The FCC’s AM Radio failure

The AM band in the continental United States has 117 possible frequencies between 540 kHz and 1710 kHz. I live in an urban area in the Northeast, yet at night there is only one local AM station that has a moderately decent signal, and it’s running automated ESPN. There are several New York stations that come in weakly (WOR, WABC, WCBS, WFAN). Why is this the condition of AM radio in 2011? (when I say FCC, I really mean Congress and the FCC)

AM radio -was- Radio until the early 1960s, when FM started being offered in car radios as an extra cost option. AM radio actually gets to you mostly through the ground, not through the air. (see groundwave propagation). But once the sun sets, the AM radio waves start to bounce off the ionosphere in the atmosphere. This allows transmission of the signals very long distances but also creates interference. If you turn on an AM radio in the middle of the night, you’ll hear noise that is actually coming from Europe since the sun is up there, but hasn’t risen here yet.

So when the NAB and NBC and the other early players in radio were deciding what radio would be, they decided on a compromise. During the day, lots of folks could run local stations (avoiding having a station on adjacent frequencies nearby), but once the sun goes down, the “big guys” in radio (NBC, CBS, ABC, Westinghouse) would get almost complete control over those channels – most frequencies were occupied with “clear channel” signals at 50kW that could be heard over most of the country. Local stations were relegated to only a few frequencies on the upper end of the band if they wanted to keep on broadcasting at night (1230,1240,1340,1400,1450,1490). Most AM stations had to turn off the transmitter when the sun set.

Before TV, satellites and cheaper long distance phone service, being able to hear radio stations hundreds of miles away was very useful. It was the way people knew what was going on in the country until the newspaper showed up in the morning. Only big stations could afford to be connected to AT&T’s coaxial cable to be connected to a network. Long distance AM was a matter of national security.

When FM became viable, the FCC granted an automatic license to every AM station if they wanted it with the same call sign. They didn’t want the FM signals to just be simulcasts but to have different programming – FM radio is much more suited for music than AM and doesn’t suffer from static.

So for the next 25 years, the government just let the status quo ride. Most of the effort was to handing out new FM licenses. As people (other than old timers and odd people) moved their listening to FM, AM radio didn’t change. KDKA, KSL, WBZ, WBT, KMOX kept broadcasting on clear channel frequencies at night when fewer and fewer people were listening. Your local stations either stopped at sunset or were very low power and could be heard only for a couple miles from the tower. They might hire a local kid for minimum wage to spin records – computers and automation hadn’t arrived yet. At midnight, most of the stations turned off the transmitter.

During the Reagan era, the FCC was pushed to finally start reforming the AM band over the loud objections of the established radio interests and the DXers (people with the hobby of trying to listen to far away radio stations). The FCC stopped issuing new daytime only licenses. All new AM stations would get a night time license, but at such a low power level that they wouldn’t interfere with existing stations.

Their hope was that AM would become more market driven – that radio stations would buy and sell their footprint so that radio would be heard where people actually wanted to hear it. Many clear channel stations were made directional so they would not cover an entire half of the country. But there was no follow through – the turf that the clear channel stations no longer covered were mostly not reused by regional or local stations and just have no service at all. The only substantial change that I’m aware of was WOWO-AM in Fort Wayne Indiana was purchased by the company that owned WLIB-AM in New York City so it could downgrade WOWO’s signal and WLIB-AM could then stay on the air at night in New York City 580 miles away.

Then the FCC decided to do the Expanded Band experiment. Up until 1993, AM radio ended at 1610 kHz. The upper limit was raised to 1700 kHz, but existing radios didn’t have the ability to hear those stations. Rather than opening the band to new competition, the FCC protected the interests of existing radio station owners (See: NAB) and offered existing stations the option to get a second license, with the promise that at the end of five years – by which time there would be a critical mass of car radios that went to 1700 – that the stations would turn in their existing license or turn back in the expanded band license.

When the five years was up, the dual lcense stations refused to turn them back in – some had already been sold off and moved to another city (like the current incarnation of WVON-AM on 1690 in Chicago owned by Clear Channel) In the entire country, there are only 54 surviving Expanded band licenses and most of those are in legal limbo still. There has been no effort to encourage new broadcasters to license stations in that band.

Perhaps AM radio no longer serves any useful purpose. Internet streaming totally replaces the need for 50 kw clear channel AM radio – but if the “protection” those stations receive was removed, would anyone then start building new AM radio stations? I tend to doubt it.

So you want the government in charge of your health care?