art Bell in his home studio in Pahrump, Nev., in 1998. He once had the third-largest radio audience among talk-show hosts, after Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.Jeff Scheid for The New York Times

Art Bell, an apostle of the paranormal whose disembodied voice drew millions to his late-night radio soapbox beamed from the Mojave Desert, died on April 13 at his home in Pahrump, Nev. He was 72.

Lt. David Boruchowitz, a spokesman for the Nye County sheriff’s office, said an autopsy would be conducted to determine the cause of death. An announcement on Mr. Bell’s website said he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“Art had a fascination with the afterlife,” the announcement said, “and it’s heartwarming to know he peacefully slipped into the next world and now knows the answers he sought for so long.”

From a home studio 65 miles west of Las Vegas, Mr. Bell personally fielded unscreened telephone calls on five lines during a five-hour nightly marathon on KNYE-FM called “Coast to Coast.” At its peak, in the 1990s, the show was broadcast on hundreds of stations and reached as many as 10 million listeners a week.

Mr. Bell once had the third-largest radio audience among talk-show hosts, after Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

In riveting narratives punctuated by convincing details, his guests spun eyewitness accounts of past lives, contacts with aliens, time travel, crop circles and other ostensibly inexplicable phenomena, most of which were accompanied by a knowing affirmation from the host himself.

He had reason to be credulous. One summer night, he recalled, he and his wife were driving home when a 150-foot-long triangular craft silently hovered over their car before disappearing.

“It really doesn’t matter that much to me if anyone believes me,” Mr. Bell explained later. “Thousands of people seeing the same thing cannot all be wrong.”

Just how much Mr. Bell believed was a matter of conjecture.

He once described his program as “absolute entertainment.” When he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, his former business partner, Alan Corbeth, said Mr. Bell had thoroughly understood “how to create theater of the mind.”

On one memorable program in 1997, a man who said he had been discharged for medical reasons from Area 51 — the storied Nevada air base that has long stoked rumors of unidentified flying objects — was mysteriously cut off in mid-interview.

“What we’re thinking of as aliens, Art, they’re extra-dimensional beings,” the man started to say, his voice choking. “They’ve infiltrated a lot of aspects of, of the military establishment.”

On another program, Mr. Bell introduced his guest, identified as Alex Collier, by saying he had been “in contact with a human race from the constellation Andromeda, located in our galaxy.”

“His experience has been both telepathic and physical,” Mr. Bell added. “His relationship with the Andromedans has been based on trust and friendship. Alex’s free will has never been violated, and his experience must not in any way be associated with abduction.”

In 1998, Mr. Bell received the ignominious Snuffed Candle Award from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a group, co-founded by Carl Sagan and based in Amherst, N.Y., that promotes scientific inquiry and critical thinking. The group cited him “for encouraging credulity, presenting pseudoscience as genuine, and contributing to the public’s lack of understanding of the methods of scientific inquiry.”

Mr. Bell in 1997. He broadcast his late-night radio talk show from a home studio in the Nevada desert.Aaron Mayes/Las Vegas Sun, via Associated Press

To which Mr. Bell replied: “A mind should not be so open that the brains fall out; however, it should not be so closed that whatever gray matter which does reside may not be reached. On behalf of those with the smallest remaining open aperture, I accept with honor.”

Arthur William Bell III was born on June 17, 1945, in Jacksonville, N.C., while his parents were stationed at Camp Lejeune there. His father, a Marine Corps captain, was descended from one of the original settlers of Stamford, Conn., in the 1640s. His mother, the former Jane Lee Gumaer, was a Marine sergeant.

At 13, Art became a licensed amateur radio operator. He was an Air Force medic during the Vietnam War and later a disc jockey for an English-language station in Okinawa.

There, he was said to have set a record for continuous broadcasting — 116 hours and 15 minutes — to raise money to ferry stranded Vietnamese orphans from Saigon to the United States for adoption by American families. (He also claimed a record of 57 hours of uninterrupted seesawing while broadcasting.)

Mr. Bell enrolled as an engineering major at the University of Maryland but dropped out to return to radio, first as a disc jockey in California and Nevada. Students of numerology were mindful that he began his political talk show in 1984 — and also that he died on a Friday the 13th.

Mr. Bell is survived by his fourth wife, Airyn Ruiz; their children, Asia and Alexander; and three children from his earlier marriages, Vincent Pontius, Lisa Pontius Minei and Arthur Bell IV.

His “Coast to Coast” show was syndicated and broadcast from 1989 to 2003, followed by episodic returns on satellite radio and online with a program called “Midnight in the Desert,” which he canceled in 2015 after he said shots had been fired at his home.

Mr. Bell said he kept a .40-caliber Glock 22 in a desk drawer of his isolated desert home.

“If I had a problem out here,” he told Time magazine in 2012, “well, the police would arrive just in time to draw the chalk outline on my floor.”

While some critics accused him of laying the foundation for right-wing conspiracists on talk radio, Mr. Bell’s politics were not easily pigeonholed. He described himself as a libertarian, but his passion was directed less at politicians or ideology than at debunking scientific doctrine and preaching apocalyptic prophecy.

“He was different, fed up with the government not because of some tax increase or a bad vote but because of what they were hiding,” the journalist Jack Dickey wrote in Time magazine in 2013. “Where others had rage, he had skepticism, and lots of it.”

With the horror novelist Whitley Strieber, Mr. Bell wrote “The Coming Global Superstorm” (1999), in which violent climate disruptions lead to a global deep freeze. The director Roland Emmerich adapted it for the 2004 film “The Day After Tomorrow,” starring Dennis Quaid.

(Writing about the film in The New York Times, Andrew C. Revkin noted, “Most experts on climate change say a switch from slow warming to an instant hemispheric deep freeze like the one posited in the book is impossible.”)

Mr. Bell wrote several other books, including “The Quickening: Today’s Trends, Tomorrow’s World” (1997) and a memoir, “The Art of Talk” (1998).

His spoken words had a much wider reach, however. “His Marlboro-Lights-weathered voice blanketed the continent after dark, reliably chilling his audience,” one reviewer wrote.

Mr. Bell acknowledged that he had a certain hold on his nocturnal audience. As he told The Washington Post in 1998, “There is a difference in what people are willing to consider, daytime versus nighttime. It’s dark, and you don’t know what’s out there.

“And the way things are now,” he added, “there may be something.”

 

[Chrisgb]

Oughta keep it in the APIM. What could be the cost savings or added chip space to get rid of it? It used to be a challenge to pull in clear channel stations like KAAY Little Rock or XEHK GUADALAJARA while in St Paul, MN on  the vibrator tube radio (to the youngsters, that ain't what you're thinkin' it is). Today, I can often pull in Packer Radio Network AM stations and sustain them better than the FM ones while traveling across MN/WI. I understand the increasing demand for bandwidth for upcoming features, but do we have to shut down Auction Air, or 6am Mass broadcasts so that we can check the expiration date of the milk in our refrigerator on an app while in Europe?