When Static Was King

Radios stink, generally. Oh, they sound OK when you crank them up on some gigawatt FM station five miles away-- which, not coincidentally, is the only thing you can hear when you fire one up in the store to try it before you buy it. But with one or two exceptions they're no good with weak signals.

On the other hand, when almost all of us live in metropolitan areas, who cares? And even more so, who cares about the AM side of things? Nobody listens to AM these days.

But t'was not always so. For about fifty years one of the FCC's biggest concerns, if not THE biggest, was to see to it that anyone in the US could hear AM radio signals.

If you listen to AM at all (and you probably don't) you probably know that there are big, powerful AM stations and there are weak ones. Some go to lower power at night, some go off the air completely. It's a mad, complex jumble of variable signal strengths. But it does have a logical purpose. It's to make sure you can always get a clear AM signal.

AM signals are on the "medium wave" band, which shares some of the properties of the "longwave" band and some of the properties of the "shortwave" band. Longwave, used in Europe, was originally believed to be the only way to send radio broadcasts over hundreds of miles. This is because it generates a "ground wave." The ground wave penetrates into the Earth a short distance and actually refracts its way around the curvature of the Earth, instead of going by line of sight only (more or less) like the VHF signals of FM do. Thus you can cover an entire European country, or at least some of them, with only one longwave transmitter site.

Shortwave signals go line-of-sight like FM, but in the ionosphere, where FM goes straight through and, four years later, entertains people on Alpha Centauri, shortwave instead reflects (properly, refracts again) back to earth. So you can pick it up great distances from the receiver, hundreds of miles, perhaps thousands, even though you might not be able to pick it up fifty miles from the transmitter.

Mediumwave does both. It does groundwave all the time-- that's why I can pick up the Detroit high-powered AM stations here, 220 miles away. That and, of course, the fact that I own an AM-FM portable radio that doesn't suck. (It's the GE Superadio. They still make them, they're up to the Superadio III now. If you want to buy one, be sure you can test it before you take it home. They've got spotty build quality. If they work they work very well, but they don't all work.)

At night skywave propogation comes in, and AM signals can bounce off the ionosphere like shortwave. You can pick them up a LONG way from home, then. When I am trying to pull in distant stations, or "listening to static" as Teffie so quaintly puts it, I've been able to pull in signals from 38 states, so far. Also five Canadian provinces, Baja California, the Bahamas, and the Netherlands Antillies. All from Michigan.

So the feds set up the AM band with "clear channel" stations on, well, clear channels, to blanket the country at night. Low powered stations could share those frequencies, but only in daylight hours. Meanwhile there were medium powered "regional" stations on some channels, hundreds of low-powered local stations on others.

All this was set up to provide nationwide coverage back when FM was only elevator music, if that, and there were hundreds of stations, not ten thousand or so.

I started listening to rock and roll radio back just when FM was starting to take over, finally. The radio geography was different then. Out in The Sticks you'd listen to your rock on some high powered AM station, perhaps during the night hours only. These things could put a powerful signal across a quarter or more of the US, and they were powerhouses in the entertainment world. And each one was different, because they had enough listener base to hire their own staff, make their own programs, and BE different.

Super CFL-- WCFL in Chicago-- was more of a standard Top 40 format; lots of music, slick, professional, but other than the music kind of unremarkable. I had a soft spot in my head for CKLW, though. They played the good music too, and their style would do Howard Stern proud. In some ways.

"This is Bryan McGregor, CKLW Twenty-Twenty News. Well, the Detroit cops pulled another floater out of the river today..."

The car radio in those days was about the biggest ripoff you'd ever find. You'd pay something like $140 for the "deluxe" AM radio. The deluxe one had the pushbuttons you could set for different stations, the regular one, for about forty bucks less, didn't. By the way, in case you have one of these old GM Delco radios, here's how you set the pushbuttons. You tune the radio to the station you want, grab the pushbutton you want to set to that station, pull it out about half an inch, then push it in all the way. No electronic pushbutton here, it's purely mechanical.

$140 is big money for an AM-only radio today, and it was even bigger money back in the mid 1970s. Those radios were built, though. Metal chassis, nearly bulletproof, and they pulled in signals from WAY far away.

They were also about the best "sound system" ever built, for ergonomics. Five or six pushbuttons and two honkin' huge rotary knobs. After the first time you operated one, you never looked at it. It wasn't a matter of forcing yourself to look at the road for safety reasons; the thing was so simple to operate there was no reason NOT to look at the road.

When car radios went all digital, they got modernized, and the tuning and volume knobs disappeared. Trukly had a radio like that. It had approximately forty flat, smooth, rectangular plastic buttons on its face, and they all felt exactly the same. Many's the time I went to turn up the volume and hit SCAN instead. Hades, many's the time I tried to turn up the volume and turned on the defroster! I had that truck for ten years and could never learn to operate that radio without taking my eyes off the road.

Well. I'm not going to tell you about how good things were in the Good Old Days. AM radio sound quality was better than you think, since the radios themselves were good quality, but it wasn't that good after all. Much of the music sucked too. The Archies. 'Nuff said.

But tuning and volume knobs were impossible to beat.

I guess eventually even engineers could figure that out, because the new Chevys at least (and I think many others) actually have rotary tuning and volume knobs again. I'm gonna have to get me one of those. Heck of a thing to have to buy a new car just because you hate the way the radio tunes, but principle is principle. :)

Of course both AM and FM as we know them are about to go down the tubes. If satellite radio doesn't run them under (and I don't think it will; even if it's not that much, the annoyance of having to write another monthly check to pay for another media subscription is just too much) then HD radio will.

In case you haven't run into this yet, it's a system for sending a digital signal beside the normal analog one. Supposed to give CD quality on AM and quality better than that on FM. If the wretched thing works. I'm not betting on that. Anyhoo, if you've got a standard radio it will still pick up the analog signal, if you have a digital radio it will pick up the digital one. Automagically. There are already a couple stations in the country using this technology.

So grab your radio-with-tuning-knobs while you may. I'm sure when HD comes in they'll go to some voice-command tuning gizmo that tunes you to the local Christian Rock station any time a McDonalds commercial comes on, or some damned thing. To quote Dr. McCoy, "You know engineers. They looooooooove to change things."