One of life’s little pleasures is tuning around the radio dial late at night before drifting off to slumber. I especially enjoy this while traveling, touring foreign radio dials, encountering strange and distant signals. This means that a small portable radio is my constant traveling companion. I prefer to travel light, so said radio must […]
Here’s a broadcasting policy history question. Who said this? “Obviously it is a waste of valuable spectrum space to use two frequencies to bring the same material to the same location.” Believe it or not, it was the Federal Communications Commission in 1965. A year earlier agency ruled that no FM station broadcasting to a city […]
This week the New York Times moved AM Radio into the mainstream consciousness with a story about FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai’s ambition to save the oft-forgotten broadcast band. There’s nothing new in the story that we haven’t covered here at Radio Survivor. But the attention of the Old Gray Lady may add a little steam […]
We received a couple of comments on my post about the revitalization of AM radio pointing to pieces that make convincing arguments that it was not a mere suggestion made at NAB last week to go all-digital with HD Radio on AM. Rather, there are forces at work to put this into policy, contrary to […]
An article in the Colorado Daily last week announced that changes are afoot at University of Colorado’s college radio station KVCU-AM, popularly known as Radio 1190. A re-branding effort along with a new website, the elimination of several paid student staff positions, a stronger collaboration between student journalists and the station, and the digitization of […]
The late 1980s were a turning point for AM radio in the US, as music gave way to the rise of talk. By the 1990s most of the music on the AM dial was limited to old time country and easy listening; essentially music favored by truckers, in the case of the former, and senior […]
I know a lot of people who would love to have a terrestrial broadcasting license, so it seemed odd to me when I read about a Chattanooga radio station turning its license back to the FCC. Why on earth would a station opt to dispense with their license when there are so many entities out […]
On the heels of Radio Caroline’s 47th birthday last week, the New York Times published a story reporting on the outfit’s attempt to garner an actual license to broadcast in the UK. Caroline is pursuing 531 KHz on the mediumwave band (known as AM in the US) which was recently vacated by the BBC. While […]
On the heels of my post about FCC enforcement of “legal” low-power AM broadcasting, I learn that Pacifica plans to jump into the LPAM arena. The plan is for Pacifica’s Los Angeles station KPFK to serve its Spanish-speaking audience with a network of Part 15 LPAM stations deployed strategically in Latino neighborhoods. According to a […]
Last fall I wrote a post on unlicensed broadcasting on the AM band in the US. The impetus was reading an article on a rare FCC action against a station in Portland, Oregon, which caused me to track down the few other Commission actions against AM pirates in 2010. The so-called Part 15 rules that […]
