I think people have a tendency to look back at AM with rose-tinted glasses. It was always horrible - the audio was horrible, the reception would cut out if you drove under a small bridge or if you turned the fluorescent light on in the kitchen or if your neighbor turned on her TV.
There was once a time that RFI noise was very minimal, and the vaccum tube radios preformed really well. In my experience with AM, distant stations will completely disappear under a bridge, but locals are generally unharmed, albeit with a little tone difference. The rise of Plasma TV's in the 1990's and 2000's really ushered in the noisy era that we recognize today, and I don't really think the CRT's made that much noise. There was, of course, thunderstorms, but again, locals were largely unaffected. I do agree, however, that the audio is not always great, if only we would've known better in the 1920's when we started organizing the band to allow for wider room. I particularly think people see things as they are today, and probably assume it was always this bad, when just a few decades ago, AM didn't have some of the problems it has today. I do imagine some people are overly nostalgic about AM's zenith, not realizing that they just got lucky.
It's become worse in recent years, but it was never marvelous!
Yes it has become worse, but as I've said above, AM used to have it easy. No overcrowding of stations, better radios, less RFI, etc.
Some areas report improved reception on DAB compared to FM - I have a friend in rural northern Scotland who says that the DAB SFN works much better than FM in mountainous areas, which were plagued with multipath distortion and black spots. Part of the problem in urban areas is that in some places, existing FM sites have been used to transmit DAB which operates at a much higher frequency and struggles to penetrate buildings from a distance. You need more, smaller transmitters within towns rather than one big transmitter on a mountaintop as with FM.
That is intriguing. I've always wondered if, in mountainous areas, that having a bundle of FM frequencies, and then using the "alternative frequency" feature on RDS, would be a good way of covering those places. It's nice to see DRM already does this on just one frequency!
