well its official
 

the last AM station in my city of approx 350,000 signed off this week..the local AM band is now officially a vacant wasteland.i virtually never listen to AM but it seems strange and worth noting as the end of an era nonetheless

I hope this is not the begining of a trend. I listen to AM almost exclusively. If FM went away here I probably would not miss it. I could not do without AM and Shortwave. To me that is real radio.

We lost one of our FM stations a few years back when they moved one town over (the second time that's happened in the past 70 years). We now have one remaining station which is both AM and FM. The AM side is limping by on an ancient WWII era transmitter and tower system with disentegrated ground planes. I figure it's just a matter of time before they shut the AM down.

That's astonishing.
There seems to be some weird agglomeration of radio stations going on in the Boston market -- with one or two old-guard stations moving to HD subchannels.

I don't think the future is very bright for OTA analog radio :-(

over the last couple of years we've picked up a couple new fm stations here in town as the AM stations swapped thier licenses/call letters and formats and moved their operations over to,one assumes,the more viable FM band..as irrelevent as AM has been to me,it does seem strange that there is no longer any local AM,the entire band has now been abandoned...tho i guess it does make for a pretty quiet dial for DX'ing LOL

Oh no, I love AM radio. I listen to it every night and sometimes during the day. There are many great stations in my listening area, I hope they don't start disappearing here too. I hate the way things are headed in 2009:uzi: '09

Nothing seems to be going away around here. The airwaves are crowded.

I mostly just listen to AM here too. I haven't lived anywhere with anything good on FM in so many years, that over that time I've slowly sold or junked every single one of my FM radios. All I have left that gets FM are my 2 combo TV sets.

Eventually, we'll probably all have to get small transmitters for our radios, like for the TVs. Last night I plugged my computer into the ext. mod. input of my signal generator, and used it as an AM transmitter, wouldn't go more than a few feet though.

We still have the same amount of AM stations that we've always had; but, the format is, unfortunately, not the same on many of them. We have three black gospel stations, one white southern gospel station, and two talk stations. I have picked up a few music (oldies and country) stations at night and I often listen to KMOX's "Route 66" oldies program on Saturday night.

Maybe we won't be forced into using a transmitter for a few more years, anyway.

I listen to classical music on FM, we only have the one FM classical music station left. Kind of sad really.

The only time I listen to AM is when we have an earthquake so I can figure out how bad it was.

Strange to think of no AM stations being available.

Wow, I guess we're pretty lucky here between Chicago and Milwaukee. We have at least one of every format all over AM and FM even a heavy/death metal station that plays at night. I think it's still called "Rebel Radio" I was in the Detroit area of Mi recently and all there was for music on most stations was hair bands, somewhat unpopular '70s rock and country. Across the whole state. It drove me nuts and I was happy when our stations started to appear in the static. Everywhere else I've been I mostly listened to CDs and wasn't alone for the trip, the last time I searched for stations far away from home was back in '00 when I went to Vegas with my Dad, there was some pretty good stuff in most of the states we went through then.

Yes, we're pretty lucky near the IL/WI border. Lots to listen too :music:. I tend to work on my projects late at night while listening to shows like the Twilight Zone on a vintage radio.

I'd forgotten about Rebel Radio - I think I listened to that back in the early 90s :guitar:

Pretty sorry here in Seattle/Tacoma. Three foam-at-the-mouth talkers (one owned by a "religious" network), two "business" talkers, three "religious", two black gospel/Motown oldies, ESPN just got the CBS affilliate's AM, NBC gone for over a decade since the passing of a local broadcast pioneer (now AirAmerica and beating conservative talk in some time-slots), two Latino, one Korean, one Indian, no classical, no jazz, two sports-talk, one "old people" oldies, no 50's oldies, no country. Just not the same as when I started AM DXing around 1966. Just Entercom and ClearChannel divvying-up whatever they can wrestle away from local owners. I am so grateful for CBS bringing us "JACK-FM", which I wake up to on my GE stereo clock-radio every weekday.

One station (WATJ 1560) in the next county south of here (a rural area some 40 miles east of Cleveland) went off the air for good, after going through no fewer than four formats. It first signed on as a daytime-only 1kW station in 1969, had a top-40 format at first; then, about ten years later (!) went to oldies, then talk, then, the last few years of its life, it was running a sports-talk format from Sporting News Radio. It signed off for the last time at 5 p.m. on Memorial Day 2004, IIRC. Hasn't been heard from since. I tried to call their business office a week or so later, but their phone had since been disconnected; this proved to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that they were off the air for good, never to return.

They couldn't return to the air anyway even if they wanted to, since the frequency they were on, 1560 kHz, is the full-time home of WQEW-AM "Radio Disney" in New York--which is the senior station on that frequency; the smaller station tried to get permission from the FCC to move to 870 kHz and operate full-time, but was turned down because that frequency is too close to a Cleveland station on 850. One other problem WATJ (the Ohio station I've been referring to) had was that, even if they were to stay on 1560, they would run into problems with a station in Toledo (and others in northwestern Ohio) on that frequency; there were other problems as well that eventually forced the station to turn in its license for cancellation, and throw in the towel for good. The FCC no longer issues new daytime-only AM radio licenses either, so WATJ couldn't possibly return as a daytimer today--again, even if it wanted to.

This station had its share of problems, however, in the short time it was on. The towers weren't well anchored into the ground and were on the verge of toppling, the aging transmitter (very likely the same transmitter they had had since they first signed on 35 years before) likely had problems one after another as well, and, if all that was not bad enough, the station, after it switched to the Sporting News Radio format, found itself unable to compete with a Cleveland station (now known as WKNR) that had itself just switched to ESPN Radio and increased its daytime power to 50kW. The signal pattern of the Cleveland station encompassed the area formerly covered by the 1kW daytimer so well that the latter couldn't hope to compete with it anymore--if it ever could have in the first place. One thing led to another and, as they say, the rest is history.

I wonder how Jack FM manages to stay within the letter of the law, considering the FCC's rules which require radio stations to operate in the public interest as a condition for license renewal. Their slogan is "we play what we want", which is certainly not my idea of operating in the public interest; however, radio stations have been operating like this for decades, before Jack-FM was even thought of--ever since they stopped, for the most part, taking listener requests.

Thank goodness there are no Jack FM stations in Cleveland, although several of the city's FMs are now CBS Radio O&Os (owned and operated stations); hey, I'd better keep my mouth shut. I just might turn on my stereo tomorrow morning and find Jack FM on 105.7, which is currently Cleveland's classic hits (what they once called oldies) station. The classic-hits station is currently operated by Clear Channel (!), as are most other local FMs not operated by CBS, but you can never tell; CC may decide to sell its O&Os nationwide to CBS before too long. No telling what might become of those stations after that.

When JACK came to Seattle, the "we play what we want" mantra was there from day one. It replaced an all-80's station that was running out of steam fast, then gave me a chance to win Stones tickets, and played some stuff that helped me forget my wife (driven off, in part, by all my radio/TV collecting).

Nickelback's How you remind me
Garbage's Special
and XTC's Peter Pumpkinhead, to name a few.

The remaining classic rock station here had adopted a "we won't play any artist without a legitimate body of recordings" policy, so we here are doomed to hear a short-list of songs once considered a treat being worn-out for good.

I always got a big kick when they named stations after a common male name. Here in Pittsburgh, we have "Bob FM" on 96.9 Kc. I think Greensburg has a "Sam FM" (SAM -Simply About Music) as well. I think somebody told me there was a "Ted-FM" in Columbus or Cleveland, Ohio.

I don't listen to much radio anymore, but happened upon WBCN this evening, and was shocked to find they're going off the air at midnight!

WBCN has been a landmark radio station for more than 40 years here in Boston, and for many years was a model for FM stations in other markets.

Ouch! The times they are a changin'..

bs

We have a SAM-FM at 94.3 here in Ark. There's also a Jack-FM on 93.9 coming from West Plains, MO. Both equally good stations, alongside 100.5 The Eagle (KEGI Jonesboro)

Nor do I (which is probably why they're all going away)...

I heard on the AM radio news (WBZ) this morning that WBCN's last broadcast song was Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which seemed pretty fitting.

I miss having a Jack station available. Outside of one or two bright spots, this area is a bit of a radio wasteland.

We had a "Jack" station; but, it left almost as fast as it came. The station went from rap, Jack, country, and now it's ESPN sports talk radio. We also had a "Sam" station that lasted about a year and then they changed the format. It seems like many stations in my area change format every time the wind changes direction. Oh, and if you really want to see radio wasteland; come to Meridian, MS. I've already mentioned what's on AM. FM consist of several country stations, a couple variety '80's-present top 40 stations, about 3 R&B/hip-hop stations, one sports talk station, one or two religious stations, and a classic rock station that mainly plays well known stuff over and over. I haven't used the tuner, for extended periods, on my stereo in years. I also really hate that real local DJ's are almost a thing of the past. We have a classic country station that receives it's programming via satellite amd it's like listening to a CD player set to shuffle play + the commercials. We used to have a typical FM "play the same top 10 songs over and over" oldies station. They pretty much dropped the oldies format and went with '70's rock songs with a few '60's songs mixed in. Then, they canned that format and went with hip-hop crap, which it's been for about 4 years now.

Talking about Jack stations, we in NYC had our oldies station WCBS-FM be jacked on a Friday afternoon several years ago. Ratings dropped, and after about 2 years of jack, they brought back the "classic hits" station (seems "oldies" is a dirty word in the broadcast industry nowadays), though they play much less pre-Beatle songs and added some 80's hits. But we were happy to have it back, as ratings went back up to place the station in the top 5 of NYC.

We have an oldies station here in 94.5 Kc, WWSW-FM, and the "oldies" they play are songs from Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Falco, and other 80's songs. Dang, I was in high school when I listened to these songs, it is funny hearing them on an oldies station.

I've been noticing over the years that Canadian AM is slowly dying. What I can't find out is precisely why the CRTC is moving AM stations to FM. I really miss hearing CBA (CBC Moncton) and CBL (CBC Toronto) at night. Yes, I can get them on the internet but it's not the same thing.

AM for me during the day is pretty useless.
1. ClearChannel Corp. all-talk
2. Mix of religious and infomercials
3. NPR(!)
4. All-sports
5,6. Spanish. If they played anything else than 24 hour a day salsa maybe I'd give 'em a listen.

Tom

Years ago I could find some Canadian AM stations rebroadcast in the 49M (6MHz) shortwave broadcast band. Probably for people widely scattered in the tundra areas.

jeeeez, i miss the am stations of the mid '60s.
WABC and cousin brucie,
WKBW in buffalo, joey reynolds (and 'chicken man'!)
WLS, Chicago
WOWO ft wayne in.
WBZ out of beantown

and more i cant remember right now.

great stations, all!

edit-i never realized halifax ns had 350,000 people. WOW!

well it's properly known as the Halifax Regional Municipality nowadays[AKA- HRM].what was really always one place anyway was until a few years ago made up of two separately incorporated cities just across the harbour from one another,as well as a town and a few other places...it was all amalgamated into one local govt a few years back...and the official population count went up accordingly..tho it pretty much always has been the largest canadian city east of Montreal

WBZ is alive and well... news/talk (mostly news); they do it much better than most AM stations with that format. I listen to 'em on the drive in to work regularly.

now that we mention it, i still tune in to 'wbz-radio 103' once in a great while. even tho i'm a hunnert miles away from their tower, i can still pick up their a.m. in the daytime.

dave maynard
don kent
forget the rest...

I have two local am stations one is talk radio and the other was playing Music of your life. Which wasn't too bad. Sure it repeated a little and a few clunker songs. Sadly they switched to Americas best music and I now get nauseous from all the bad Disney soundcraps. So now I have to wait till dark sets in to listen to am740 Toronto. I guess I will have to get started building a transmitter.

I get 'em at night. Whatever became of David Brudnoy?

Was that the one around 1070?

Passed away in 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brudnoy

The migration of hit music from AM to FM has been going on at least 25 years. It's to the point now where AM radio in most cities is talk, sports and/or religion, with few if any music stations. One of the best AM music stations I listened to after all the AMs in Cleveland went to talk formats was WKBW in Buffalo, New York. They even had a former top-40 disk jockey from Cleveland (Jack Armstrong), who had been on at least two Cleveland stations in the 1960s. I remember him best on the former WIXY radio (1260, now WWMK Radio Disney), and later 50kW WKYC-1100 in Cleveland (now newstalk WTAM), from 1965-'74. I'll never forget how he used to scream at the top of his voice "Big Jack YOUR LEADER!" every chance he got. It amazed me that he didn't lose his voice from all that yelling.

When WKBW (KB-1520) finally went all-talk a couple years ago, they let Armstrong go; where he wound up, I may never know. Maybe he found work at a little 250-watt station in a small Southern town; that wouldn't surprise me, as he did work for at least one station in the Carolinas after leaving Cleveland. However, since most big-city stations today are automated, the demand for live DJs is not as pressing as it was in the '50s through the end of the 1980s, so I think Armstrong may well have retired after he was fired by the Buffalo station.

Add to this the fact that many of the few live DJs there are left will voice-track their shows on several different stations, and we now know why AM radio is dying a slow death in most of the US--and the FM stations in those areas, especially those FMs operated by Clear Channel and CBS Radio (which, combined, own some 90 percent of all American FM radio stations) are following suit as well. Clear Channel operates, among others in the Cleveland area, the "classic hits" (what was formerly referred to as oldies) station, and it would not surprise me one bit if their one afternoon DJ, who seems to be on the air almost continuously from three p. m. until midnight, is live during the first four hours of his program and voicetracked the rest of the time.

I don't listen to the station (or any Cleveland FM station) much anymore, preferring, rather, to listen to Internet radio (which has a much wider variety of music than today's terrestrial FM or AM stations) and my own music collection, so I'm only guessing, but I think a lot of their programming after the jerks on the morning show (Lanigan and Malone, 5:30-10am weekdays) leave the air (thank heavens they are off the air for the day by the time I get up in the morning) may well be voicetracked or otherwise automated, as the DJs do not give time checks as they once did, and the comments they make on the air (what little they are allowed to say between songs) are not, by and large, IMHO, worth listening to.

Commercials? The classic-hits station, probably like all stations today, runs seemingly endless strings of those obnoxious things several times an hour, which is one reason I don't listen to the station much these days. I have never actually counted how many songs this station (or any of the CC/CBS Radio O&Os--owned and operated stations--in Cleveland) actually plays in an hour; however, it might be an eye-opener if I did so some day. As a stab-in-the-dark guess, however, I would say most stations in this area play perhaps 30-40 minutes of actual music, if that much (!), with commercials filling in the other 20 minutes or so.

Sheeeesh! I know radio stations need to run a certain number of commercials an hour to stay on the air, but for crying out loud, this business of running strings of them every hour is too much. The day the FCC decided to deregulate radio broadcasting was the day that agency made a huge mistake, IMO, and when commercial radio started going down the drain as well. :no:

I could not believe what happened to Cleveland's Music of Your Life station a few years ago. The format was on a 10kW day/5kW night station for years; then, when the FCC decided to give AM stations the option of increasing their day or night power (or both), with directional antennas if need be, the Cleveland station immediately applied for and received permission to raise its daytime power to 50kW. The night power was and still is 4.7 kW. However, shortly (very shortly) after this station increased its power, it dropped the Music of Your Life format and replaced it--with ESPN. :no:

The MoYL format then disappeared for good from the radio dials (AM and FM) in northeastern Ohio--well, I guess it's not quite that bad, although it is as far as commercial radio stations in my area are concerned. There is a small FM station operated by a school district in Geauga County, Ohio, however, about 20 miles south of where I live, that plays big band and 30s-50s standards. The station is WKHR-FM, 91.5 MHz, and the station has an excellent signal everywhere in Lake and eastern Cuyahoga counties of Ohio; they also have an Internet audio stream at www.wkhr.org for folks listening over their computers at the office or at home (the stream sounds excellent when listened to on a good stereo system), or who live in areas the station's over-the-air signal does not reach. The only things I wonder about with that station are their student DJs, all of whom are far too young to remember any of the music they play over that station; after all, just about every track played over WKHR was recorded decades before these young people were born.

I can't help but wonder if these kids aren't all but bored to tears, having to listen for hours to music (through headphones in the studio) that is almost certainly decades older than they are. I wouldn't be surprised if, at the end of their air shifts, these kids immediately turn on their car stereos to the loudest FM rock station they can find (or they plug in their iPods to their car stereos and run the volume so high the thing can be heard outside the car for blocks around, with the windows closed), for the ride back home; after all, today's commercial FM radio stations play music today's teens and young adults can relate to. I honestly do not believe high-school or college radio DJs are required to listen to their school's radio station exclusively, after hours, as DJs at commercial stations often must because of possible problems with conflicts of interest, advertising restrictions, etc. if they listen to any other local radio station than the one for which they work--even after these folks are finished for the day or on weekends. Hmmmm. :scratch2:

I managed to pull in a grand total of 2 AM stations just now. Sad.

I did just hear Chicago's "You're the Inspiration" on FM.

Now paying, " Love Will Find a Way"......Pablo Cruise?

Now, America's "Ventura Highway"...

His immediate replacement has also since passed away. Having that slot at WBZ is apparently akin to being keyboardist for the Grateful Dead (or drummer for Spinal Tap).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Cruise

Never thought I'd miss the sappy sound of 70's E-Z listening, but after listening to current stuff I suppose it wasn't so bad after all. I used to have these guys mixed up with Player (Baby come back).

BTW, the bumper music I'm listening to on a podcast as I type this is Bruce Cockburn's If I had a rocket launcher. :banana:

I can't pull in many AM stations here (except at night, when I get mainland Chinese ones almost like pulling in shortwave!), but I recently learned that the main AM station I like to listen to --probably the best of the few English-language stations here-- is actually broadcasting now in AM STEREO! I have to rig up an AM stereo receiver, to give that a listen! :yes:


On the sad side, there are subtle (and not-so-subtle) signs that the government has insidious plans to either shut down or greatly alter the station and its management, probably because it is a free-speaking station that is perhaps more outspoken on certain issues than the Mainland Central Government is comfortable with. Not exactly censorship, but clearly there are some behind-the-scenes struggles and differences of opinion about the station, and I fear for its longevity in any form that I'll want to continue listening to. But so far, they remain a decent station and a visible token reminder that we live in a "one country, TWO systems" environment here. The government cannot and will not be too obviously seen to be doing anything too harmful to the station, as it would hurt their image and the image of Hong Kong, perhaps too much... but they will patiently and persistently try to accomplish their ends in more subtle (if not devious) ways, no doubt.

Interesting. AM stations here in the US were experimenting with stereo transmission about twenty years ago (there was at least one AM stereo station in the Cleveland, Ohio area at the time), but the idea never caught on. :no: I remember one all-news station in Chicago in the late '80s (WMAQ-AM 670, now WSCR ESPN sports) that was also transmitting in AM stereo, but they gave up on that experiment as well when they were sold and changed their format several years later.

I don't know if AM stereo receivers are even available new-in-box anymore; if they are, you may be looking quite a while before you find one, except perhaps on the used market (i.e. eBay or Craigslist). At least that's how it stands here in the US. I have yet to actually see an AM stereo receiver up close, although I saw ads for them here and there in ad flyers in my Sunday newspaper, etc. when the system was finally approved for use by US radio stations.

BTW, I'm amazed that Hong Kong has few if any AM radio stations. It may be, as it is here in the US, that FM radio in Hong Kong is more popular by far than AM these days--forcing many AM stations off the air or to run automated formats, as several AM stations in my area near Cleveland, Ohio have done over the last few years. Two examples: The local AM station here (actually about five miles from my apartment) was a fairly good local news and music station until a year or so ago, when it was sold and the new owner switched it to nearly 100-percent syndicated satellite programming; the same happened to a station near where I grew up. The latter was also a music station for 40-odd years, but its owner recently decided there was more money in talk radio, so five years ago or so that station was flipped from oldies to 100-percent satellite talk.

The foregoing is a very sad commentary on the state of United States AM radio in the 21st century, but unfortunately the owners of those stations care only about their bottom line (read money), so they have decided in most cases, of necessity, to flip their stations from music to talk. (Most stations, in fact almost all 50kW stations, in U.S. major cities are now talk, news, sports or religion.) Even that isn't enough to save some very small local stations from floundering; many such stations have been forced off the air due to financial difficulties, problems maintaining aging equipment and towers they cannot afford to replace (this actually happened to a station some 20 miles south of here about five years ago), and so on.

U.S. AM radio is not the powerhouse it once was; in fact, it is but a shadow of its former self these days. It wouldn't surprise me if some day all AM stations here either left the air entirely or moved to FM, leaving the AM broadcast band all but quiet as a mouse--except at night, when one might hear a few stations from other countries. The big money these days is in FM and Internet radio, so I think AM's demise may be a lot closer than we may think.