The problem is beyond challenging reception, AM is inferior in many ways. It's mono, and sounds worse than just about anything else available today. Reception goes away inside buildings, under overpasses, crossing bridges, and near electrically noisy transportation like buses and trolleys. Because of the poor quality, programming is limited to spoken word like right-wing talk, religion, and some foreign languages. Younger people aren't interested in any of that, so no new listeners even know AM exists.
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- Thread starter davideduardo
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Can't that be changed with more power. I remember AM not sounding nearly as bad 30 years ago.
I do think that a solution is to give permanent status to translators and to allow AM based ones to permanently close the AM. This would clear the band of many AMs of low power, day timers and ridiculously directional ones, allowing the rest to upgrade
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For the better of the band, yes.
How do you plan to compensate them for the loss of their businesses?
How much longer is their business viable?
Power won't overcome inherent limitations like poor audio quality, distortion, and physics that prevent AM signals from penetrating
rebar and other forms of a Faraday cage. Power also won't prevent stronger interference from home consumer devices, and transportation from overriding the originating signal.
That's going to vary widely from station to station and market to market. In the case of lower-powered stations that broker their time to, for example, preachers, the ratings may be next to zero, but the revenue could be significant. In any case, other than voluntary surrenders of licenses from those ready to go, you're talking about putting these small businesspeople (in most cases) out of business.
Sounds like a great idea!
Still, I think that there are going to be well over a thousand.... maybe as many as half of all AMs... which will silence their station if allowed to have a full license for the translator.
Quite a few AMs that got translators have done modifications to reduce power, eliminated directional systems and make AM transmitter site relocations to make the AM run as cheaply as possible so as to retain the license to sustain the translator. If they could eliminate the AM altogether, it would be cheaper.
The problem today is that translators linked to AMs or to an HD channel are not "guaranteed" assignments. If a full licensed FM facility decides to move its transmitter or increase antenna height and adding coverage where the translator is located, suddenly the translator is S--t Outta' Luck. They have to move, if there is another frequency available, or shut down.
I think Scott can add some further details on how translators could be protected and given permanence. He does this every day as a profession, while I deal with rumor, innuendo and hearsay and only about 10% actual knowledge of the rules! (You will find a lot of managers basically can't do anything useful on their own and their most important skill they have is hiring people better qualified than themselves to do the actual work)
It didn't. It sounded better as recently as 10 years ago, and I attribute that somewhat to there being a few more programming choices back then, but mainly to all the digital hash makers (aka, computers, phones, EVs and various other IoT devices) that have proliferated over the past decade (it's not nearly so bad outside of the major cities, where these devices tend to be less prevalent; AM reception in such places is still relatively good, actually).
I think this is somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy. Obviously, it'll never sound as good as FM or HD, but it can sound better than it does (many stations actually do still sound decent, even with iffy reception, when received on a decent radio).
And mono is a solved problem (C-QUAM) but because the FCC bungled it early on (when they decided to "let the market decide," they might as well have said, "we don't care"), people got confused and lost interest in it before it could really go anywhere. Same goes with the AMAX standard, the adoption of which the FCC also bungled quite badly (C-QUAM did become pretty much universal in car stereos from the late 80s to the late 90s, and most major markets had at least one C-QUAM station during that time, so for what it's worth, AM Stereo wasn't a complete bust).
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When FM starts thinning out, perhaps in 15-20 years, the remaining AMs may be able to move to FM. Or perhaps by then the translator laws will change. The trend is towards online delivery anyway.
Actually, there would have been a lot of interest in AM stereo had a system been approved when it should, around 1978. But when the FCC did not approve one of the systems, the designer moved to have the decision blocked. It took nearly 5 years to get it resolved and by then nearly all music listening had moved to FM.
When radio's competition is streaming, and FM plus anything digital sounds better than AM, it falls to last place.
That's not how it happened. The FCC chose the Magnavox system as the standard, so Leonard Kahn started suing everyone. The Commission got sick of all the infighting and lawyers, so they said fine; run what you want and let the market decide. AM stereo in any brand was too little too late. The music migration to FM was already happening. And it didn't matter what AM stereo brand/method, none of them could match the audio performance and low noise floor of FM.
AMAX was a whistling pile of crap and a complete joke. It never stood a chance.
It's partially a matter of law, partially a matter of policy, partially a matter of physics.
There's not room on the FM dial to accommodate all of the AM stations that want to move there, at least not within 88-108 (and I have long considered the 76-88 band a non-starter - it's one area where Michi and I do not agree.)
You could declare all existing translators to be protected from interference immediately, if you were willing to forgo opportunities to upgrade existing full-power stations or add new ones. That's a policy matter, not a physics one, and there's an argument that eliminating the possibility of those upgrades runs afoul of the FCC's responsibilities under the Communications Act to fairly distribute spectrum, because it's not the most efficient use of that spectrum.
And here's where Michi knows more than I do - you also run up against the acts of Congress that require primary users of commercial radio spectrum to pay for it at auction. Translators wiggled around that rule because they're not primary users, and you can't just wave a wand now and declare them primary without an auction process.
Now: could you conceivably make the case that if you take an existing license that's operating on AM and simply declare it to now be an FM license instead (while surrendering the AM frequency), you could redefine "minor change" to cover such a move? I'm not a lawyer, just a consultant, but I'm sure it would have both some support and a lot of opposition from the LPFM community and elsewhere.
In summary: the road to any such change has to go through Congress. It's hard to imagine such a divided House, especially, making anything like this a priority in the near future.
How do you define "most efficient"? As having the most people in an area able to hear the highest number of stations?
Could we not define "efficient" in the way the Canadians, to some extent, and the Mexicans did, totally: AM is dead, and we need to preserve the existing variety or alternatives in programming so we are "replacing" AMs with FMs.
If you declare AM as "dead" or "on life support" the way Mexico did, then you simply convert an AM license to an FM one. Mexico established a grant fee for the change, but otherwise it was like getting a new driver license with a different address.
Mexico also changed their second adjacent protection to allow full power stations at the same COL with no distancing requirement.
Good point. A lot of this has to do with the contentious state of government, and some has to do with simple "its not our job" inertia.
My favorite example of that kind of bureaucracy occurred when a horse died right down the street from my first station. It was not removed. It began to smell bad. The city was called and they said that they removed dead cats and dogs, but not horses. We called the police, but they said they only dealt with human cadavers. We called the assistant to the mayor, who said they could not do anything but to call the health department, which we did. The health department said, sure, they could remove it but they needed a death certificate first. A bunch of neighbors all contributed about $5 each and during the graveyard shift, the horse appeared on the steps of city hall. It was gone by 9 AM.
There's a whole set of fair distribution rules that largely come into play these days on full-power upgrades, and they're complicated. In general, the preference goes to proposals that will increase the number of people receiving service and the area of service. But there's still also a requirement that a community of license not be left without local service (with a bunch of qualifications to that based on whether it's a move into, out of or within an urbanized area), a near-absolute prohibition on creating new "white" or "gray" areas (zero or one local services), very strong preferences for new tribal land coverage, and so on.
I had a hand in one such especially complex proposal a couple of years ago that involved a series of desired moves and some debatable interpretations of those rules and coverage maps. It's still being hashed out even now.
Multiply that times hundreds or even thousands of AMs that might want to go FM only and it gets excruciatingly complex.
I had a hand in one such especially complex proposal a couple of years ago that involved a series of desired moves and some debatable interpretations of those rules and coverage maps. It's still being hashed out even now.
Multiply that times hundreds or even thousands of AMs that might want to go FM only and it gets excruciatingly complex.
A lot of this dates back to Dick Friedman's application to change a Class A to a C in Bonita Springs, FL, in the early 80's. That was a "major change" then and opened up the application to counter filings, and there were about 10 of those. Dick, whom I consulted on Programming, finally ran out of money and gave up.
But the whole thing, where big, monied applicants could take a station away just because the owner wanted to improve it. So we ended up with Docket 80-90 and the resultant need for deregulation (in my opinion) all over a little Top 40 station in SW Florida.
Friedman went back to Puerto Rico, where he owned WDOY, until he fell off his sailboat and died a few years later. Total sad story
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