2016 Mazda Radios in Seattle Are Stuck on KUOW, and Nobody Knows Why

[SpaceAge]

Bizarre story out of Seattle. All joking about NPR being propaganda aside, anyone wanna guess what’s going on here?

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a3...-seattle-stuck

[MIPS]

It's being discussed here - http://videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=274711

In a nutshell the infotainment system supports HD Radio. A proprietary modern "high-bitrate" radio format that's not going to end up like DAB in Europe, we swear. There is a data stream formatting standard that has to be followed but for some reason NPR didn't completely follow it or they managed to unknowingly find a bug in the implementation that meant the broadcast went out but it was malformed. Be it a textfile or an image, the file lacked an attribute that told the receiver what it was.
Mazda's infotainment build quality has been mostly questionable at best and nobody in Japan asked what would happen if an HD Radio stream was received that wasn't formatted to spec, or at least to ship it in the 2016 model they didn't test this. The result of the Seattle NPR gaffe was the receivers received the stream, had no idea how to handle the weirdness and crashed into a bootloop which bricks the system.

I still have no goddamn idea how in this day and age we can manage to screw up something as simple as a radio. It's about as bad as modern cars getting regular "bugfixes". Who the hell do you hire for programming and code auditing/testing?

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by MIPS

It's being discussed here - http://videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=274711

In a nutshell the infotainment system supports HD Radio. A proprietary modern "high-bitrate" radio format that's not going to end up like DAB in Europe, we swear. There is a data stream formatting standard that has to be followed but for some reason NPR didn't completely follow it or they managed to unknowingly find a bug in the implementation that meant the broadcast went out but it was malformed. Be it a textfile or an image, the file lacked an attribute that told the receiver what it was.
Mazda's infotainment build quality has been mostly questionable at best and nobody in Japan asked what would happen if an HD Radio stream was received that wasn't formatted to spec, or at least to ship it in the 2016 model they didn't test this. The result of the Seattle NPR gaffe was the receivers received the stream, had no idea how to handle the weirdness and crashed into a bootloop which bricks the system.

I still have no goddamn idea how in this day and age we can manage to screw up something as simple as a radio. It's about as bad as modern cars getting regular "bugfixes". Who the hell do you hire for programming and code auditing/testing?

I've never seen a software based device that didn't have a bug or (if I want to be kind) a design deficiency. I think we are computerizing too many basic systems for computerization sake.

[Jeffhs]

The problem may be caused by something as simple as the car being just too close to the radio station's tower, causing the station's signal to overload the car radio. However, if this is a problem only with radios in 2016 Mazda automobiles, I'm not sure what the trouble actually is unless it is actually due to the design of the entertainment systems in these cars, which are much more sophisticated (with video, etc. in addition to the radio) than they used to be. I lived in a Cleveland suburb years ago, just a third of a mile, give or take (I could see the tower from my third-floor bedroom window) from a local FM station on 92.3 MHz. I was so close to the tower I could hear it not only on its assigned frequency and between local Cleveland stations on my FM radios, but also on channel 6 on an old color TV I had at the time and even, believe it or not, very faintly on the ten-meter band on the SX-101 Hallicrafters communications receiver in my amateur radio station. Had the interfering radio station been an AM station, I am sure the interference problem would have been much worse, the signal being heard not only on standard radios but on such things as burner coils on electric stoves (I have read of this kind of interference in areas very close to 50kW AM radio stations). In my situation, I tried putting a small resistor in the antenna line of one of my radios, an AM-FM 17-transistor stereo portable; it worked, but not as well as I had hoped.

Years after I left the Cleveland suburb where this station is located and moved to my present location (long story and OT), I read the station had moved its transmitter and antenna to another suburb, some distance from its previous location. This may have alleviated or even outright eliminated the interference problem in the area in which the station had been located (much to the relief of many people there) because the transmitter and antenna were then and are now some miles away from where they had been since the station first went on the air; I don't know and will never know now since, as I mentioned, I moved away from that area in summer 1975 (again, long story and OT).

Thank goodness the area in which I live today, a very small town some 30 miles and a county line from Cleveland and another 10-15 miles or so from the city's radio stations' towers (totaling 40-45 miles), doesn't have this problem. There is a small AM station near here (within five miles) but its signal doesn't bother any of my radios from an interference standpoint, except the AM tuner in my stereo system, which receives the station not only on its assigned frequency (1460 KHz) but also some 0.4 MHz down the dial as well. Since I don't listen to AM radio much, if at all, these days (most AM stations in this area are talk stations, a format I do not care for, and I haven't used the AM tuner in my stereo system literally in years because of that), this doesn't concern or bother me in the least.

BTW, I just read another reply to the OP's post, in which HD radio was mentioned. I don't know much about this new facet of AM broadcast radio, but I do know it requires special signal-processing circuitry in receivers (including car radios) which, if designed poorly or outright shoddily, can cause the problems mentioned. I am hoping, some day very soon, this problem is corrected, since it sounds as if it could be extremely annoying if it literally "locks" the car radio on one station, to the exclusion of all others in the area. If Mazda is aware of the problem (as they should be, especially after so many owners have spoken up about it), they can and should do everything in their power to remedy it as soon as possible.

Cars are not cheap (most new vehicles now start at $10,000 and go up from there), so anyone who buys one these days has the right to expect the vehicle to be trouble-free in every way, even down to the radio. It used to be, decades ago, that radios in cars were extra-cost options, but not anymore. The radio comes with the car, whether the buyer likes it or not. I had a great-aunt, now long since deceased, who bought a car without a radio; I don't think she missed it, as AM radio in those days in Cleveland (1960s-'70s) was not worth listening to, then as now. This was, of course, when one had a choice whether or not to have a radio in the car; today, as I mentioned, however, the radio comes with the car, like it or not.