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Why is AM still around?

Inside my office building there is no FM reception, so whenever I listen to the radio my only option is to listen via my cell phone (my company blocks streaming audio over the internet). Well I have Verizon Wireless, which just so happens to be the #1 rated wireless provider in NJ, and at least 2-3 times per hour the signal drops out, goes down for about 10 minutes, and comes back. The guy sitting next to me has Sprint and gets little to no reception inside our building, ever. So much for that wireless bandwidth everyone keeps talking about. It's not nearly as reliable as everyone makes it out to be.
 
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MarioMania said:
There's people still listen to AM, Alot of Receviers now made AM poor. You have to find a good radio for AM like my Sony ICF-S10MK2
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And there's your problem right there: nobody is going to invest in a good radio just to listen to AM. The content is already losing listeners in droves, transmission standards don't live up to even the crappy "good radios" that ARE built, and the technology is never going to be able to overcome the interference that modern devices like computers, LED and CFL lights, cell phones and the like generate. It's dead. That's all there is to it.

MarioMania said:
At night I can haer alot of Radio Stations, What I mean by dead is AM band be a wasteland ...Just Static, Only thing you hear is the 50kw's like KCBS, KNX, KEX, WCBS, WBZ, KDKA, WABC, WTAM ect
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That IS all you can hear at night. Unless you're in a large metro with several relatively high-powered regional stations, AM is nothing but noise and the clears at night. And at that point in the day, people aren't listening to the radio, they're watching TV.

MarioMania said:
The FCC would never follow Mexico & Canada
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I wouldn't bet much money on that claim. Once AM is entirely religious, ethnic and brokered programming (a day that's fast approaching), you'll start to see a lot of owners turning their licenses in. Sure, there'll be a few rounds of sales before then, but anyone who buys an AM radio station today is just turning it around for the resale to some poor sap who's going to find that it's not worth the land it's sitting on. It won't be the FCC that makes the decisions, it'll be the license holders, and believe you me, they'll decline in number soon enough.
 
ansky212 said:
Inside my office building there is no FM reception, so whenever I listen to the radio my only option is to listen via my cell phone (my company blocks streaming audio over the internet). Well I have Verizon Wireless, which just so happens to be the #1 rated wireless provider in NJ, and at least 2-3 times per hour the signal drops out, goes down for about 10 minutes, and comes back. The guy sitting next to me has Sprint and gets little to no reception inside our building, ever. So much for that wireless bandwidth everyone keeps talking about. It's not nearly as reliable as everyone makes it out to be.
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Keep in mind, you're essentially trying to pull in a signal through a Faraday cage. It's not the bandwidth you're having problems with, it's lack of signal penetration.
 
Exactly. In the 1960's everybody watched TV without paying a dime (except electricity costs). Then came cable... and then came satellite. Since then, pay for play seems to be pretty standard for TV.

Radio can't be too far behind. My guess is that radios in cars are probably one of the things keeping OTA radio alive.
 
FM, to me, is not an improvement over AM. I work in a building where 100 kw fm's DON'T penetrate at all, yet I can get all local AM stations very well with clean signals at my work station, including a couple of stations 2 hours away. I go outside, the overload is so bad, that on any radio but my G8, I get 3 stations that bleed over the entire band. I walk to and from work and the dropouts I get, plus the scratchy sound makes me not touch the FM dial. Ever heard a less than perfect FM signal? It's not that clean sounding. I can't listen to the one FM station that plays classical here, despite it's 100,000 watt signal, because of the scratchiness when the station fades just enough. I can listen to it just fine on a 1000 watt AM because the signal is steady. I live in a building with an extremely high noise floor, but it doesn't wipe out local reception.

I can't stand treble. I'm very sensitive to it. When I lived in the U.S., if there was an AM/FM simulcast. I chose the AM so I wouldn't have to turn the treble all the way down. This is because of my asbergers, people who have my disability are very sensitive to high pitched sounds..FM sounds tinny and horrible to us.

And Canada has not moved AM to FM. The crtc has no mandate to move existing AM's to FM...that was all a CORPORATE decision, that the CRTC allowed because FM was underused, or in most places, not used at all.

Not all of us can afford cell phones, let alone the data plans. A smartphone costs more than the rent I struggle to pay some months. And I don't want to be connected to one device like most people I see...checking the damn thing every 10 seconds for messages, walking around and not looking where I'm going.

Dismiss what I say all you wish but if I could show each and everyone of you my own experiences with AM vs FM, we'd all be seeing a renaisance of AM listeners.

For all the problems posted here about AM, those are the same things that bother me about FM. Newer electronics cause just as much FM interference and in some cases more than they do on AM.
 
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Radio and TV can be heard in a building.....IF you have a decent MATV (Master Antenna Television) Distribution System.
If a company is worried about costs of bandwidth for stream listeners, maybe they should invest in a system.
Ours is a pretty elaborate system, since we use it for monitoring and QC of TV and Radio plus closed-circuit, but the FM part of the head-end was done with a $250 Processor from Tin-Lee Electronics.
 
kenglish said:
If a company is worried about costs of bandwidth for stream listeners, maybe they should invest in a system.
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I left a "show and tell meeting" held by the CEO of our company one day. He opened up the floor for questions and suggestions. I suggested something like you described, and since we had some world-class designers of Cell tower antennas and we were working on developing some Cell phone repeaters for use in shopping centers, transit stations, etc. I thought putting such a system together would be a bit of entertainment for our guru class of employees.

Our CEO was a retired general. He set me straight right quick. My job was to turn our productive work at my desk. Listening to the radio, etc. was not in my job description. He announced he had no intention of spending money on something that would distract employees.

And with a big smile, he asked: "Next employee suggestion???" S-i-l-e-n-c-e!


I guess you don't get to be CEO by spending time looking for FM signals at your desk and listening to your favorite music mix.
 
Exactly. No CEO is going to spend corporate dollars on some elaborate radio system that does not contribute to the company's bottom line. Imagine trying to sell that idea to shareholders. Besides, how many people even still have a portable radio that they would bring to the office.
 
WQEW will sell, it just very likely won't be a format worth mentioning. Highly suspect it'll just be brokered all the time.

Though AM isn't totally dead everywhere. Go to small town USA and several AM's flourish. That being said, nearly all of them are desperate for an FM side.
 
If you have a 1,000 watt AM I'm not so sure 120 watt FM is really Sufficient? Why can't a 1,000 watt AM get a 1,000 watt FM? At some point the commission is going to do some major work and perhaps we'll be left with some 50 AM's nationwide that can be boosted to 100,000 watts day/50,000 watts night.
 
"AM" radio's biggest problem

The biggest problem with "AM" radio is the low quality of receivers. If you think that the frequency response is bad then it is, no doubt, your receiver. There are few radios that are worth anything. Sony made a receiver called SRF A100 that was great. The SRF A100 was capable of stereo "AM" reception and it had two bandwidth choices. On wide it sounded like FM stereo because in those days the FCC allowed "AM" stations to broadcast audio up to 15,000 Hertz. The FCC changed the rules in 1989 so "AM" stations can only broadcast audio up to 10,200 Hertz. The second biggest problem is the incompetence of the FCC. The FCC has put too many stations on the air at night on each of the first 107 channels and has put stations too close in frequency in various locations so the stations can not transmit audio over 10,000 Hertz without interfering with each other in the daytime. It is time to move broadcasters off of medium wave and on a new band. I recommend that the FCC create a digital band that stretches from 76 MHz to 88 MHz and would use a variation of DRM that would use the free Opus codec instead of AAC. The new system would be called DRA (Digital Radio Americas) and would allow a broadcaster to have five 72 Kbps streams or they could be used as one, two, three, or four streams with greater bit rates. Perhaps a stereo signal with 360 Kbps would be able to carry any music format without any criticism.
 
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
Our CEO was a retired general. He set me straight right quick. My job was to turn our productive work at my desk. Listening to the radio, etc. was not in my job description. He announced he had no intention of spending money on something that would distract employees.
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I spent the last 20 years of my working life in a typical big corporation cube farm. We were crammed into these nondescript grey boxes like sardines and the overflow noise from normal office activity could be very distracting. I resolved some of that by setting up a music stream on my PC and listening to it with earphones. I could blank out almost all my neighbors conversations and the occasional busybody that happened to rest his/her elbows on my cube. Instead of being distracting it was white noise that allowed me to concentrate on my work as a programmer.

It isn't surprising to me that your boss, a retired general, is so closed minded. That is exactly the same thinking I could not tolerate in the military and why, although I had a great military career in front of me, I decided to get out and back into a more tolerant civilian world. In one of my first civilian jobs my boss made the statement that he had no rules about what you could and could not do in your own office except these:

1. Whatever it was had to add, not detract, from your productivity.
2. You could not negatively affect your office mate.
3. Your worth to the company was determined on results and not how you got there.

He was the brightest boss I ever had. And I really doubt any of those people last long in any military.
 
ansky212 said:
Exactly my point. For wireless service to be practical for radio listening we need a usable signal indoors.
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Yeah but you said yourself that radio listening isn't even practical in that indoor location... Of course broadband won't replace radio listening there, because you can't even listen to the radio in giant steel filled buildings.
 
People don't like to pay for things. You've heard about people trying to cut the cord with cable? What makes you think people are going to pay substantial amounts for radio? You're forseeing a world where OTA is completely eliminated. That's not going to be as easy as you think.

JoshTheRadioDude said:
Who said it's going to be free? And who said it had to be?
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