Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada AM radio silent; are U.S. stations next?

[wa2ise]

As for a 1KW daytimer station going dark, I wondered how such stations could have ever survived even 40 years ago. As it is, the AM band is a little overcrowded and if a daytimer goes dark, it's less interference to stations in nearby markets in the same channel. AM tends to be large regions of interference with small islands of service.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by wa2ise

As for a 1KW daytimer station going dark, I wondered how such stations could have ever survived even 40 years ago. As it is, the AM band is a little overcrowded and if a daytimer goes dark, it's less interference to stations in nearby markets in the same channel. AM tends to be large regions of interference with small islands of service.

One of the problems with the 1kW daytime station I mentioned was that, in the last year or so before it signed off permanently, it was a sports station being programmed from a satellite feed--with little or no local programming. The other problem was that this station was trying (unsuccessfully) to compete against a 50kW sports station in Cleveland; the daytimer was in a very small town that received the 50kW station (and most other radio stations in the Cleveland radio market) very well, so it is likely that listeners in the small town were tuning in to the 50kW sports station a lot more than they were listening to the smaller local one. This always means trouble for radio stations because they depend on advertising revenue to stay on the air; this is especially true for small stations in one-horse towns. The small station in the Geauga County, Ohio town I mentioned in my post is no exception. They tried everything in their power to keep from going under--among the things they tried was an attempt to get FCC approval to move to 870 kHz, so they could install a more powerful transmitter. That failed miserably; I don't know for certain why, but I have a suspicion that, since 870 kHz is only 20 kHz (0.2 MHz) up the dial from a 50kW Cleveland station at 850 (the station the 1kW daytime Geauga County station was trying to compete against), there were concerns that the two stations could interfere with each other, or worse, the Cleveland station could obliterate the smaller one. Another problem, had the Cleveland sports station moved to 870 kHz, would have been nighttime interference to 50kW WWL-AM radio in New Orleans, also on 870, unless the Cleveland station employed a very sharply directional nighttime signal pattern and reduced its nighttime power to well below 5kW (the station runs, and has run since it increased power to 50kW a few years ago, 4700 watts nighttime on 850 kHz). Yet another problem, and why the 1kW daytime Ohio station finally threw in the towel when it signed off for the last time on Memorial Day about five years ago, was that by now the station was literally falling apart--antenna towers had been improperly anchored to the ground and could have toppled in the first good windstorm, an antiquated transmitter and studio equipment, and other problems the owner just couldn't deal with any longer. The AM station went silent shortly thereafter and the owner/licensee, Music Express Broadcasting, then decided to concentrate its efforts on maintaining and operating the other station it owns, WKKY-FM 104.7 in a small town on the shores of Lake Erie.

I think the US would be better off without AM radio, as most of the stations are talk, sports or religion--formats that could easily be moved either to the Internet (streaming audio) or to FM. The problem, however, with moving underperforming AM stations to FM, especially in smaller markets, is the sheer cost of operating another station (which many cities cannot afford, especially in today's economy, to say nothing of the fact that most major cities' FM stations are running, and have been running for years or in some cases decades, established formats already and would be unwilling to switch), unless the AM station moved its programming to an existing FM station that itself was underperforming so badly it was on the verge of collapse.

Streaming audio over the Internet looks, on paper anyway, like a viable alternative to over-the-air broadcasting, but it too is very expensive to maintain once the stream is established. Unless the station's owner is sure beyond the shadow of a doubt that enough people will listen to his/her station to keep the stream online for more than just a few weeks or months, exclusively streaming a radio station over the Internet at the expense of the station's over-the-air signal is a risk few if any stations can afford to take. A small local station near the Cleveland suburb in which I grew up does stream over the Internet, but it is a talk station whose owners probably are convinced will survive since people such as myself who cannot, by virtue of the station's 42-watt directional nighttime signal, hear the over the air broadcast can log on to the station's Internet site and listen to the station's programming there.