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AM Radio is dying
- Thread starter Ronnie Milsoup
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I have to agree, but you are playing moderator again. We have several of those already!
Quote/reply from Archie Bunker to two other prior quotes from All In The Family.
Oh, and just for the record, I don't play moderator. I may 'vote' for something though.
Just keep him away from Andrew Mellon, his Treasury Secretary, who steered Hoover into an election drubbing in 1932."We could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!"
Mellon had solid business sense, but was oblivious to the devastating social impact of his own policies.
KALW San Francisco was on the air in 1941 at 42.1 MHz. Thus it claims to be the oldest FM station on the West Coast. It was marked as a non-commercial educational station, but I don't know if that was because of the frequency or because the station requested it.
In retrospect, it's hard to believe Hoover chose to run again in '32, or that his party would nominate him.
That's an inference, indicative but possibly not conclusive. More after the next couple of quotes.
So, from that, I gather that the answer is that either the data are not available or that the data have been aggregated in such a way that makes it impossible to break out types of units.
These are also inferences and observations that indicate the possibility of declining sales, but they're not direct measurements. I'm not saying you're wrong, but what I'm getting from this is that the direct data don't exist.
Someone arguing the other side of the question could point to the fact that radios are still being sold, and it seems like the Chinese are pumping them out like nobody's business (i.e. look at Amazon) as indicative that radio sales are still viable. Again, indicative but not conclusive. It starts appearing like a matter of opinion.
There's a reason I'm going down this path: a field of business that's been around a certain amount of time develops its own dogma and "conventional wisdom" that gets reinforced because no one (or few) perceived as having credibility and professional knowledge questions that dogma and conventional wisdom - out of fear of loss of business, loss of face, or just going along to get along, who knows?
That would be an interesting survey if done properly and could help answer the question with more conclusiveness. Where we seem to be right now in this type of query is that we have indications and anecdotal observations, which rely upon a number of assumptions in order to build a more complete picture. There's nothing wrong with assumptions, in fact you can't do predictive modeling without them, but all involved should at least make those assumptions explicit to help avoid the trap of getting caught in dogmatic ways of thinking.
Aside from my approach which is somewhat challenging to accept, an easy implication to accept is that radios are bought by people who want to listen to something; radio programmers seem to be giving them fewer reasons to buy those devices.
You do know what Herbert Hoover did before he became president, don't you?"We could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!"
We seem to be in a replay of that now with the Silicon Valley billionaires and certain ones who have suddenly latched onto Trump.
Hoover won in 1928 in part due to his effectiveness in providing aid to devasted Europe after World War I, and his abilities as Secretary of Commerce, including cleaning up and regulating radio broadcasting, which had become anarchic, with resulting interference and public frustration. That's why the Federal Radio Commission, the FCC's ancestor, was created.
The AM Band in 15 years going to sound like just static
And alot of RFI
And alot of RFI
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
But ... exactly what date in 1941? I ask because on August 11, 1941, K45LA first went on the air at 44.5 mc and is today's KRTH at 101.1 Mhz ... KALW's own page on the subject says they were licensed in March but they say September 1 was the first day of "regular broadcasts". Having the license does not make you first if someone else got on the air before you finished constructing the facilities.
And this article in Broadcasting from January 20, 1941 indicates that K45LA had gotten their grant. No mention of any other CPs issued in California.
Call me skeptical, but ...
Are you going for his KKK connections? Hoover didn't cause the stock market crash; he inherited the conditions that caused it! That said, "All in the Family" was parodying the bigot angle and by extension, the idea that "we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again".
Going back a few posts regarding sound quality: I have an aircheck recorded in 1982 from an AM station I worked for at the time. It was recorded off the air on my cheap home stereo system. The sound quality was almost as good as our FM sister station, despite the ancient transmitter and the old tube board in the studio. But even then there was some slight electro-magnetic interference (probably from a fluorescent light in a nearby bathroom). Things have gone waaaaay downhill since then!
I think it was the other site because I haven't posted in the DX section on this site very much.
I once started a thread whose name was something like "Larry the Cable Guy after eating chili". I was hoping to make a recording but never found a way.
And I had a similar experience this morning, on FM! I don't know where that noise was coming from on my kitchen radio. It eventually went away but at one point it was like Larry the Cable Guy after eating beans, but not chili. But constant. It wasn't that loud to begin with and I fixed it by moving the antenna, but then it came back.
I once started a thread whose name was something like "Larry the Cable Guy after eating chili". I was hoping to make a recording but never found a way.
And I had a similar experience this morning, on FM! I don't know where that noise was coming from on my kitchen radio. It eventually went away but at one point it was like Larry the Cable Guy after eating beans, but not chili. But constant. It wasn't that loud to begin with and I fixed it by moving the antenna, but then it came back.
Post #69: https://radiodiscussions.com/threads/am-radio-is-dying.772772/post-6745472
Don't people read?
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
The CP for KALW was granted 8/14/1940 according to the station's FCC history cards; Broadcasting magazine the following week had that date as 8/15/1940. That Broadcasting page also answered another question that I had upthread. There were reserved channels for non-commercial, educational stations: five channels, 42.1 to 42.9 MHz. (footnote 1) KALW was granted 1,000 watts on 42.1 MHz.
The history cards state the following grant and/or application dates (grant dates unless otherwise noted):
2/27/1941 - amend CP for new transmitter
3/12/1941 application date - license to cover
3/27/1941 - extend CP to 5/14/1941
5/14/1941 - extend CP to 8/14/1941
9/18/1941 - license to cover granted
Broadcasting had a list of FM station permits and statuses in its August 18, 1941 issue. There were 53 of them. For KALW, it listed: "KALW, Board of Education of the San Francisco Unified School District, 42.1 mc, 1,000 watts, now on the air". (footnote 2)
In that same list, K45LA is indicates as having "special commercial authorization". I didn't dig further to see what that was about.
There's not much in the way of contemporary local attestation of KALW that I could find. It was situated within the SFUSD's Samuel Gompers Trade School, which offered numerous free classes for a variety of manual skills and may have been used later in 1941 for defense-related radio training. The trade school was at the center of controversy in 1941 after its principal had been demoted and a grand jury report questioned the effectiveness of the training programs at the school. Ironically considering its name, at least one union local also lodged protests against the school's offerings of machinists' training. I found a few Bay Area newspaper articles that indicated KALW had a chief engineer by July 1941, K. L. Dragoo, who was teaching defense-oriented radio classes in Palo Alto as well.
So where does that leave us? I've often said that it can be impossible to determine who was the "first" with something or another related to radio. That may be the case here.
Lacking contemporary attestation, I have to fall back on speculation: the district felt it was ready to go in March 1941 when it filed for the license to cover. It took the Commission six months to make the grant. Broadcasting reported the station on the air in August, a month before the grant. The station may have been on the air from time to time while awaiting the final grant. When you look at FCC history cards for educational stations, they often requested SSAs to stay silent during vacation or summer periods. The SFUSD's Gompers trade school, however, appeared to running at full tilt in the summer of 1941 with defense-oriented classes. (footnote 3) KALW may have waited to inaugurate a regular schedule until it felt it was on firm legal ground with an actual license rather than a CP, but may have had periodic broadcasts for some reason or another. Without better contemporary accounts, that's the best I can do.
Related? K45LA was a Don Lee operation. A splashy Los Angeles Times article from August 10, 1941 promoted that station's inaugural broadcast the next day. I think you can definitely say that FM had more of a presence and mindshare in Los Angeles than in San Francisco. As it turns out, Don Lee also had plans for Oakland. The Oakland Post-Enquirer of April 30, 1941 had an article about those plans. Don Lee had obtained an option on 2½ acres of land at Marlborough Terrace and Grizzly Peak Boulevard in the Oakland hills. (footnote 4) The plans called for a 50,000 watt station costing $50,000 with a possible TV transmitter to go on the site later. It appears that there was no further action taken by Don Lee. But: that site is in use today, by KPFA!
Footnotes:
(1) Except when quoting, I adopt the modern practice of saying MHz rather than megacycles. Technically, "megacycles" really should have been expressed as "megacycles per second" or "mc/s", and that's what saying "mega-Hertz" does.
(2) It's possible Broadcasting got ahead of itself. It's hard to say.
(3) Keep in mind this was before Pearl Harbor, but people were clearly seeing that there was going to be some kind of war.
(4) The article misidentified the location that Don Lee had optioned as Berkeley. Nope, it's Oakland. I used to do road biking right through that intersection.
½
And I was wrong. There were five reserved channels, 42.1 MHz to 42.9 MHz. (Repeating, for more clarity, what I wrote in post #77)
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Well, at the time of KRTH's 70th anniversary I wrote a short piece about same at the now-defunct LARadio.com, and as KRTH's program director at the time (Jhani Kaye) is an old friend, I gave him a heads up about it. That led to a special TOH station identification airing every hour on the anniversary date, and I keep a link to the MP3 of it that Jhani was kind enough to send at my website. (BTW, that was voiced by the legendary Charlie Van Dyke.)
I didn't see KALW doing anything similar. 😝
I didn't see KALW doing anything similar. 😝
KALW mentioned its anniversary from time to time in 2021 and wrote it up in its (printed) program guide.
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