Thursday, July 18, 2024

Meanwhile, in Radio News

AM radio is pretty much dead in Europe.

At one point, when I was a kid, I attended a regional junior high school that was almost an hour's bus ride away. Four or five kids brought transistor radios with them and, by unspoken agreement, all were tuned to the same AM rock station. Few things were as unmelodious as a busload of kids sining along to Lightning Strikes.

Here, radio stations have been pushing politicians to keep AM. Which, if you think has anything really to do with public safety, contact me for the rights to collect tolls over the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

8 comments:

  1. In my entire existence, I've never understood the appeal of AM radio. The signals were always weak, there was way too much static, and then at night for some godforsaken reason it got worse to where Cuban broadcasts (I lived in central Florida) were interfering with our local stations.

    Most of the sports radio were AM, which was terrible as a sports fan to keep up. When the NFL games moved to FM broadcasts I cheered.

    In the hurricanes I've been through, the FM stations were working just fine.

    I understand that there's a limit to the number of FM stations you can have in a regional market, and with direct services and streaming nowadays things should be switching to WiFi anyway. But AM is an outdated format, and needs to go away.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The biggest problem with AM radio and EV’s is interference. The amount of shielding necessary to make an AM radio work in an EV’s is significant and still not that effective. A Tesla owner I know (yes, bought before the real crazy started) never even knew he couldn’t tune in AM because he’d never tried. He also won’t sell it right now because the price cuts have destroyed his equity, so he’s gonna run it into the ground and hope the battery craps out before the warranty so it costs them money.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AM in America or as it is more commonly known: hate radio.

    -Doug in Sugar Pine

    ReplyDelete
  4. Clete Purcell is right: 40% of the people in this country would be OK with firing up the ovens as long as they were upwind of the smoke.

    ReplyDelete
  5. In defense of AM, it did allow my friends and I in Western Mass to listen to Chickenman on WKBW Buffalo, NY 50,000 watt clear channel nightly at 9,

    ReplyDelete
  6. And let’s not forget Wolfman Jack.

    In college, I listened to the CBS evening news on WBBM. And the Osgood Files.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I haven't listened to AM Radio since I got an FM adapter to put in my 4/8-Track tape player. Back then it was Album Rock instead of bubble-gum music. Now I've been told AM is just sports and hate radio. Don't bother with the first one and it's a "no way" for the second one

    ReplyDelete
  8. I once drove from Eureka Ca. to Missoula Montanna for a woods job. Once I got away from the coast, AM was all there was to help me stay awake on the road. Lots of Country and Western, or talk shows, or sports. Sure, FM is great but out in those parts, AM was all I could get.
    w3ski

    ReplyDelete

House Rules #1, #2 and #6 apply to all comments. Rule #3 also applies to political comments.

In short, don't be a jackass. THIS MEANS YOU!
If you never see your comments posted, see Rule #7.

All comments must be on point and address either the points raised in the blog post or points raised by commenters in response.
Any comments that drift off onto other topics are subject to deletion.

(Please don't feed the trolls.)

中國詞不評論,冒抹除的風險。僅英語。

COMMENT MODERATION IS IN EFFECT UFN. This means that if you are an insulting dick, nobody will ever see it.