well its official

[Rodzilla]

the last AM station in my city of approx 350,000 signed off this week..the local AM band is now officially a vacant wasteland.i virtually never listen to AM but it seems strange and worth noting as the end of an era nonetheless

[compucat]

I hope this is not the begining of a trend. I listen to AM almost exclusively. If FM went away here I probably would not miss it. I could not do without AM and Shortwave. To me that is real radio.

[Celt]

We lost one of our FM stations a few years back when they moved one town over (the second time that's happened in the past 70 years). We now have one remaining station which is both AM and FM. The AM side is limping by on an ancient WWII era transmitter and tower system with disentegrated ground planes. I figure it's just a matter of time before they shut the AM down.

[mhardy6647]

That's astonishing.
There seems to be some weird agglomeration of radio stations going on in the Boston market -- with one or two old-guard stations moving to HD subchannels.

I don't think the future is very bright for OTA analog radio :-(

[Rodzilla]

over the last couple of years we've picked up a couple new fm stations here in town as the AM stations swapped thier licenses/call letters and formats and moved their operations over to,one assumes,the more viable FM band..as irrelevent as AM has been to me,it does seem strange that there is no longer any local AM,the entire band has now been abandoned...tho i guess it does make for a pretty quiet dial for DX'ing LOL

[zenithfan1]

Oh no, I love AM radio. I listen to it every night and sometimes during the day. There are many great stations in my listening area, I hope they don't start disappearing here too. I hate the way things are headed in 2009 '09

[Sam Cogley]

Nothing seems to be going away around here. The airwaves are crowded.

[Adam]

I mostly just listen to AM here too. I haven't lived anywhere with anything good on FM in so many years, that over that time I've slowly sold or junked every single one of my FM radios. All I have left that gets FM are my 2 combo TV sets.

Eventually, we'll probably all have to get small transmitters for our radios, like for the TVs. Last night I plugged my computer into the ext. mod. input of my signal generator, and used it as an AM transmitter, wouldn't go more than a few feet though.

[radiotvnut]

We still have the same amount of AM stations that we've always had; but, the format is, unfortunately, not the same on many of them. We have three black gospel stations, one white southern gospel station, and two talk stations. I have picked up a few music (oldies and country) stations at night and I often listen to KMOX's "Route 66" oldies program on Saturday night.

Maybe we won't be forced into using a transmitter for a few more years, anyway.

[chasaboo]

I listen to classical music on FM, we only have the one FM classical music station left. Kind of sad really.

The only time I listen to AM is when we have an earthquake so I can figure out how bad it was.

Strange to think of no AM stations being available.

[zenithfan1]

Wow, I guess we're pretty lucky here between Chicago and Milwaukee. We have at least one of every format all over AM and FM even a heavy/death metal station that plays at night. I think it's still called "Rebel Radio" I was in the Detroit area of Mi recently and all there was for music on most stations was hair bands, somewhat unpopular '70s rock and country. Across the whole state. It drove me nuts and I was happy when our stations started to appear in the static. Everywhere else I've been I mostly listened to CDs and wasn't alone for the trip, the last time I searched for stations far away from home was back in '00 when I went to Vegas with my Dad, there was some pretty good stuff in most of the states we went through then.

[bandersen]

Yes, we're pretty lucky near the IL/WI border. Lots to listen too . I tend to work on my projects late at night while listening to shows like the Twilight Zone on a vintage radio.

I'd forgotten about Rebel Radio - I think I listened to that back in the early 90s

[Einar72]

Pretty sorry here in Seattle/Tacoma. Three foam-at-the-mouth talkers (one owned by a "religious" network), two "business" talkers, three "religious", two black gospel/Motown oldies, ESPN just got the CBS affilliate's AM, NBC gone for over a decade since the passing of a local broadcast pioneer (now AirAmerica and beating conservative talk in some time-slots), two Latino, one Korean, one Indian, no classical, no jazz, two sports-talk, one "old people" oldies, no 50's oldies, no country. Just not the same as when I started AM DXing around 1966. Just Entercom and ClearChannel divvying-up whatever they can wrestle away from local owners. I am so grateful for CBS bringing us "JACK-FM", which I wake up to on my GE stereo clock-radio every weekday.

[Jeffhs]

One station (WATJ 1560) in the next county south of here (a rural area some 40 miles east of Cleveland) went off the air for good, after going through no fewer than four formats. It first signed on as a daytime-only 1kW station in 1969, had a top-40 format at first; then, about ten years later (!) went to oldies, then talk, then, the last few years of its life, it was running a sports-talk format from Sporting News Radio. It signed off for the last time at 5 p.m. on Memorial Day 2004, IIRC. Hasn't been heard from since. I tried to call their business office a week or so later, but their phone had since been disconnected; this proved to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that they were off the air for good, never to return.

They couldn't return to the air anyway even if they wanted to, since the frequency they were on, 1560 kHz, is the full-time home of WQEW-AM "Radio Disney" in New York--which is the senior station on that frequency; the smaller station tried to get permission from the FCC to move to 870 kHz and operate full-time, but was turned down because that frequency is too close to a Cleveland station on 850. One other problem WATJ (the Ohio station I've been referring to) had was that, even if they were to stay on 1560, they would run into problems with a station in Toledo (and others in northwestern Ohio) on that frequency; there were other problems as well that eventually forced the station to turn in its license for cancellation, and throw in the towel for good. The FCC no longer issues new daytime-only AM radio licenses either, so WATJ couldn't possibly return as a daytimer today--again, even if it wanted to.

This station had its share of problems, however, in the short time it was on. The towers weren't well anchored into the ground and were on the verge of toppling, the aging transmitter (very likely the same transmitter they had had since they first signed on 35 years before) likely had problems one after another as well, and, if all that was not bad enough, the station, after it switched to the Sporting News Radio format, found itself unable to compete with a Cleveland station (now known as WKNR) that had itself just switched to ESPN Radio and increased its daytime power to 50kW. The signal pattern of the Cleveland station encompassed the area formerly covered by the 1kW daytimer so well that the latter couldn't hope to compete with it anymore--if it ever could have in the first place. One thing led to another and, as they say, the rest is history.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Einar72

I am so grateful for CBS bringing us "JACK-FM", which I wake up to on my GE stereo clock-radio every weekday.

I wonder how Jack FM manages to stay within the letter of the law, considering the FCC's rules which require radio stations to operate in the public interest as a condition for license renewal. Their slogan is "we play what we want", which is certainly not my idea of operating in the public interest; however, radio stations have been operating like this for decades, before Jack-FM was even thought of--ever since they stopped, for the most part, taking listener requests.

Thank goodness there are no Jack FM stations in Cleveland, although several of the city's FMs are now CBS Radio O&Os (owned and operated stations); hey, I'd better keep my mouth shut. I just might turn on my stereo tomorrow morning and find Jack FM on 105.7, which is currently Cleveland's classic hits (what they once called oldies) station. The classic-hits station is currently operated by Clear Channel (!), as are most other local FMs not operated by CBS, but you can never tell; CC may decide to sell its O&Os nationwide to CBS before too long. No telling what might become of those stations after that.