Drop the AM day&night transmitter power to what the maximum night omni power (directional hardware shut off) is to keep interference with other AMs the same as it is, no power increase.
Kirk Bayne
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
Drop the AM day&night transmitter power to what the maximum night omni power (directional hardware shut off) is to keep interference with other AMs the same as it is, no power increase.
Kirk Bayne
Somewhat true, though what might happen is that broadcasters supported by contributions - Christian outfits, public radio, community/open-access radio - will predominate at that point. Ethnic broadcasters could also migrate to FM, and some lucky small towns may be able to keep their stations with a low-overhead, low-revenue business model. But don't think the brave new world online is going to be an ad-free audio paradise. As we're seeing in television, the migration to subscription-based online services was first fueled by freedom from advertising alongside a greater variety of choices - but as the growth curve for subscription revenue gets less and less steep, with growth ever-harder to come by, advertising is reintroduced and choices begin narrowing. TV may well end up being the same old crap that you will now get to pay for, though cable TV already got us partway to that point. Radio doesn't have that cable-TV-like "gateway drug" so the reversion to the same-old same-old in online audio media may be harder to accomplish, but don't expect your paid-for Spotify subscription to be ad-free forever. The real winners will be marketers, who will have better, more direct data with which to target their advertising or, in some cases, outright propaganda. You already see this with Facebook, X/Twitter, and so on. There's no reason it can't happen with audio.
A friend who works with high-school and college students on career development tells me that his students simply do not take radio into account. They're all listening to streams.
Ever feel like this is a message board about blacksmithing?
You're conflating two things. There's a more recent example where Cumulus owned WNSH and WMAS, both on the same frequency, and adjusted the signal of WMAS to allow WNSH to move its tower further east. These stations were later traded to Audacy. In both cases, the one you gave and the more recent one, these were possible because of the laws governing station operations. All the government did was approve the changes. They were not imposed by the government. It sounds like you're blaming the government for things done by private companies. Shouldn't private companies also take some blame?
The one thing I notice about this board is the usage of the term "radio" as being a single thing. It's not. Broadcast stations also stream, and most are in the process of transferring their audience from OTA transmission to online. If students are listening to streams, you have to be more specific. If they're strictly music streams such as Spotify or Pandora, that is a different content service than a hosted and curated audio service that we associate with radio. To people who have grown up with both, they're both on the same platform, and seen as being the same. But they're not. They're looking for content. It's up to us in the content creation business to make it available to them on all platforms, including social media. That's where we're at now.
I was last in Europe in 2022; Allouis was gone by then except for the carrier, I think RTL was about to go, but RMC was still there. I may go later this year and I wondering whether even to bother bringing my good longwave portable. I believe BBC Radio 4 is still on 198, but I'm sure there's a time limit on that.
I may have to see about getting a DAB radio when I'm over there.
Radio 4 is still on longwave, and the longwave programming has its own stream:
The use case I'm trying to solve for is that, when I'm in the Netherlands, I find that almost all local broadcasting is in Dutch - no news in English. At least the BBC World Service is on DAB, according to radiomap.eu. The need is a little less pressing in Spain or France or Wallonia or Brussels, where I speak the language.Radio 4 is still on longwave, and the longwave programming has its own stream:
some stations would get power barely in the triple digits if they went Non directional if it was predicated on not causing interference.. many stations would barely get double digits night power.
What problem does that fix solve?
When i was in Ord, NE at KNLV, the AM has 23 watt at night.... the tower is on the south end of town... i was about 2 miles away on the NW corner of town........ i could see the tower lights off in the distance and there were days that when KRCN 1060 Denver didnt power down from 50kw to 110 watts and KRLD dallas had HD on at night that it made KNLVs night signal noticeably noisy.
Staying at 1kw at night wouldve solved that problem, but gaurendarntee you it wouldve caused interference to someone else in the chain
That's a very fair point. At the same time, it seems like terrestrial radio isn't managing a transition to streaming terribly well, or at least on a basis that sustains current revenue models. Perhaps this is a factor in all the layoffs we're seeing: get the overhead down because streaming revenues just won't support former levels of staffing. Additionally, certain social media platforms take their own cut of the action, further diminishing what's left for what you would call the content provider.
RTL on 234 kHz shut down in early 2023.
RMC has been gone from 216 kHz since 2020, though the transmitter has reportedly been powered up a few times for tests. You might have caught one of those in 2022. I have not heard it myself on European SDRs for several years.
Radio 4 on 198 is still going, but will probably shut down sometime in 2025. No specific date has been released by the BBC, but the longwave outlet is living on borrowed time.
The BBC ended the “separate” programming on 198 kHz this past March, so the longwave schedule now is identical to the other Radio 4 outlets on FM, DAB, and online sources.
You know what's funny? I produce a weekly program hosted by a very wealthy man with interests in natural gas. He uses his platform to constantly preach against renewable energy and the move towards electric cars–on the latter, he and the guests he interviews all believe that the government is "forcing" EVs on consumers and that the marketplace should decide instead.
On the same line, he supports this congressional push to make sure AM receivers are still available in all cars–even the electric ones he hates so much. Why? Because he owns an AM station himself.
Another case of not only wanting their cake, but wanting to eat it too.
It's possible, then, what I heard was RTL. The radio I was using is an analog radio with slide-rule indicator. My location was in the southeast of the Netherlands.
Probably so. The RTL signal was always a blowtorch on the UTwente SDR in the east of The Netherlands.
Edit to add: Polish Radio is still going on 225 kHz, once adjacent to RTL on 234.
Last edited:
It depends on the station. Once again, radio is not one thing. It's thousands of stations and hundreds of owners.
The transition will not be one-for-one. Ad rates for online are much lower, and you can't do the number of impressions the advertisers want if you're not a linear service. So they will NOT sustain current revenue levels. They HAVE to diversify. Look at the music industry as an example. The labels made more money when they were selling physical product. They had to take a haircut when distribution went digital. That is simply the reality we all have to face with digital. The only people making money in the digital world are ISPs and tech companies.
So yes, the layoffs will continue until radio companies are staffed differently, and build on user-generated content like this message board rather than paying staff with salaries and benefits.
True; that said, there are aggregate trends which combined provide an overall picture. There may be individual circumstances that differ. Sometimes they stand out precisely because they differ and thus are not indicative of overall trends.
Almost all the people who made money in California's Gold Rush were the ones selling suppliers to the prospectors.
In order to do that, they may have to ditch transmitters and fully embrace the digital mindset. The transmitters come with obligations and tend to frame thinking in certain ways. (This is why the remaining terrestrial broadcasters may almost all be non-commercial and will have to solicit money by other means.) I absolutely hate to write a sentence like that, but I spent 30+ years in technology and saw what happened when people hung on to technologies that were in a declining phase.
I still wonder what the unintended consequences of abandoning free over-the-air broadcasting will be. Having to pay VerizonTMobileCharterCast for any audio access might mean they charge anything they want for data.
Anymore terrestrial transmission facilities are considered just another content delivery method than they are a big part of the product. Radio and local TV management would like nothing more than ditch the hassle and expense of transmitters, towers, antennas, and links. I suspect like what we're seeing with AM, as the audience that grew up-on or relies on OTA transmission for their news and entertainment eventually dies off, that's when you'll see a transition away from transmitters and towers.
This is very sad to me.
I've always had a fascination with radio, and I've often thought about going into the business, but I find myself holding myself back from going forward, especially over the past few years, because the "traditional" OTA radio industry seems to have no future, and while I won't completely close the door on them, I would prefer to avoid working at anon-commercial and/or low power station if I can help it, unless it is reputable and professionally operated; I volunteered at an LPFM in Ukiah back in 2008-2010, and that was all I could stand because it was so poorly run, and any attempt at improving anything was passive-aggressively blocked by the people in charge (they eventually pushed me out altogether). I'm sure not all are quite that bad, but the experience definitely soured me, to the point that I wanted nothing at all to do with anything radio for a full decade.
Given the current state of affairs, I almost wish I hadn't been so reluctant, as I fear that that decade (2010-2020) was the last time I would've had any opportunities at all, and I've now mostly squandered them.
Can anyone tell me I'm wrong?
c
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Simply put, KABC is owned by Cumulus, and is their only station in the market (mostly because no one else wants it now). It exists solely to clear Westwood One programming in market #2. They have no actual interest in serving the market and their programming is pretty much irrelevant with near-zero demand.
They already had a high powered (grandfathered signal) FM, KLOS, but they sold it to independent operator Meruelo Media four years ago. That should tell you how little they care about L.A. and its audience.