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City with the lowest Number of local FM stations?

Scott Fybush said:
MR5229 said:
If 580 KMJ aimed more of their signal east towards the Sierra Nevadas, then I would imagine that they would be receivable in Bishop.
Click to expand...

Thing is, you've got 14,000 feet of Sierra Nevada mountains separating the Central Valley (Fresno) from the Owens Valley (Bishop), with all the lousy ground conductivity you'd expect from mountains. Nothing much gets through the Sierras, even with 50 kW.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah I forgot about the ground conductivity issue. I guess solid rock is a big factor in weakening AM signals.
 
Fifteen years ago, Asheville, North Carolina, was lacking in local FM signals. Basically, the only commercial FM was country WKSF 99.9(and a translator in West Asheville for Spartanburg, SC easy listening station WSPA), with three non-commercial FMs, NPR WCQS 88.1, Contemporary Christian WLFA 91.3 and Billy Graham's WMIT 106.9 (licensed to Black Mountain). Several FM signals licensed to outlying communities have since come on (96.5, 104.1, 104.3 & 105.9).
 
In some large cities (population over 500,000, or metro area (city limits) larger than 100 square miles), aren't there some places, like near transmitter sites, where you can ONLY hear 1 or 2, maybe 3 FM stations? ;)
 
LibertyNT said:
Fields, Oregon Takes The Cake
0 Receivable Signals AM or FM.
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I think you're onto something (...or, lack of it). Out of curiosity I plugged in the ZIP code for Fields at V-Soft's "Zip Code Signal" site and here's what came up:


That's right, nothing ("Data for the zip code 97710 was not found..."); no FM stations with signal strength higher than 50dBu and no AM's with anything higher than about 0.30mVm. Now that's desperate!
 
I can't speak to larger markets, but a little bigger than Fields, Oregon is Van Horn, Texas, a lonely outpost on I-10 between El Paso and nowhere. When I spent the night there several years ago there was exactly one religious translator as a local signal and nothing else.

Radio-Locator shows a CP for a public radio outlet that will barely cover Van Horn but that wasn't there when I was there. In fact, the only reception beyond the translator was weak knife edge reception of two stations from Carlsbad and Artesia, New Mexico, about 110 miles north.
 
It would be impossible to find a U.S. city of any respectable size with few FM stations. Any clear frequencies have already been snatched up, if not by full-power stations than by translators, usually with satellite-fed religious content (Christian pop stations Air 1 and K-Love and Family Radio (KEAR) have the most extensive networks, along with countless other smaller networks). In Canada, you'd have an easier time finding cities with few FM stations. Thunder Bay, Ontario is about the same size as Duluth, Minnesota about 150 miles south (actually larger - 100,000+ vs 85,000, although Duluth has a larger "metro area"), but only has 6 full-power FM stations (>1 kW) and NO AM stations. Duluth, on the other hand, has 15 full-power FM stations and 6 AM stations, plus several from outlying cities that are audible on a normal radio throughout most of the city (at least at higher elevations). Most other Canadian cities have fewer stations, both FM and AM, than American cities of comparable size.

You can still find large, almost-unpopulated areas in the U.S. with few FM or AM stations. A large swath of land spanning southwestern Idaho, southeastern Oregon, and northern Nevada is almost unpopulated, and as a result there are almost no FM or AM stations in the region, with some areas probably receiving no local signals. Another area is the Angle Inlet on the northern tip of Minnesota; there are indeed probably stations receivable there, but none local, until "Heartland Christian Broadcasters" decided to put a translator there.
 
I'll nominate Memphis as a starting point, then. 23 FMs cover all or part of the city, but realistic reception from midtown may only net 21 usable signals. Birmingham also only has about 23 decent FM signals, too. New Orleans and Baton Rouge also fall roughly into that range.

Rapid City, SD has only about 20 signals and some of them are iffy, I think. Same for Odessa.

After a playful search on radio-dislocator, I am concluding that medium size cities seem to have at least 20 strong FMs and most average 25-30.
 
I live out in Lubbock. Being from Dallas, the FM band out here is pretty open.

http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bi...b=Y&format=&dx=2&radius=&freq=&sort=freq&sid=

With only 1 HD station out here, it makes DXing great!

When I'm driving to and from Dallas, there's a spot that I drive through on 114 where there are very few signals.

http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bi...b=Y&format=&dx=2&radius=&freq=&sort=freq&sid=

Luckily the last time I drove in that area, I caught a nice skip. Yes. West Texas can be a great place to DX in the summer during skip season. Radio band is open in most areas...and more importantly, very few HD stations...so no HD hiss like you get in the major cities. The only city in West TX with a significant amount of HD stations is El Paso.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kWGBSpKCh8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaY-OiFSq4s&feature=related
 
RMarino said:
I've heard the same thing about an area in Nevada, about a couple hours north of Las Vegas.
Click to expand...
I can confirm this in the daytime...at least as of the mid-late 90's. After a complete scan of the AM and FM band came up empty, I manually checked each AM and FM frequency. I would probably have received more stations if I were on the moon. There was a very slight trace of 720 from Vegas, but it was far too weak to even ID.
 
Presidio, TX is out in the middle of nowhere. I looked it up and thought I would find as few stations as Marfa, But NOOOOOOO...... There are 2 FMs and 3 AMs covering the area from across the border. :D

Most, if not all, recent move-ins to metro areas have been licensed to suburbs. If you take the number of stations actually licensed to the city and compare it with the market size, you may get some interesting results.
 
Another place I can think of is Hyannis, NE, with only 1 FM local station that is a translator, in the almost uninhabited "Sand Hills" section of NE.
 
I think that the OP's question pertained to cities/markets with the fewest FM choices. In other countries, there are pretty good sized cities with only a half-dozen or so receivable FM signals.

That's a more challenging question than finding some remote area with no FM signals. There are actually plenty of those in the western U.S.
 
A lot of people seem to forget that FM stations in the boonies can be tuned manually. I was making plans to visit Hyannis NE to do some Sands Hill golf this summer. I'm sure there is only 1 local but I imagine one can receive listenable FM signals for up to 100 mi in on a GOOD car radio receiver. In the case of Hyannis, I imagine FM reception to the east (at considerably lower elevations) would be enhanced.
I know that was the case when spending 10 days or so in Kansas several years ago.
 
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