[Jeffhs]

That AK model 43 would probably get only one station out here where I live, in northeastern Ohio, unless a really good antenna were used. That station is a 1kW days/0.5kW nights talk station on 1460 kHz. I am about 30 miles east of Cleveland and some ten-fifteen miles further than that from most of the Cleveland radio stations, all of which have their towers located west of town.

That this AK radio does not have AGC doesn't help matters much, either, at least in weak signal areas. It would probably receive the "local" station here with decent volume during the day, but when the station cuts its output power in half after dark, I doubt if it could be heard unless the volume were turned up as high as it will go, and even then I wouldn't count on hearing much of anything. The 50kW stations from Cleveland wouldn't produce room-filling volume from this set either, because of the distance (about 35-40 miles) from the towers and the fact that some of the 5kW stations cut their power output and/or have directional signal patterns at night. You probably wouldn't hear smaller stations (under 5kW) at all on this radio unless you had a really good antenna.

I am convinced that those early Atwater Kent radios were designed and built for strong-signal areas, not more than ten miles from the nearest station(s). This probably wasn't a problem when these sets were new, as radio itself was in its infancy in the '20s-'30s and there weren't that many radio stations in those days, anyway. Those stations that were on the air at the time had no more than 100 watts of power or so; the big 50kW ones didn't appear until the '40s or '50s, with the notable exception of WLW in Cincinnati, which had a 500kW(!) transmitter in the mid-1930s. I bet anyone in Cincinnati with an AK model 43 probably could hear that station (and little or nothing else) with room-filling volume--and then some. That 500kW signal would swamp a TRF radio in no time flat. Of course, with that much power, who even needed a radio to hear it? I've read reports of people having heard WLW on bedsprings, on the burner coils of electric stoves, etc. until the FCC stepped in and declared a 50kW maximum output power limit for all U. S. AM radio stations. For folks living on farms near the station's towers in their 500-kW days, "seven hundred WLW" was the only station in town.

BTW, the 50kW rule apparently does not apply to radio stations outside the US, especially those near the border of Arizona and Mexico, some of which run as much power today as WLW was belting out in the '30s.