AM to FM Migration Increase

[trusty]

It seems that the migration of stations from AM to FM is increasing, especially in Canada and Latin America, with talk that the AM band will someday soon become like shortwave.

I'm curious if anyone has actually graphed the increase of the migration to give us somewhat of a "forecast" of the AM band (like what will it be like at Christmas, 2012 or 2015). Tnx.

 

[spunker88]

Interference on the AM band has accelerated the move to FM. Newer electronics, fluorescent lights and don't forget HD Radio. Plus the fact that most newer AM radios are junk, there are some exceptions. With all the abuse the AM band gets these days its no wonder stations are moving away from it.

The biggest problem for FM is the fact that it is filling up. I'm wondering if the FCC will ever expand the FM band into the VHF-L band sometime in the future.

 

[drt]

I agree most radios have an AM band, that is an afterthought, that is those units that even have the AM/medium wave band.

I see more and more units that don't even have AM and increasingly it seems that on some radios the FM bands are an afterthought and the main feature is the slot for the I-Pod or MP3 Player.

Also I've noticed that some of the newer gadgets even interfere with weaker FM stations, I have a printer, that I keep turned off and unplugged when not in use, as I found that it interferes with the FM band and more so when printing.

The FM band is also becoming more cluttered with translators, new stations wedged in etc, if the NAB and FCC can't get together to try to somehow reduce interference (and that seems unlikely), the FM band may end up going the way of the AM band and radio listening will be retricted to smart phone apps , netbooks, Pads and/or streaming. (and many work places block streaming due to bandwidth restrictions.)

Where I'm located, there is the additional problem of Cuban interference 24/7 on some AM stations in addition to all the electrical interference.
drt,
st. petersburg

 

[mimo]

The FM band in Canada is so full in some places that all of a sudden AM is a hot commodity. There are 5 frequencies in Montreal alone that are going to be decided upon in the next month. There's fierce competition for 2 of the frequencies. Ottawa has an application for another new AM and Calgary just got an appliciation for it's first x bander. A nice 5 thousand watt station on the prairies that will get out quite a bit.

They'll have to expand FM eventually. I've already got a radio that I use all the time that tunes straight from 64 mhz to 108.

 

[flytrap]

Personally I think that some cities have entirely too many radio stations. especially on the FM band. It splits the audience up too many ways which results in poor ratings. Back when their were fewer stations, a popular AM station could have HUGE ratings and make a lot more money. Even a low power station could have ratings that could rival most stations today. There are more stations than there are listeners. None of the stations can afford decent disk jockeys anymore, even if they wanted them. If there were fewer stations on the air maybe they could afford to hire some actual jocks instead of piping them in from satelite or voice tracking. Radio today is boring. Its just too cookie cutter.

 

[Steve Green NEPA]

As well, Fly, with the lemming-like wingtip rush of talk, news-talk, sports-talk and simulcast to FM, that band of the spectrum by itself is starting to sound more like short wave with each passing wave of cutbacks.

And I can't be alone on seconding your 'boring' accusation. I guess I like Country music a lot more than the average urban punk (in my case NYC) but when it comes time for a jock on huge-rated WIVK Knoxville to open the mic and go into a stop set, he may as well be slinging fast-food music at a CHR or an Oldies stationassembly line. Even the cash-flow of commercials sound the same, with their anonymous 1-800 garbage and senseless 200 MPH disclaimers.

Both dials are in trouble keeping pace with the myriad communications devices of modern times. But to me, the AM dial has dealt with the mudslide of competition with less disgrace than their younger sibling FM. It's been over thirty years since the majority migration of listenership to the 'For Music' dial, and AM is still around.

 

[kenglish]

Even when there were GOOD AM tuners, like the 1970's McKay-Dymek, or the 1980's Denon TU-680NAB "SuperTuner", did stations ever promote them?
I hear some AM's running ads for the C Crane's and such, but I have not seen much in the way of promotion of loop antennas or anything like that.

I can't believe that the National Association of BROADCASTERS has never done a campaign about "Better TV and Radio Reception", or "How to Fix Interference". We constantly promote Cable TV, Satellite, Broadband and iPhone apps. Interference is rapidly destroying our business, and we just give up. Kinda' like 7-11 getting robbed and just moving, rather than calling the cops.

 

[MarioMania]

The FCC dosen't care about AM

and besides if a AM's goes Dark..there's always church/Spanish & other stuff poping up on AM's

 

[nocomradio]

From a practical standpoint, I don't believe either one is going anywhere soon.

The AM dial in most places I travel around the US seems to be pretty full still, especially around the urban centers. Granted not much of the programming differs from one area to the next, and interference has definitely limited the listenable stations now. At night I can still DX some pretty distant stuff though that I'd never hear other than over an internet stream. Smaller market and specialty stations still seem to keep an audience there.

The FM dial, as was pointed out by flytrap is becoming quite crowded with lots of the same old same old, but its clear, familiar, and best of all: Free. You can drive any car with a radio anywhere in the country and pick up something. Same at home with even a cheap radio. You can't do that with your Smartphone, Sat radio or internet stream. You have to pay for them and you have to be tethered to some device or clear sky, etc. A radio works in a wide variety of places and pretty well at that.

Time will tell, but overall, I don't think either spectrum is going away too quickly.

 

[davideduardo]

I'm curious if anyone has actually graphed the increase of the migration to give us somewhat of a "forecast" of the AM band (like what will it be like at Christmas, 2012 or 2015). Tnx.

The only two places where I see a conscious and purposeful migration to FM are Canada and Mexico. Canada has pretty much declared AM dead, except in the biggest cities where population diversity requires AM stations to serve the niche interests and communities. In Mexico, their congress passed a law that said that the viability of AM was declining and that the government needed to protect both the investments and jobs of AM operations by facilitating, when technically possible, the migration of AMs to FM.

In the rest of Latin America, we see some countries where AM continues to be viable, such as Brazil and Argentina, while others are declining in revenue and audience, like Colombia and Venezuela. And then there are those where the AMs are going off the air, and rather rapidly, like El Salvador and Ecuador. In El Salvador, half are gone, and half of the remaining AMs are evangelical (in a Catholic country). In Ecuador, excessive population of the FM band (50+ licensed in Quito, where the are literally unlistenable) has caused many AMs to sign off... about a third of all AMs are gone.

But in most places where AMs are disappearing, we see a sequence a lot like in the US. More stations serving non-rated niche markets, and more religious stations... more sales of marginal stations when buyers see that they can't make it... and than random stations going dark. Outside the US, we see more stations going dark than here, but we look at some really bad AMs in larger markets and some smaller market ones that are going silent, and it looks like a trend.

 

[FreddyE1977]

I think eventually AM will provide a great opportunity for community and local broadcasters.

As the big guys find it increasingly financially non-viable, lots of space will be opened up which
can then be turned over to community-based broadcasters. All could go at say up to 100
watts nondirectional, a giant "graveyard" if you will.

It would have to be this way because few could afford to produce directional patterns, etc.

 

[BRNout]

It did not help when the FCC ceased to recognize skywave as a reality by shoehorning super-directional and supposedly local stations on to a formerly clear channel. Nor did it help when the FCC auctioned off an overabundance of frequencies all jammed together in areas where they would inevitably not be viable financially. For a band that is so rapidly losing viability, it sure is crowded!

I've said this before and I'll say it again: about 60% of present AM stations need to sign off for good. That would clear the band and improve the audio for the rest. A less crowded band allows for a wider bandwidth signal and better audio response for the listener. Also, a better and more viable range.

In addition, a return to (an at least modified) recognition of clear channels should be encouraged. Take advantage of the physics of the AM band, rather than ignoring them. I shouldn't have to hear a low-powered oldies station from Michigan on 850 when trying to listen to an otherwise good signal from KOA. And, the FCC never should have allowed WCPT to boost their nighttime signal on 820! Since they did that last year, I get a 50-50 nighttime signal of liberal drivel from WCPT and the overbearing Laura Ingram on WBAP. Neither is listenable, despite the fact that WBAP used to be quite clear in the Chicago area at night.

This is a small example of the kind of ignorance of the part of the FCC that has killed the MW band. It's now filled with a mish-mash of undesirable noise that almost no one will tolerate. Hence, the band is dying. No wonder so few stations are viable and no wonder so many have such crapola on them.

So, in addition to the factors described in the various other posts above, I place a solid percentage of the blame for this at the feet of the Federal Communications Commission.

 

[Steve Green NEPA]

Am with ya most of the way, Brn. There might be people aboard who remember the KIIS 1150 test broadcast one Monday morning. At the time, iIrc, the only station north of the equator overnight on 1150 was Mexico. So KIIS in Los Angeles was an easy catch, nationwide -- both on their 5000 watt testing and on 1000 watts!

But the DXers to the AM dial were always a curious stepchild to management. Despite our fervor for this civilized form of hunting, we really weren't considered actual listeners. And we were destined never to be considered listeners. Not only have our wishes for a clearer dial run opposite the prevailing ownership thinking, they've been in opposition for years. The IBoc noise was not designed to be aimed strictly at us, but the fact is that even if it HAD been, it would not have made a difference. Nothing that DXers ever did was considered a programming or business factor.

The X-band didn't help. IIrc, only one or two X-Band stations ever made the ratings anywhere -- and not for long.

Attrition and economy will thin out the dial more than any re-legislation. Here in NEPA (admittedly a hard-hit place job-wise anyway), five stations have left the airwaves on AM since I moved in nineteen years ago. All five certainly were capable, signal-wise, of serving their COLs with the local fare that many insist is the way to go. But the money wasn't there. Nobody missed the mostly-satellite fare that filled the broadcast days before the end. Point is, no one missed the local stuff that came before the satellite stuff, either.

The music, what there was of it, went to FM. And now, as the thread provokes, THAT dial is starting to sound more like a yard sale. So obviously, sonics no longer count, either.

I suggest, half in jest, to give every currently licensed regional and graveyard station the option to go 10,000 watts omni during the day and give them a deadline to do it. Start it or goodbye license. If you can't at least build and serve a daytime audience with that kind of elbow room, the ratings will say so and the license gets yanked. Put out or get lost.

Nighttimes .... I confess I know very little about them anymore.

 

[rfry]

It did not help when the FCC ceased to recognize skywave as a reality by shoehorning super-directional and supposedly local stations on to a formerly clear channel..... I've said this before and I'll say it again: about 60% of present AM stations need to sign off for good. That would clear the band and improve the audio for the rest.

If this 60% reduction included any of the 50 kW Class A, 24/7, non-D stations in the US operating at 750 through 780 kHz (for example), that would not enable all of those remaining in that spectrum segment to improve their transmitted r-f bandwidth beyond about 10 kHz (5 kHz audio response at the receiver) without creating nighttime skywave sideband interference to adjacent channels. And this assumes that the AM receiver essentially has about zero r-f/i-f response beyond +/-5 kHz from the carrier frequency it is tuned to receive (probably a safe bet these days).

Never mind the digital sidebands generated by HD/IBOC -- which only worsen the interference on adjacent channels.

The widespread, nighttime, listenable "noise-free," skywave reception of an AM broadcast station with 5 kHz audio bandwidth even from a legacy, non-D, 50 kW Class A station pretty much is a thing of the past at this point.

RF

 

[davideduardo]

It did not help when the FCC ceased to recognize skywave as a reality by shoehorning super-directional and supposedly local stations on to a formerly clear channel.

Skywave was really only a benefit when TV was not the dominant entertainment medium in the evenings and when thousands of towns and smaller cities had no radio stations. This was also the era before portable radios were available and when home radios were often as big as a CRT-type TV set.

Once TV took over evenings and the network radio shows moved, or tried to move, skywave became a disadvantage to radio. Local stations could not increase power to serve expanding metros, because they had to protect skywave coverage hundreds of miles away.

Long before additional stations were put on clear channels, radio had ceased to make much money on evening hours... which became the territory of the bonus spot and the PI commercial.

Radio, the local-only medium of the sixties and beyond, was bought for strictly the home market and so, with an exception or two (like the Grand Ole Opry), stations programmed for the local market. Expanding the skywave coverage area will not help as the stations with the potential to cover big areas have no interest in programming for anyone outside their local market and advertisers have even less interest in buying tiny audiences outside of those markets.

 

[nocomradio]

Expanding the skywave coverage area will not help as the stations with the potential to cover big areas have no interest in programming for anyone outside their local market and advertisers have even less interest in buying tiny audiences outside of those markets.

And there, is the kind of thinking that will finish digging the grave, push the corpse in and cover it up, tamping down the final layer for good measure.

Let's just keep thinking like we did 50 years ago and hope that will work.

We've got kids running around out here now in Chuck Taylors, drinking PBR, wearing chain-driven wallets, and scarfing up anything that is retro, why not AM too? Market it right.

 

[davideduardo]

And there, is the kind of thinking that will finish digging the grave, push the corpse in and cover it up, tamping down the final layer for good measure.

That "kind of thinking" is reality. Advertisers buy each market separately, or aggregate network buys based on the sums of the delivery of stations in each individual market. Radio depends on advertisers to generate revenue, and offering something that advertisers don't want is unrealistic.

"Retro" does not include listening to fading, static and interference from dimmers, CFLs, computers, etc. Younger people don't buy radios... they buy devices that get entertainment from a variety of sources. Nobody has to listen to crummy, distant signals to hear something they can get in much better and consistent quality off a smartphone.

AM radio is already near death... some rated markets have AM shares below 5% in under-55 age groups. In many markets, no AM fully covers the market, and in most others, only one or two covers most of the market day and night. Again, today there are alternatives and there is nothing a station in Denver does that would be of measurable interest in Missouri or Iowa or Wisconsin.

There are really only a handful of stations that could, under other conditions, cover significant territory at night... mostly limited to the 25 original 1-A clears. But if you look at them, you find stations like WBBM and WCBS and WBZ that are all-news or mostly news with a totally local focus... of no possible interest outside the local metro. Or you have talkers like KFI that are really focused on the local market, and irrelevant to anyone else. Or you have other talkers that have the same programs that are on local stations nearly everywhere... no need to hear a bad signal when a local one does the same thing.

Many competent radio people have tried to make AM relevant to younger audiences... or to any audience in many markets. Everything that could be done has been tried, and the failures are legion. That's why we have more and more paid or sustaining religion, niche ethnic and brokered shows. And that is why the most significant religious broadcaster, EMF, won't touch AMs...

 

[nocomradio]

See, you just said that the stations that could make a difference (WBBM, CBS, WBZ) are concentrating on local news. Sounds to me like they are shooting themselves in both feet that way. Do any of their engineers, PD's, owners, or stockholders realize just how far their signal reaches? If not, they truly are pretty out of touch. If so, then they need to realize that while yes, news for Chicago is beneficial to Chicagoans, it isn't really of much use to someone in Atlanta. Why not turn that signal over to someone who might use it to reach a broad audience with something useful or heaven forbid, entertaining?

I know, it won't work..........but that is the pat answer for anything these days, and no one seems willing to look at things logically.

 

[pianoplayer88key]

As for the skywave interference problem ...  aren't there types of antennas that minimize skywave radiation that stations could use to expand their "local" coverage area while minimizing the skywave interference they generate?  For example I'm aware of Franklin-type (sectionalized) antennas - wouldn't something like that work?
Also in looking at Wikipedia's "Mast Radiator" article, they mention collinear arrays (is that another name for a Franklin/sectionalized antenna?) and circle group aerials.  Would something like that help reduce skywave interference?  If properly implemented, what might the efficiency (in mV/m @ 1 km for 1 kW of power) be, as well as the vertical angle attenuation at, say, 15, 30, 45, 60 or 75 degrees be, approximately? As for the land taken by a circle group aerial, couldn't the impact of those be minimized by using self-supporting sectionalized antennas (hopefully eliminating the need for a ground radial system and guy wires)? And even if radials and guys are needed, I still know of quite a few places that have public use right around the tower - for example KFI, KNX and WSB just to name a few.
Or is there another way to minimize the skywave radiation (for example having at least a 60-80dB reduction at angles above 10-15° or so) while improving the efficiency for groundwave (preferred minimum 510 mV/m @ 1 km for 1 kW, which I know at least one station in the USA (KSTP, using its daytime antenna) that slightly exceeds that)?

 

[davideduardo]

See, you just said that the stations that could make a difference (WBBM, CBS, WBZ) are concentrating on local news. Sounds to me like they are shooting themselves in both feet that way. Do any of their engineers, PD's, owners, or stockholders realize just how far their signal reaches? If not, they truly are pretty out of touch. If so, then they need to realize that while yes, news for Chicago is beneficial to Chicagoans, it isn't really of much use to someone in Atlanta. Why not turn that signal over to someone who might use it to reach a broad audience with something useful or heaven forbid, entertaining?

I know, it won't work..........but that is the pat answer for anything these days, and no one seems willing to look at things logically.

In these three cases, we are talking about stations that are in the top two or three billers in their market... and in the case of Chicago and NY, the number 4 and 6 billers in the whole country.

So, the management is supposed to remove the local traffic, the local weather, the local news and try to appeal to the audience in, let's say, Morgantown, WV. So they would become a nonentity in New York, where unless you are 50 kw, and, hopefully, 50 kw non directional, you can't penetrate the buildings and apartments, and where $1000 spots are not unknown... and become an occasional choice at night in markets where spots go for $10 or so.

First, all radio... AM and FM, has much less listening at night. It's been that way since the freeze lifted.

Second, buyers who might somehow be interested in that kind of audience don't usually buy radio at night, and then they don't buy stations that couldn't show up in the ratings in all those other night-only skywave markets because in the high listening times, daylight hours, you could not hear those stations.

Beyond that, you have the fact that you can't reliably hear a Chicago station in Atlanta due to noise and, frequently, interference from stations in other countries. FUrther, Atlanta has 100 stations of its own in the metro... why would they want information from far off if they can get it locally, focused on them, and with no fading, static, noise and interference.

As an example, I'd mention that several of the LA stations are in the top 10 in the adjacent Riverside San Bernardino market... some are top 5. Yet that impressive showing adds about zero additional revenue. Local Riverside advertisers won't pay LA rates, and agencies don't buy the two markets combined... even though some stations have tried for the last several decades to change that. Again, the evidence shows that radio provides what advertisers want, and they don't want to buy a local market via an out of market station and they don't want to buy nights, anyway.