Imagine your electric vehicle being charged as you drive it down the road. Pretty convenient! But as the U.S. auto industry explores such technologies to charge electric vehicles wirelessly, should AM radio broadcasters be concerned about interference?
That’s one of the topics to be explored in the Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference at the spring NAB Show.
A session about EV power will be given on Monday April 7 by Bob Weller, vice president of spectrum policy at the NAB.
According to a session preview, the association’s engineers have been studying the possible effects of wireless power transfer, or WPT, systems — not only for stationary use, as in a garage or parking lot, but more dramatically for use while a vehicle is in motion, through charging elements within the actual roadway.
NAB’s work included a visit to a prototype WPT installation in Detroit, according to the conference agenda.
Although the description didn’t specify, the facility in question is probably the short section of public roadway unveiled by the Michigan Department of Transportation and the City of Detroit in late 2023. According to the state DOT, “Using technology from Electreon, a quarter-mile segment of 14th Street is now equipped with inductive charging coils that wirelessly charge electric vehicles (EVs) as they drive, marking a pivotal step toward electrified, emission-free roads.” (Learn more about that project here.)
The NAB presentation is expected to provide background information on how WPT systems operate, including possible mechanisms for creating RF interference in the AM band, as well as some of the test results obtained by NAB.
BEITC sessions will also include talks about the High-Efficiency Broadband (HEB) Antenna; digital-only boosters for HD Radio single-frequency networks; tower safety; visual radio; EAS in virtual air chains; artificial intelligence; and continued migration to the cloud. You can peruse the BEITC agenda here.
